Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor 978-0-8166-9396-2, 978-0-8166-9394-8

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 8
Introduction. Life Support: India’s Production of Vital Energy......Page 10
1 Limits of Labor: Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work......Page 34
2 Call Center Agents: Commodified Affect and the Biocapital of Care......Page 52
3 Information Technology Professionals: Innovation and Uncertain Futures......Page 76
4 Transnational Gestational Surrogacy: Expectation and Exchange......Page 112
Epilogue: Imperial Pasts and Mortgaged Futures......Page 150
Acknowledgments......Page 158
Notes......Page 162
A......Page 184
B......Page 185
C......Page 186
F......Page 187
G......Page 188
I......Page 189
M......Page 190
R......Page 191
T......Page 192
Z......Page 193

Citation preview

Life Support

Vora.indd 1

16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM

D i f f e r e n c e I n c o r p o r at e d Roderick A. Ferguson and Grace Kyungwon Hong Series Editors

Vora.indd 2

16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM

Life Support Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor

Kalindi Vora

D i f f e r e n c e I n c o r p o r at e d

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London

Vora.indd 3

16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM

Portions of chapter 1 appeared in “Limits of Labor: Accounting for Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 4 (2012): 681–­700. Portions of chapter 2 appeared in “The Commodification of Affect in Indian Call Centers,” in Intimate Labors: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Care, Sex, and Domestic Work, edited by E. Boris and R. Parreñas, 3–­48 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010). Copyright 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vora, Kalindi. Life support : biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor / Kalindi Vora. (Difference incorporated) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-9394-8 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-9396-2 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Biotechnology industries—India. 2. High technology industries—India. 3. Contracting out—India. 4. Labor policy—India. I. Title. HD9999.B443I58 2015  331.5´420954—dc23 2014019930 Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. 21 20 19 18 17 16 15        10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Vora.indd 4

16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM

In memory of Nisheeth Jitendr a Vor a

Vora.indd 5

16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Introduction. Life Support: India’s Production of Vital Energy

Vora.indd 7

1

1 Limits of Labor: Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work

25

2 Call Center Agents: Commodified Affect and the Biocapital of Care

43

3 Information Technology Professionals: Innovation and Uncertain Futures

67

4 Transnational Gestational Surrogacy: Expectation and Exchange

103

Epilogue: Imperial Pasts and Mortgaged Futures

141

Acknowledgments

149

Notes

153

Index

175

16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

Life Support India’s Production of Vital Energy

I

n October 2002, an article was published in the Journal of the American           Medical Association ( JAMA) on the phenomenon of impoverished people in India selling kidneys for transplant.1 The JAMA publication was one of the first in mainstream medicine to recognize the existence of the international trade in human organs. In the years since, critical public discourse about the organ trade has primarily focused on ethics, values, and human rights as they allow for and can potentially limit the exploitation that occurs through the market in human organs.2 However, the advent of the procurement and circulation of human organs as a market also reflects a logic and geopolitics that emerged together with outsourcing practices characterizing the global economy in the 1990s. This logic and geography have enacted and continue to produce new forms of the global distribution of labor, first as outsourcing emerged from colonial geopolitics and later as what anthropologists of the biotechnology economy are calling biocapital. The creation of value through the growing realm of feminized work sourced from India, which for the purposes of this study includes domestic work, customer care, the production of biological commodities and services like human organs and gestation, and “noninnovative” knowledge work, occurs through the investment of human energy in other bodies—­both individual and social bodies—­as well as through the sociocultural valorization of those bodies and communities. This form of life support is transmitted across boundaries of cul­ tural and social difference, across gendered divides within the same household 1

Vora.indd 1

16/01/2015 11:38:24 AM

2 Introduction

as well as between distant points in the international division of labor. The conditions, technologies, and sensibilities that engendered outsourcing have become more complex and have extended in ways that have enabled the rise of markets in biological commodities and services. These include commodities such as human organs for transplant, engineered medical and therapeutic devices made from human biological materials, and services such as the use of an organ or body temporarily, as in gestational surrogacy or clinical trial participation. Revisiting industries and technologies involved in outsourcing is an important step in understanding shifts in the nature of transnational production as well as the inflection of globalization by the history of colonization. As I explain in what follows, India’s labor history is central to mapping how new modes of racialized and gendered labor have been produced and allocated on a global scale, and how these techniques have been moving decisively into the realm of biology. Labor, like human vital organs, can be understood as a specific portion of a person’s body and life that can be made free to travel by being constructed as “extra” or not needed where it is currently located. Before a human kidney or a given task or type of labor can become seemingly unnecessary in its immediate context and therefore available for outsourcing, it must be the object of specific cultural and material practices that establish it as unnecessary. For example, the construction of the second kidney in the human body as surplus illustrates the way that medical technology, in this case surgical technique and immune-­suppressing pharmaceuticals, intersects with technologies of mobility and the medical definition of the utility of kidneys as reduplicative in the body, thus rendering it surplus in the context of the global demand for transplant organs. As the construction of a specific idea of surplus, the kidney is “freed” to have an existence separate from the body that produced it. However, tracing the flows of capital that allow for the mobility of the kidney also reveals concomitant limits on the mobility of (whole) bodies that lead people to need to sell an organ, limits that are created by the same processes that free the kidney in the first place.3 The central role played by reproductive labor in the economy of outsourcing makes evident how much contemporary transnational capitalism, like

Vora.indd 2

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

Introduction 3

earlier forms of accumulation, has come to rely on the reproduction of life for continued growth and expansion. Human bodies and subjects are thus playing a role structurally similar to that of land and natural resources as they were dispossessed in the period of capitalist growth during European territorial colonialism. The rapid pace at which scientific knowledge of bodily production through cellular and molecular biology and genetics has expanded, coupled with pharmaceutical advances and the exponential growth of distance communication and Internet technologies, has opened up the human body and subject as a greatly expanded site for annexation, harvest, dispossession, and production. Although the enabling technologies and market conditions may appear quite different, activities such as organ selling and gestational surrogacy share commonalities and sometimes overlap with the paid production of empathy and attention or the repression of subjective needs, including creativity and socially meaningful work, for the sake of the disciplined reproduction of knowledge forms found in work like contracted software coding. These activities, whether glossed as outsourced service, knowledge, or care work, exceed conventional definitions of labor as they sometimes recapitulate, sometimes carry forward, and sometimes reinvent technologies of dispossession, accumulation, and constraint on autonomy. Life Support argues that any analysis of biocapital must engage its roots in colonial labor allocation as a project of the racialization and gendering of labor. Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock define biocapital as “a form of extraction that involves isolating and mobilizing the primary reproductive agency of specific body parts.”4 I argue that this form of accumulation and production can be seen in its historical context of colonialism and its antecedents as a system of continuing the transmission of what I call vital energy—­the substance of activity that produces life (though often deemed reproductive)—­from areas of life depletion to areas of life enrichment. Thus, rather than focusing only on biological science and biotechnology as sites for producing value, this study identifies the social logics within biological and labor markets and looks for evidence of how capitalist accumulation continues to rely on reproductivity. This approach to biocapital reads narrative accounts of outsourcing as transmitting vital energy from producers to consumers, which is evidenced in the

Vora.indd 3

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

4 Introduction

latter’s improved ability to thrive and perpetuate individual and community life. Thus, unlike other studies that focus on the economy of biological materi­ als, production, and value, in this book biocapital, describes an overall market in life-­supporting energies and services, produced through ways of inhabiting the body and understanding life that evolved out of earlier (gendered and racialized) social and economic forms. The notion of life animating this understanding of biocapital references human biological and social existence as inseparable, and hence the continuation and thriving of life can mark the accumulation of vital energy, whereas its depletion is marked by the opposite. This book tracks transitions to new types of laboring subjects and new forms of labor by conducting a multisited study of labor outsourced to India from the 1990s through the first decade of the twenty-­first century. It focuses on India in particular because studying India’s role in outsourcing as part of globalization highlights the central role of social and biological human reproduction, mutually dependent and imbricated, in the growth of the global capitalist economy. Beginning with forms of labor and socialities that emerged in information technology (IT) and call center work, it then follows these subject and labor formations into the emergence of subjects of commercial biological labor in transnational surrogacy. Theorizing the role of reproduction and reproductive labor in outsourcing, it seeks to demonstrate the growing importance of vital energy as a privileged mode of transmission and accumulation, as demonstrated by the trajectory from colonial labor allocation to outsourcing in knowledge, communications work, biological processes, and human reproduction. This project argues that colonial labor extraction was based on a principle of the extraction of not only economic (monetary) sources of value, of raw materials and labor-­power, but also of life itself. Thus I read the contemporary commodification of life and vitality as having a precursor in earlier colonial modes of exploitation, contributing a deeper historical context to the theoretical analysis of biocapital. I am able to trace this trajectory by focusing on India as a postcolonial site, particularly through an analysis of the ways in which the outsourcing of reproductive labor became central to colonial capitalist accumulation. India is a particularly rich site to examine because of the uniqueness of its central role in British colonialism and its

Vora.indd 4

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

Introduction 5

position in the new global economy as a rising technological and science leader. I bring analyses of biocapital together with older scholarship about outsourcing to highlight the continuities between old and new modes of capitalist accumulation and their reliance on the capture of life and reproductivity. Outsourcing is understood as the relocation of productive processes and labor outside the national location of a given corporation or economic entity, but I historicize it as a recent instantiation of labor allocation that recruits vital energy in addition to labor to aid in a form of primitive accumulation and restricted autonomy associated with colonial exploitation. I do this through a survey of some of the ways that the biological apparatus of the human and its inseparable subjective being become objects of biopower and resource exploitation as well as how new forms of life, labor contexts, subjectivity, and sociality emerge through these conditions. Each chapter examines the ways in which subjects mark and are marked by both the deprivations enforced through relations of outsourcing and forms of connection that arise unexpectedly in excess of these same relations. When the legitimate and illegitimate, visible and invisible processes and effects of outsourcing are analyzed together, a new kind of biopolitics of hypermobility in the global economy emerges. The history of this biopolitics of hypermobility, where those aspects of the subject or parts of the body useful for reproducing life elsewhere travel easily without the whole, is located in the gendering practices of heteropatriarchy and the constraint on lives and subjects inherited and continuing through colonization and its practices of racialized labor allocation. Thus this project takes up the concerns of postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and feminist materialist and science studies scholarship interested in understanding how biopolitical relations—­in terms of both the nature of new subjects and new socialities—­ emerge through a growing formalization of reproduction, both social and biological, as a mode of generating and accumulating wealth-­as-­thriving. Biopolitics and Colonial Outsourcing Outsourcing, as a discourse, describes the utilization of new communications technologies to manage production in a transnational chain by assigning components of production, administration, and support to several different

Vora.indd 5

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

6 Introduction

locations. The conditions leading to outsourcing also led to other practices of flexible accumulation such as the use of sweatshop labor and the institution of special economic zones and free trade zones.5 These practices mark both the degradation of working conditions and the legal gray areas made possible when transnational corporations are detached from national regulatory mechanisms. The rich literature on globalization in social and cultural theory produced at the turn of the millennium details new iterations of an international division of labor and its impact on social relations and production.6 Ethnographic studies like those of organ selling, domestic labor migration, and sex work examine ways that those located in the Global South maneuver to access global flows of wealth despite being located outside of their centers of consumption.7 Such studies draw attention to new kinds of labor and commodities arising out of globalizing technologies and new kinds of mobility generated alongside outsourcing as part of the same originating conditions. Life Support describes a system that exists currently as the inheritance of the colonial reorganization of production and consumption and acts as a supplement to the process and geography of outsourcing, where cost-­effectiveness mandates locating a labor process where it is cheapest, without concern for how that labor has been made to be cheap. This system genders the labor of reproduction so that some work becomes that of merely reproducing life and culture, whereas other work is deemed creative, innovative, and productive in itself. The period of globalization and growth of flexible production in the early 1990s that led outsourcing to become a common and widespread business practice around the world was also one in which imperial legacies and labor maps coalesced with the contemporary neoliberal restructuring of domestic and global economies. In the period of European colonialism, colonies served as sites of raw materials to be expropriated for production in colonial metropoles and then sold back to the colonies as finished goods. The international division of labor grew out of such colonial organization.8 Though the conventional discussion of the older international division of labor does not theorize it as structured around reproductive (biological and affective) labor, in the sections that follow, I read it as historically and presently grounded in exactly those forms of labor. In so doing, my reading highlights the ways in

Vora.indd 6

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

Introduction 7

which the earlier international division of labor set the stage for the current one that constituted the geopolitics of life support rendering India’s legibility in the 1990s and early 2000s as a labor market primarily for the reproduction of the biological and affective life of other places. Biocapital as a system of capitalist production, accumulation, and specu­la­ tion that relies directly on reproductivity as its primary motor has been elaborated and expanded by the reach of biotechnologies, but it is not a new system. The antecedents of contemporary bioeconomies, which rely on the patentability of innovative knowledge and the exploitation of the undervalued and often invisible reproductivity of humans and other organisms and of their parts, such as tissues and cells, were present in the economies of colonialism and slavery in which dehumanized and unfree workers were also self-­reproducing capital. Examples include the gendering of indentured tea plantation labor in colonial India to create a supply of new workers for the necessary but undervalued labor of cultivating, picking, and processing tea leaves to fuel the growth of the international trade in tea,9 and the instantiation of indentured labor from India for plantation work in other British colonies,10 accompanied by a similar reliance within the overlapping economy of Atlantic chattel slavery.11 Anthropological work on biocapital has identified biotechnologies and their products, such as pharmaceutical research and development12 and immortal cell lines and other cellular engineering,13 as marking a new period of capitalism and capitalist growth interested in producing and capitalizing on life from the scale of the cell.14 Nikolas Rose traces the rise of the bioeconomy generally to the political order of biopolitics in the United States and Europe, noting the rationalizing of vitality into “a series of distinct and discrete objects, that can be stabilized, frozen, banked, stored, accumulated, exchanged, traded across time, across space, across organs and species, across diverse contexts and enterprises, in the service of bioeconomic objectives.”15 However, life is objectified and made legible through culturally specific projects, and as Stefan Helmreich has argued, it is how biology and biological substances are made to matter through the imaginations of biotech practitioners and, to a lesser extent, social analysts that frames the centrality of biological reproductivity to biocapital, particularly in light of Marilyn Strathern’s observation

Vora.indd 7

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

8 Introduction

that the imagination of biology as a platform for “reproducing the future” is a Euro-­American belief.16 Life as vital energy has been made available from India for global consumption, both as biology and as what Gayatri Spivak calls affectively necessary labor, through the intersection of legacies of British colonialism with Euro-­American cultural and economic logics embedded in contemporary practices of global production and consumption.17 India is unique in the ways that science, the market, labor, and access to global circulation were tied together through the British colonial project and have continued to remain entangled. As Gyan Prakash notes, “constituting India through empirical sciences went hand in hand with the establishment of a grid of modern infrastructures and economic linkages that drew the unified territory into a global capitalist economy.”18 The construction of some modern infrastructure in India and economic linkages to Europe as well as other colonies was singular among the British colonies.19 Infrastructural development in the 1850s promoted local industrial development, which created conditions that supported capitalist enterprise.20 Related to the development of the economy was the ascension of an Indian business class, which evolved into a powerful bourgeois class by the postcolonial era.21 It was particularly the “civilizing mission” of the British as it played out in law and the formu­ lation of private property,22 and the instituting of a British-­style educational system intended to create a new colonial class of English-­speaking Indian elites—­“Indian in blood and color, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”23—­that distinguished India from other British colonies. Entry into the elite tiers of the colonial middle class was conditioned by property ownership and occupation, as these were crucial markers of the family background and caste affiliations constituting the intertwined social, cultural, and economic capital that structured the formation of this class.24 Upon independence, middle-­class interests came to dominate state-­led development and encouraged a focus on rapid technological and industrial growth.25 This history has contributed to the production of a liberal, property-­interested, English-­speaking, and Western-­educated class who were positioned to take advantage of India’s role in globalization and the investments and connections that came with the liberalizing of India’s economy upon its acceptance of an

Vora.indd 8

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

Introduction 9

International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan in 1991. State support of science and technology development and education after independence nurtured the growth of the technical expertise and infrastructure that eventually enabled the success of technology-­based industries, such as business process outsourcing and biotech, and created the conditions of possibility for markets in reproductive technology services and commercial surrogacy. The British colonial management of Indian labor created settings and conditions of work that served as a way to extract value from the lives of workers in addition to their labor. Studying those conditions in comparison to the conditions entailed in business process outsourcing in Indian IT and call centers, and as they manifest in the still-­developing industry of gestational sur­ rogacy, creates a new perspective for thinking about emerging transnational labor markets like gestational surrogacy in India, and for attending to the effects of the conditions of work themselves as they are described by those who participate in them. The techniques of extracting vital energy from the lives of workers as an accumulation strategy, which depend on structures of racialized and gendered difference built into transnational production and consumption, can be tracked in each labor setting in different but connected ways that are linked to colonial techniques even though they may not all be colonizing in themselves. The dependence of both outsourcing and biocapital’s growth on reproductivity also has antecedents in the British colonial project in India. Thomas Malthus’s lectures and essays on population while a professor at the East India Company College in England promulgated the idea that India had a surplus of reproductivity and that this reproductivity could be a source of material wealth for colonizers. The discourse of race and India, and particularly of Indian workers as numerous, easily replaceable, and best suited for reproduction, becomes transformed in different settings of labor, but Malthus’s argument for the need to manage India’s reproductivity and harness it for profitable production is sedimented into the industries that transmit vital energy from India’s workers to its consumers. The management and disciplining of sexuality and affect, particularly when they threatened to cross lines of racial difference, were central to the politics of empire.26

Vora.indd 9

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

10 Introduction

Settings of transnational labor in India continue to work within governmental policies and cultures of management that remain connected to the colonial period through both formal structures, such as law, and through social relations and conventions. For this reason they are postcolonial in the sense that they operate within the legacy of British colonization but do not replicate its forms. Other forms of labor in South Asia continue to operate much as they did during British colonization. For example, Piya Chatterjee tracks structures of racialized and gendered labor organization that bring together colonial, patriarchal, and feudal structures of power on contemporary tea plantations in India’s northeast. Along with these coexisting structures of power and subjectification, the continuities between the British colonial plantation and the contemporary Indian-­owned plantation blur any ready distinction between the time of colonialism and the time of postcolonialism for people who have inherited their jobs growing, picking, and processing tea.27 Yet other forms of labor continue in ways inflected by colonization but predating them, such as forms of caste-­based servitude and indenture found all over the subcontinent.28 Work in postcolonial studies has underlined the ways that racial logics are folded into recognition of the human and the subject29 and into how notions of civilization, progress, and the human were built into and understood in terms of the categorizations of everyday life,30 narratives of history, modernity and the nature of political action,31 medicine,32 and the distribution of labor under the British.33 The study of colonial labor practices asserts the necessity for looking at power, domination, and political structure in understanding the work of subjective self-­crafting that occurs in a given labor context. The self-­forming of subjects that appears in the ethnographic and fictive narratives of call center work, IT practice, and surrogacy experiences in this book reflect processes that are specific yet congruent with those in other spaces of labor across different classes in colonial and modernizing India. The 1990s gave rise to business process outsourcing as a growth industry in India, and the discourse of outsourcing became a way to describe how globalization was creating new forms of mobility in production, “freeing” components of the production of commodities for global relocation and thereby

Vora.indd 10

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

Introduction 11

leading to new “scapes” of technology and production that also affected politics, culture, and social relations.34 The conditions and effects of outsourcing produced the highly visible sites of transnational production and labor most closely identified with the Indian economy, including IT and call centers. These industries were celebrated in India as harkening a new emergent economic era, and in international discourse as part of the turn of the millennium global economics formulation of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) to describe those national economies that characterized what was new about the global economy and to imagine the future toward which the global economy was headed. The legacy of British colonial labor formations, tied inextricably to the process of feminizing labor, can be recognized in contemporary processes that “civilize” low-­earning and often lower-­caste workers, such as the women who leave day work and small-­scale farming to become gestational surrogates, by initiating them into property relations to their bodies and a sense of entrepreneurship of themselves. It can also be seen in the service of rehumanization provided to consumers by the labor of emotion and attention performed in call centers and in the creation of spaces of innovation and creativity in highly valued IT work sites at the expense and by the support of those working in outsourcing sites. Though such transnational projects may at first seem as divorced from the politics of racialization as they do from coloni­zation, the “racialized economy that connected and characterized ‘native’ essences to their customary work” in the colonial period argues otherwise.35 Jodi Melamed defines racialization as the “process that constitutes differential relations of human value and valuelessness” through racial distinction of bodies and spaces.36 Indian labor retains the mark of colonial characterizations from the British period that continue to signify its value in different international labor markets. Hence coloniality and racialization, in addition to the gendering of labor, are essential processes to track even in the contemporary moment in India’s transnational labor history, which was primarily instantiated through British colonial practices combining technologies of self making and empire building and projects of economic conquest and exploitation. Globalization and its division of labor mapped the work of reproduction onto the decolonizing

Vora.indd 11

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

12 Introduction

Global South, creating a system that evacuated resources, labor, and value from those spaces to invest it into the Global North, much as the former colonial metropoles have benefitted from a similar exploitation of what world systems theory named the “peripheries.” With the increasing role of biocapital as an engine of the international market, and the human body (along with the realm of biological life in general) as a new frontier in biotechnological resource extraction, social and biological reproductivity becomes of central interest in understanding all labor and human life under biopolitical management. Colonialism, the subsequent international division of labor, and the recent phenomenon of outsourcing elaborated a system of life support for those spaces into which the vital energy of service, affective, and biological labor could accumulate, depleting the same where it is produced. Though it can be argued that capitalist exploitation in India is not a form of neocolonialism but rather the vast differential in wealth between the transnational capitalist class and the working poor enabled by the liberal contract and the failures of informed consent,37 the replacement of the geopolitics of imperialism is an ongoing process, and the biopolitical relations in that process are still emerging and yet to be theorized.38 For example, the transnational capitalist class represented in the emergence of trans­ national corporations in the 1980s engaged in neocolonial practices of resource extraction and dispossession of laboring populations.39 Kamala Kempadoo argues that neoliberal reforms imposed by the World Bank and IMF have been a process of recolonization in the realm of female, reproductive work.40 Such analysis suggests that the agents of neocolonialism are not to be found in state formations but rather in the differentiation of populations whose elite strata have the means to accumulate value that is generated through limitations on the potential for reproducing life in nonprivileged spaces and in controlling the inherent excesses of this potential through practices and politics linked to those of imperialism. Vitality Economies and New Socialities Studying the accumulation of vital energy as a form of biocapital provides a way to specify continuities and differences in the contemporary global economy

Vora.indd 12

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

Introduction 13

in ways that modern liberal concepts of freedom, consent, or even labor do not fully accommodate. Tracking vital energy, rather than value, as the content of what is produced and transmitted between biological and affective producers and their consumers holds on to the human vitality that Karl Marx describes as the true content of value carried by the commodity and the absolute use-­value of labor power to capitalist production, while maintaining the argument that what is produced by these activities exceeds what is recog­ nizable in the commodity’s exchange value. It makes plain the connection between the exhaustion of biological bodies and labors in India to extend “life” in the Global North and a longer history of power relations underpinning what may seem like an emerging form of biopower in sites like commercial surrogacy. The transmission of vital energy, a life necessity, out of spaces of production also represents a form of biological accumulation in the thriving of consumers, even when the commodities themselves are not biological, and arguably works within a neocolonial structure of accumulation. In this sense, “biology” has the characteristics of a mode of accumulation, both as “historically specific, congealed embodiments in the world as well as the technoscientific discourse positing such bodies.”41 The transmission of technical work and services through outsourcing in call centers and IT also circulates affective commodities and capacities through a gendering of labor that was scaled up through globalization. This scaling up built on techniques of generating wealth by the expropriation of reproductive energies established in smaller-­scale systems set up in European colonialism and within the heteropatriarchal household economy. Tracking affective and biological production in outsourcing as vital energy opens up possibilities that attending to labor alone may not. Identifying specific subjective and material processes of expropriation through the gendering of affective labor allows us to link newer modes to already-­existing forms as well as recognizing the agency of producers as laborers. For example, in the realm of biological labor, Catherine Waldby and Melinda Cooper argue that we must attend to the “microbiopolitics” of reproduction and the specificities of new forms of gendered labor, such as clinical42 and regenerative43 labor, to recognize the continuities and interchanges between the labor of clinical trial subjects and

Vora.indd 13

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

14 Introduction

women’s reproductivity in stem cell technologies, respectively, and other forms of “subordinated and devalued labor,” such as sex and domestic work and the labor of indigenous and colonized peoples.44 They argue that understanding “bioeconomic activity”45 as a specific form of gendered, differentiated labor makes clear the illegitimate ways in which it is appropriated, particularly because biological producers can then be understood to have property rights to biological materials originating in their bodies rather than inhabiting a role like that of land and other resources in colonial doctrines of res nullius and terra nullius.46 When international media began covering the small but growing number of clinics in India that were arranging gestational surrogacy by Indian women for foreigners in 2007, the transnational arrangements were framed as the outsourcing of birth or the outsourcing of wombs.47 In addition to its sensationalizing effect as a media technique, this characterization draws attention to the continuing social, economic, and political developments taking place through the connections enabled by the legal and technical infrastructure of outsourcing. What is less apparent in the discourse of “wombs for rent” is that the same technologies of transfer and often the same commodities circulating in outsourcing channels build subjects and forms of sociality both together with and apart from the reproduction of capital, up to and including “encounters of the economic with the biological.”48 Differences between populations connected through outsourcing serve as membranes through which unequal social relations occur and across which new socialities are formed and imagined. Spontaneous social formations that arise through the technologies and conditions of production themselves can be read as temporary affiliations or investments between subjects who are accidentally connected through the irreducible heterogeneity of use-­value carried in the commodity49 or as new political forms of social life, reminders of the political importance of the fact that “we are not the subjects of or the subject formations of the capitalist world-­system. Is it merely one condition of our being.”50 Revisiting the period of the flexibilizing and transnational dispersal of production associated with globalization, when social relations enacted through labor were beginning to be conducted at a distance in lieu of those previously

Vora.indd 14

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

Introduction 15

materialized through migration and other forms of travel, creates an impor­ tant context for analyzing relations enacted through transnational surrogacy as an emerging biological industry. In vitro fertilization (IVF) technologies involved in surrogacy do require physical interface, because infants who are born to surrogates thus far (as per current national guidelines and likely soon by law) must be met in India by their commissioning parents, but the sociality between surrogates and commissioning parents generally involves little or no contact and is created largely through participants’ imaginations, which is in keeping with other technologically mediated sites of outsourced labor. Outsourced work, comprising nodes in the production process understood to be noninnovative and therefore reproductive, and the affective work of service and humanizing required by corporations to interface with their consumers are essential to producing the continuance of biological and social lives that provide sources of accumulation for capital as well as existing in excess to it. Starting with the essential nature of the work of care and attention in the lives of laboring subjects creates a space from which to reexamine subjective accounts of work in two of the most prototypical sites of outsourcing, IT and call centers, and to examine the grounding of outsourcing in the ultimate project of transmitting vital energy out of producing sites and into sites of high consumption. The kinds of affective diminishment that necessarily accompany work for laborers in outsourced production require an explanation for how these conditions play a role in the continuation of outsourcing into the realm of human biological production as evidenced in transnational surrogacy. This recasting sheds light on how biopower works together with what can be called the expanded realm of biocapital, human biological reproductivity, and reproductive labor, as a site of the generation of value; it also marks the political importance of the formation of new subjects and socialities occurring through the very technologies of outsourcing and extraction. Methods and Approach As becomes apparent in the connection between the logic of British colonial labor allocation and contemporary representations of Indian laborers, the meaning attributed to laboring subjects under capitalism is arbitrary in the

Vora.indd 15

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

16 Introduction

sense that it cannot be explained when removed from systems of recognition and value within capitalism.51 However, the signification of workers becomes a form of thought embodied in capital itself, so that Indian labor becomes by definition cheaper and more replaceable than other sources.52 This conceptual violence, the understanding or reading of a certain type of human as less human or not human at all, is a type of violence that is simultaneously naturalized, systemic, economic, and logical. It is also therefore essential to examine how the use-­value and meaning of bodies and lives, and the general cultural and economic impact of signification, circulate without recognition from capitalist systems. The analysis of dehumanizing logics must be accompanied by the work of reading for other logics, “private grammars,”53 that indicate alternate ways to think about bodies and lives and their meaning outside dominant systems of coding, even as they remain limited and undervalued by market processes. In my readings of the conditions of living for different types of Indian laborers, I argue that though these conditions reflect dominant tendencies within capitalist production and imagination, the dynamic nature of use-­ value means that the particular conditions of call center workers in New Delhi, or IT professionals in Bangalore, or gestational surrogates in Indian clinics, are never simply a reflection of these tendencies. The particularities of each situation show up in narratives as evidence of simultaneous and sometimes contradictory economies of imagination, desire, consumption, and production. These particularities also tell us about the nature of capitalism at this moment, as it is a dynamic system that only becomes available for analysis in particular instances. At the same time, attention to larger tendencies between these instances, occurring in India and the United States, is important in understanding macro-­level processes of the exploitation of surplus value, logics, and structures between the Global North and South and the way these processes relate to the differential valuing of lives in those places. Ethnography, as refined by feminist, poststructural, and native anthropological interventions, can be a practice engaging an ethics of responsibility in relaying and producing knowledge that centers a commitment to cultural–­linguistic fluency; to attempting to convey the original intentions, affects, and references of a given social interaction; and to sustaining a continuing relationship of

Vora.indd 16

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

Introduction 17

accountability between researchers and those affected by this knowledge.54 To produce a reading of the material and subjective conditions of labor made available in ethnographic and aesthetic narratives is nevertheless an act of translation that produces something new, a representation, and leaves a remainder that is both productive and also a failure.55 The virtual and often imagined nature of social relations formed through outsourcing’s exchanges requires a method that brings the ethnographic and the fictive together. These relations form through contact zones as seemingly mundane as clinics and offices and as unexpected as programming code and petri dishes, giving a central role to imagination and its investment of living labor in how the politics of these relations play out. I approach both the virtual and physical spaces in which socialities form with a “contact perspective,” which, as James Clifford defines it, approaches contact zones as characterized by the coming together of histories and politics under “radically asymmetrical relations of power . . . [insisting] that all social distances and segregations are historical and political products.”56 Analysis of subjective accounts of both real and imagined social relations provides insight into the nature of sociality and also into unexplored arenas of affective and biological production as they have developed through the era of globalization into the era of biocapital. Globalization extends “distanciated” social relations, in which social life is constituted by relationships of both presence and absence when relationships exist across distance.57 In this way, contemporary conditions “disembed or lift out social relations from local contexts of interaction and rearrange them across extensive spans of time-­ space, leaving locales to be haunted by that which is absent.”58 Looking at the subjective experience of distanciation as it exists in outsourcing relationships, at times a haunting absence, at others times the expression of disjunctured connection or even the projection of an imagined future connection, requires analysis of subjective accounts of both material and imagined relationships in ethnographic and fictive narratives. Complex histories emerge in the everyday practices and interactions captured with equal depth and significance in both ethnographic and fictive narratives. To foreground the politics of negotiation and exchange in daily life,

Vora.indd 17

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

18 Introduction

I examine my own and others’ ethnographic narratives together with literary and cultural texts through which such lives and historical imaginaries take shape, and which they in turn shape. This argument about how new forms of sociality occur through new sites of labor parallels the argument I make to describe, and the material practices that compose, the processes of accumulation and production that occur through the minutiae of lived biological and social lives as they are transmitted in the form of vital energy. The vitality of living labor yields both the recognizable historical archive as well as other histories that do not get represented in that archive’s record. It is the specificity of labor, understood by Dipesh Chakrabarty as the channeling of vitality, or life force, that troubles a homogenous reading of the world system.59 As repositories of the living labor of fantastic social relations, eth­ nographic and fictive subjective experiences related through the narratives I examine provide content and context for analysis of vital energy’s production, consumption, and accumulation in each chapter of this book. Representation, whether it is understood as a technology of knowledge formation, as part of the work of imagination, or as an ideological project of power, has material effects for which we must account. If representation can impact a person’s access to the means of subsistence and her quality of life, then it must be examined as a productive force. Fantasy, a structure of desire and imagination that also produces social relations, representations, and the different ways that bodies become appropriate for particular types of labor, is an organization of individual and collective imagination. Neferti Tadiar’s use of “fantasy production” to describe this function both addresses the material consequences of the way one knows reality and points out its unstable structure.60 These “fictions of the real,”61 as Avery Gordon calls them, where the real is the most fully realized and experienced of fantasies, in Tadiar’s argument represent the living labor of experiences and activities that are “unrecognized productive forces of globalization itself.”62 By relying on a juxtapositional reading practice to analyze multiple sites of labor, this book attends to the production and circulation of subjectivities, commodities, and representations, highlighting continuities in forms of work that produce value in invisible or undervalued ways. Each chapter traces the

Vora.indd 18

16/01/2015 11:38:25 AM

Introduction 19

transit of vital energy while providing a careful reading and analysis of how subjects describe work and sociality as creating diminishment and also unintended enrichment in their lives, and how they experience connection or generate new forms of sociality through the conduits and technologies assembled to transmit their vital energy elsewhere for its accumulation. The substance within human beings of interest to capitalist accumulation, “labor power” in the writings of Karl Marx, consists of “living labor” as a form of life. Unlike a labor theory of value, the argument that the productivity of biological activities can be structurally directed toward the enhancement of other lives in a way that depletes that of the producer doesn’t rely on quantifying expenditure (labor time) but rather on this subjective marking of what is exhausted. Each chapter also describes the qualities that announce the accumulation of vital energy elsewhere, posing different and occasionally contradictory elements of subjective humanisms that point to the contextualized operation of technologies of life support, on one hand, and life diminishing, on the other. These are made apprehensible through readings in each chapter of subjective expression and reflection on the ethics of proper human social relations and working conditions. This study of vital energy takes up the problems and promise of feminist theories of reproductive labor that argue for the difficulty in determining the limits of gendered labor. When vital energy is attended to as that which is produced and accumulated under biocapital, it opens up possibilities for exploring and connecting to biopolitical economies of extrahuman life of interest to women-­of-­color feminists, feminist science studies scholars, and others. Framed in terms of illicit and gray economies of affective exchange, the connections made and socialities formed through communication and biological forms of labor, seemingly strange affinities, suggest that even the coerced or otherwise unfree aspects of new forms of accumulation and production demand attention to the politics not only of exploitation but also of affiliation and political connection. Referencing women-­of-­color feminism and queer-­ of-­color critiques as examples, Hong and Ferguson argue that “an alternative comparative method must traffic in the unknowable and the devalued” and propose the need for “new analytics through which to apprehend coalitional

Vora.indd 19

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM

20 Introduction

possibilities, or strange affinities.”63 The forms of life and transmission of sociality that occur in the sites examined herein both historically and geographically require a form of transnational relational analysis that draws from and expands the study of difference practiced in women-­of-­color feminist analytics and ethnic studies. The crossing over between histories of geopolitical spaces and histories typically understood as separate areas of study invites a relational and transnational approach that identifies not only commonalities between groups with different histories but also alternate politics of affinity and connection in the forms of sociality that emerge through the technologies that entangle differently embodied histories. Juxtaposition as a method in this project is an intentional mismatching of sites of interest and genres of documentation or other modes of archiving, combining often seemingly unrelated sites of labor to highlight the underlying common cultural and economic systems in operation. Each chapter in this book brings together readings of ethnographic, cultural–­creative, and theoretical texts. Together these texts recast the study of life as an object, and specifically the formulation of biocapital outlined previously, by reading labor, the bodies that labor, and the content of that labor as it travels between producers and consumers in the form of human vitality. This reading practice is also crucial in making visible and connecting the types of support that are necessary for life and constitute a large part of international labor markets and yet are underanalyzed or even invisible as productive work. In this way, it can consider aspects of labor and value that are not tracked in other studies of globalization or through economic studies of labor markets, accounting for invisible racialized and feminized work that circulates and accumulates as vital energy in support of some lives and not others. Bringing together the sites of IT, call centers, and commercial surrogacy provides insight about global service economies not available through the study of a single industry. As Spivak argues, “re-­constellating” narratives and texts in this way “wrench[es]” them out of what reason demands are their “proper context[s]” and places them “within alien arguments,” a project that is essential for a materialist analysis that aims to suspend empiricism when it imposes given subject formations.64 The com­binations arranged in this book may seem nonintuitive at

Vora.indd 20

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM

Introduction 21

first, but they do important work in drawing attention to the otherwise unnoticed ground that makes their juxtaposition possible and productive.65 Getting a glimpse of that ground is part of the project of understanding the system of life support as it plays out in the lives of Indian workers. The introduction and first chapter establish the structural and historical underpinnings for the system of life support and theorize the role of vital energy. Serving as a theoretical framing for the following chapters, the first chapter asks, How, given the mapping of new arenas of bodily and biological labor in the Global South, can we conceptualize the subject who performs labors of affect and biological production outside of her utility to capitalist accumulation when it is only through the lens of capitalism and new industrial production that we can see these acts as labor to begin with? Subsequent chapters analyze call center labor, IT work, and gestational surrogacy, marking the subjective and context-­specific evidence of the expenditure of vital energy as well as the social lives and relations these exchanges promote, while maintaining attention to how technologies and knowledge promoting the extraction of vital energies may be novel in some ways, while also reproducing earlier forms of extraction. Each chapter dwells on forms of support and sociality that come into existence beside and despite structures of neoliberal production, coloniality, and conditions of constraint and unfreedom tied to the racialization and gendering of labor in the global economy. The Indian workers examined in this study, ranging across a number of regional, class, gender, and caste divisions, occupy particular positions in the international division of labor as a result of the material conditions India has inherited from British imperial labor and production-­chain allocation practices as well as from its postcolonial economic and political history. These workers are also figured by an economy of imagination and desire that is interlaced with their shared histories. Chapter 1, “Limits of Labor: Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work,” looks at how affective and biological labor, such as that found in call center and surrogacy work, index new forms of exploitation and accumulation within neoliberal globalization but also rearticulate a longer historical colonial division of labor. Feminist materialist scholarship

Vora.indd 21

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM

22 Introduction

and critiques of the racialized nature of domesticity and free labor advanced by feminists based in the Global South, black feminists, and U.S. women-­of-­ color feminists, provide the ground to continue to scrutinize which kinds of exchange and subjectivity can even be represented by categories of labor, leading to the question of what stakes are involved in asserting that gestational surrogates and others whose productivity occurs primarily through biological and affective processes are subjects of capitalist labor power. Expanding the argument from the introduction and bringing it to bear on the ways in which surrogacy and call center work put pressure on and exceed the category of labor, this chapter argues that tracking vital energy, rather than value, as the content of what is produced and transmitted between biological and affective producers and their consumers holds on to the human vitality that Marx describes as the content of value carried by the commodity and absolute use-­value of labor power to capitalist production, while also describing the content of these value-­producing activities as greater than what can be described in terms of physical commodities and their value as represented through exchange. Chapter 2, “Call Center Agents: Commodified Affect and the Biocapital of Care,” looks at how the technologies and training that create the call center agent as a subject of labor and capital also produce an artificial surplus of affective commodities that can then be transmitted elsewhere through the labor of the call center worker. These technologies and this training also create conduits for communication and connection that are the conditions for new forms of sociality and resistance as they transmit the mechanisms of support and coping embedded in histories of labor. This chapter reads Arjun Raina’s dramatic monologue A Terrible Beauty Is Born together with ethnographic accounts of call center work to think about the forms of vital energy carried by affective commodities and accumulated as biocapital. The play presents both a theory of humanism out of the experience of call center workers and an argument that dehumanizing labor conditions cannot stop forms of life that continue to insist on the humanity of workers. In fact, the very technologies that strive to evacuate the support of humanness, such as care, attention, and reinforcement of one’s worth through meriting such concern, can serve to channel it back through other sources. These gray economies of affect create

Vora.indd 22

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM

Introduction 23

new possibilities for histories of labor struggle to come together despite geography, just as they serve to transfer affective resources long distance. Reading A Terrible Beauty Is Born together with ethnographic narratives of call center work sites suggests that affective labor transfers the capacity of human vital energy as a creative force and invests it directly into other human beings, thereby supporting their lives. Chapter 3, “Information Technology Professionals: Innovation and Uncertain Futures,” uses original ethnography to examine how IT as an industry depends on a reterritorializing of imperial labor legacies despite the assumed globality and connectedness of high tech. The differential valuings of labor through racial and national difference merge to influence the kind of work available for high-­tech workers in Bangalore, making India largely illegible as a site of innovative and globally connected products. Utilizing ethnographic research conducted in 2005 and 2006 with Indian IT professionals living in Bangalore and California’s Silicon Valley, this chapter looks at how the particular experiences shared among a relatively small group of programmers point to larger tendencies in how the generation of surplus value in the United States relies on the outsourcing of conditions of temporariness and the work of reproducing prior innovation to Global South production centers. This in turn impacts the ability of people in Bangalore, even relatively elite IT professionals, to imagine their own stable futures. A reading of Hari Kunzru’s novel Transmission alongside this ethnographic narrative illustrates the central role of imagination and fantasy in structuring the material lives and life decisions of programmers and their access to a sense of future possibility. The desire for work that is creative and that connects programmers with a community and a sense of importance in the global progress of technological knowledge raises a number of questions about what conditions are necessary for creative potential and attitudes within work and how these are distributed geopolitically. The popularity of open source in the mid-2000s suggested a possible alternative to the system of global distribution that determines who gets to create knowledge commodities and who reproduces them. Chapter 4, “Transnational Gestational Surrogacy: Expectation and Exchange,” draws from original ethnographic research conducted in 2008 at a

Vora.indd 23

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM

24 Introduction

fertility clinic in northern India offering surrogacy services for transnational clients. It examines how assisted reproductive technologies expand options for childless couples with financial resources to pursue low-­cost surrogacy and for laboring-­class Indian women to sell the use of their bodies to gestate these fetuses/children for higher wages than they could otherwise earn. At the same time, IVF technologies expand the increasing number of commodity forms of human life and human vital energy. I argue that in the context of the current lack of legal discourse around these technologies in India, assisted reproductive technologies allow the Indian surrogate’s womb and its biological functions to be abstracted from the rest of her life and made excessive to her nonreproductive existence. Even though women describe entering surrogacy agreements because of material constraints in their lives, current and future surrogates also describe relationships they create with one another, and sometimes with commissioning parents, outside their contracted relationship that create political possibility and advance alternative ethical models for the future of commercial transnational surrogacy. This chapter further develops the notions of affective labor and biocapital to explain how the recipients of a surrogate mother’s labor and the child she bears become a site of capital accumulation and how outsourcing has extended into human biology as part of biocapitalism.

Vora.indd 24

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM

1 Limits of Labor Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work

T

his chapter traces a colonial history of biological and affective labor to provide the necessary foundation for understanding how exploitation operates in Indian transnational contexts like call centers and commercial surrogacy. In conversation with feminist critiques of labor, the imperial legacies at work in transnational Indian labor suggest a new lineage for the study of the effects of racialization and gendering in emerging sites of affective and biological labor. Contemporary forms of work that blur the line between the subject and the work performed, like that found in Indian call centers and surrogacy, but also in sites such as clinical trial participation and the sale of human organs, engage longer imperial legacies of liberal capitalism and trouble the adequacy of labor itself as a framework of analysis.1 In both call centers and commercial surrogacy, the distinction between the subject and the work she performs is complicated by the nature of the work itself, the specific technologies of distance communication and assisted reproduction, and their relationship to the embodied subject. Some of the types of work performed by call center agents and surrogates are indexes of new forms of exploitation and accumulation within neoliberal globalization, but they also rearticulate a historical and colonial division of labor. Feminist materialist analyses of the historical differentiation of productive and reproductive labor are an invaluable resource for demarcating the limits of both liberal and Marxist notions of labor, value, and political subjectivity. Yet even as these feminist materialists point to the unwaged, unrecognized reproductive, or even 25

Vora.indd 25

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM

26

Limits of Labor

“maternal,” labors of service, care, and nurture, their analyses do not directly articulate with the exploitation of gendered labor as part of a system that depends on these degraded feminized labors as part of governing through reduction and extension of life, even as it uses them up. To this end, critiques of the racialized nature of domesticity and free labor advanced by feminists based in the Global South, black feminists, and U.S. women-­of-­color feminists contribute to another history of the dependence of capitalism on both reproduction and the exhaustion of life past the possibility of its reproduction. While arguing that the category of reproductive labor makes visible a type of productivity that is essential yet unseen, this scholarship also provides the grounds to continue to scrutinize which kinds of exchange and subjectivity can even be represented by categories of labor. Such analyses thus lead us to ask what specific stakes are involved in asserting that gestational surrogates, call center agents, and others whose productivity occurs primarily through biological and affective processes are subjects of capitalist labor power. The affective and biological exploitation and accumulation represented together in call centers and commercial surrogacy depend as much on contemporary technologies that disaggregate and commodify discrete acts as they do on the longer colonial political economy within which human “life” (as free, autonomous, self-­willing, and biologically healthy) has been supported in the Global North by the labor and resources of the South. Rereading the undertheorized side of the dual nature of reproductive labor together with contemporary feminist scholarship concerned with race and imperialism is important for understanding the co-­constitution of the sexual organization of the heteropatriarchal family and the work of gendered labor to both humanize workers for continued production and provide a source of unmarked accumulation in itself. Structures of race and gender continue to disguise the transmission of vital energy, that is, the value imparted by labor and more, between bodies and communities. In addition to creating value recognizable through exchange, the duality of this labor helps characterize India’s continuing racialized role as a primary provider in the gendered global service economy even as elite levels of Indian society economically outpace nonelites in the United States and Europe.

Vora.indd 26

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM



Limits of Labor

27

Legacies of Imperial Labor Humanism as a liberal philosophy of the subject, organized through a distinction of freedom from conditions of unfreedom, was co-­constituted by the formation of colonial racial categorizations and an international division of labor as they arose together following the abolition of the slave trade within the British Empire in 1807. Lowe explains that “the social inequalities of our time are a legacy of this [liberal] definition of ‘the human’ and subsequent discourses that have placed particular subjects, practices, and geographies at a distance from ‘the human.’”2 The distinction between enslaved and free labor that became a concern as part of the abolitionist movement functioned to generate a category of mobile workers that complemented an imperial labor reallocation strategy connecting imperial subjects all over the world as “labor” while elaborating their hierarchical relationship and separation through emerg­ ing categories of race and gender attached to their labor. In turn, the nature of freedom and free labor became invested with assumptions about gender, race, and class, as these were also embroiled in the instrumental distinction between free labor and slavery that justified the practice of indenture.3 This instrumentality wrote over the coercive nature of indenture because it was described as contractual by mutual consent and understanding, even in the face of evidence of the lack of understanding or choice on the part of those signing themselves into indenture. Women were recruited under the same contractual conditions not as free labor but rather for the purpose of providing the reproductive labor that made male workers viable, a practice and problem Madhavi Kale says is embedded in the material origins of the category of free labor as an instrument in imperial labor reallocation. This reallocation was in effect the superimposition of a constructed dichotomy of slavery and free labor on the proliferation of less-­than-­free labor and conditions as part of empire building, whereby “the post-­abolitionist fiction of equal status and equal protection for all imperial subjects regardless of race or nation could be maintained by erasing women as political agents”4—­what Lowe calls a “modern racial governmentality.”5 Like the fiction of noncoercion underpinning Indian indenture, in the larger colonial context of the British Empire, a number of gendered, sexual, and reproductive relations existed under the umbrella of “consensual” that

Vora.indd 27

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM

28

Limits of Labor

did not even figure as labor.6 In her study of the recruitment and resettlement of bonded or indentured laborers from India to the Caribbean, Kale argues that empire was the invisible pretext for the constitution of labor as an identity and ultimately as a category of analysis in historiography.7 Abstract notions of “consent,” “freedom,” “choice,” and “contract” have been produced and unequally distributed by modern liberalism and have been affirmed selectively for some through the disavowal of colonized and enslaved labor.8 The category of labor continues to function to write over contemporary conditions of force under other names.9 These histories, together with the history of the category of free labor itself, mandate attention be paid not only to the particular nature of the work being performed under contract in emerging affective and biological production but also to the particular forms of dependency in operation, because contractual arrangements may contain incomplete or absent information. Consent and, therefore, autonomy are incomplete despite being arranged through a freely entered agreement. For example, the contemporary status of women who take up gestational surrogacy is constructed through Indian law, particularly through legal relations that accord little power to the surrogate. The draft Assisted Reproductive Technologies Bill (2012) currently under consideration by India’s parliament is largely a free-­market-­promoting document that provides only basic protections to surrogates as underresourced Indian citizens. Unless and until it is finalized as law, the practice of commercial surrogacy is subject only to national guidelines that are not enforceable. The status of women once they enter into a surrogacy agreement is also defined through the translation of human gestation into paid labor; they may receive trimesterly stipends as they proceed through pregnancy, and after delivering the infant, they receive their fees. This means that once they become pregnant, they must complete the pregnancy to receive payment, and as it stands in the draft bill, the surrogate would not have a say in decisions about embryo reduction or abortion. There is currently no legal guarantee of medical treatment for complications arising after the delivery, and there is no formal procedure to follow should anything untoward happen to the woman while pregnant. Her legal status as a particular kind of worker whose body has been engaged

Vora.indd 28

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM



Limits of Labor

29

through a contract to perform self-­care and nurture with the aim of a healthy pregnancy and delivery does not account for the frequent separation enforced between surrogates and their nuclear and extended families and communities in the interest of the clinic and commissioning parents, nor does it account for any effects of her own separation from the child she bears. There is no socially recognizable or defensible relationship between the surrogate’s social world and that of the infant she carries other than the contract, even in the proposed legislation. This separation is figured as natural and commonsensical within the discourses of biological parenthood and property, where intention and gametes on the part of commissioning parents give them ownership of the embryo, fetus, and infant, and as such is endorsed by the clinic. The surrogate has no claim on the developing fetus and is in fact positioned in the current guidelines and proposed legislation as a potential threat to it. Current contracts may also forbid the surrogate from engaging in sexual intercourse with her husband and may effectively mandate residence in surrogate hostels to facilitate surveillance. These conditions engage an imperial history of instrumentalizing consent, freedom and choice, alienation, and sexual and reproductive relations invisible as labor, so that subjects disappear from the identity category of labor through their gendering. Though all biological life represents a site of speculation and potential biological production and accumulation, the legacies of imperialism continue to affect the hyperavailability of racialized and gendered bodies.10 The concerns raised by the legacies of colonial labor in India also come to bear on the social alienation and constraint of choice among workers in the call center industry and other forms of gendered industrial labor, as these value-­producing activities straddle the line of visible and invisible labor, autonomy, and coercion, while engaging interior levels of the subject, self, and personality in their performance. Feminist Critiques of the Limits of Labor Understanding how the production of immediate life through affect and biology on one side of the world can serve to support life elsewhere is aided by an examination of feminist critiques of the type of labor that is often referred to

Vora.indd 29

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM

30

Limits of Labor

in Marxist theory as “reproductive.” Marx’s formulation from the first volume of Capital defines reproductive labor against productive labor. If productive labor is understood as the investment of (socially averaged) labor time into an object for exchange, then reproductive labor is the energy put into making sure the person doing productive labor was able to return to work each day. It re-­creates or replenishes the labor power of the person who works outside the home in the public sphere by providing support to the biological reproduction of the worker’s body and strength as well as a replacement worker in the form of child rearing. In the form of care, love, and nurture, it also reassures the worker of his humanity, allowing him to continue to participate in his own commodification as labor. Contemporary materialist feminists and women-­of-­color feminists have critiqued the limits of our understanding of labor on the basis of different historical examples of gendered labor. Materialist feminists extended the understanding of reproductive labor by redefining it as productive in itself, as producing immediate life and not just supporting the masculine worker who earned the means to immediate subsistence.11 Women-­of-­color critiques of Marxist feminism have noted the limits of the capacity of labor to fully encompass the accumulation made possible through racialized and gendered dispossession. As a result of this history of the feminization and racialization of work that reproduces life, work that often involves a service rather than a physical object as its commodity, service and care also remain undervalued in public labor markets. Service, care, and attention work are considered unskilled because they originated in a gendered division of labor that did not require the identification of skills to secure a contract, as this was covered in contracts of marriage and servitude.12 At the same time, a growing percentage of jobs, particularly those performed by people marginalized in a given society or within the international division of labor, are these very jobs of care and service, and they are being taken up primarily by minority and Global South women workers. Affective and biological labors differ in kind from the productive labor that Marx presumes and analyzes in volume 1 of Capital; that is, the labor of the worker who weaves linen or sews a coat meant for exchange is different than that of the call center worker or the surrogate, in that the latter workers engage

Vora.indd 30

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM



Limits of Labor

31

in both productive and reproductive labors. Activities of service, care, and nurture engage the biological use of their bodies and lives as well as labor, and the requirements of such work intrude on the laboring subject in ways that radically compromise any sense of “autonomy” or “separation of spheres” presumed by both liberal and Marxist discussions of workers within Western societies. Biotechnology together with globalization (and its colonial past) is the condition that makes the selling or renting of one’s biological function and parts possible, a process that is qualitatively different than the commodification of the labor that the biological body performs. Both commercial surrogacy and call center work produce recognizable commodities in exchange for a monetary sum (stipend/fee and wage, respectively). They also produce a number of other use values, including feelings or affects, forms of sociality and humanity, and the valorization of those forms among their consumers. Occurring in the domestic–­nonpublic realm and producing commodities that do not line up with a physical model, elements of domestic work have often not been visible as productive or even as labor to mainstream political economic labor analysis, nor to liberal philosophies of labor, which privilege an autonomous individual as the subject of capitalist labor. As a result, domestic work and reproductive work in general, as well as the subject who performs it, get represented, at least in part, as nonvalue.13 To address this problem, Fortunati has identified a dual nature within capital’s appropriation of labor power, a dualism that is within labor power itself. Reproductive work, a category in which domestic work is a large component, has a dual nature under capitalism because it represents itself and its subject-­ bearer as nonvalue, yet it simultaneously functions to siphon the value it produces into capital through the ability of the “productive” worker to return to work each day.14 Fortunati’s understanding of reproduction as inherent but unmarked in the value of labor power is a very different approach to that of earlier feminist models of domestic work as either productive labor deserving of a wage or reproductive labor coerced by patriarchy. Approaching affective labor in this way allows us to see its essential role of compensating and rehumanizing the worker as more than a commodity, “creating the illusion that he is an individual with unique characteristics and a real personality.”15

Vora.indd 31

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM

32

Limits of Labor

The draining of vital energy in service of the rehumanization of the worker within the economy of the household becomes visible as a relationship across divides of class, race, and nationality once the domestic sphere as a privileged space is problematized. For example, Angela Davis critiques the Marxist feminist focus on housework as invisible labor supporting capitalism, arguing that the destruction of the family unit and its domestic roles has also been essential to capitalist growth.16 The abolition of the international slave trade created dependence among slave owners and the slave-­based economy on women’s reproduction to increase the domestic population of slaves,17 and the separation of women unrecognized as mothers and their infants was a regular practice.18 Grace Hong also marks how dispossession of property has been as important as property ownership in maintaining the bearing of rights and property as sequestered for white middle-­class enjoyment in the United States, or “differential access to property rights.”19 The system of property and chatteldom separated women slaves from notions of gendered propriety and occupation tied to women’s roles as housewives and mothers developing at that time. Commercial surrogacy, because of its social location in mothering labor and the cultural economic weight of the household–­family economic unit that comes with that location, together with its imbrication with the bodies of producer and consumer, complicates the surrogate as a capitalist worker-­ subject. The feminist theories briefly engaged here explain ways that the subject of labor power relies on a host of supports that originate in the vital energy of others, supports that do not appear to be labor or behave like it. The historical structure of the Protestant heteropatriarchal household with its wife, children, and servants has played a role in this process, as have colonization, indenture, and slavery—obscuring subjects of value-­producing labor in support of the subject predicated by labor power in the capitalist market. Janet Jakobsen argues that “the autonomous individual is not just any particular human being but a particular way to understand and inhabit human being—­a subjectivity in which the individual understands himself to be free when he acts without the assistance of others,”20 an understanding of autonomy that obscures the support labor of those on whom this autonomy depends. For this reason, Jakobsen argues that sexual relations within the Protestant heteropatriarchal

Vora.indd 32

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM



Limits of Labor

33

family are relations of production that produce both the autonomous individual and this particular variety of human subject.21 Indian gestational surrogacy falls into this sexual mode of production as the privatized labor of reproduction and childbirth. It is also crucial to note that when surrogates insist that their role exceeds that of gestational carrier, they are challenging the indivi­ duality, freedom, and private quality of this mode of production22 as well as revealing the work that goes into supporting it through contracts, legislation, and assumed norms of sociality and kinship. Housewifization, colonization, dispossession through the gendered and racialized right to property, and the global elaboration of these and other legacies in “flexibilization” are part of the history that leads to the present-­day understanding of commercial surrogacy.23 Bringing gendered labor, with its ties to property and patriarchy, under the umbrella of labor remains the most effective way to gain protections for a variety of subjects. For example, feminists in India have historically conducted efforts and continue to push the government toward a future that opens up opportunities for women with regard to reproductive technologies and equality of representation and access to rights over property, progeny, labor, and their own bodies.24 In this context, organizations like Sama: Resource Group for Women and Health in New Delhi, a national research and advocacy group, have introduced the issue of transnational surrogacy.25 Amrita Pande suggests that, despite the obstacles to surrogates’ realization of worker consciousness, the demand for labor protections and the model of labor organization are the most immediate and pressing needs and strategies of women working as surrogates.26 The model of “ownership” of the body is an important step toward guaranteeing basic and necessary protections for women entering surrogacy agreements, but the problem of the devaluation of women’s bodies, particularly the maternal body, under patriarchal property-­based systems where “the bodies are just the space in which the genetic material matures into babies” remains, and if the body is believed to contain the property of someone else, owning her body is not enough to ensure the maternal subject’s civil liberties.27 The woman acting as a gestational surrogate, much like the colonized laborer, the housewife, and the worker outside of labor protections, is partially

Vora.indd 33

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM

34

Limits of Labor

a subject of labor who is “free” to sell labor to buyers but is also occluded as a subject in the service of what Mies, Fortunati, Hong, and others have identified as ongoing primitive accumulation. Lacking definition as true income-­ generating activities because of their gendering, intentional actions that transmit life-­supporting energy and the reaffirmation of humanness can create value through commodities but also directly support life in other bodies, communities, and locations. Technology has played an important role in separating the pregnant body as a productive machine from the subject, freeing the work of gestation and nurture to circulate as a commodity. However, examination of the history of slavery and indenture in India itself and as part of British colonial labor allocation in the colonies adds an additional and important layer for considering the content of labor that is understood to be produced by a free, liberal subject, a tension that complements the analysis of the dual nature of reproductive labor, where part of what is produced necessarily remains outside the reach of recognizing the subject of such work as a subject of labor. Vital Energy Accumulation from Call Centers to Surrogacy Bharati, a college graduate in urban India, represents the typical call center agent in New Delhi. After being hired, she was trained to neutralize her accent, given a new moniker more user-­friendly and culturally familiar for the consumer, and exposed to the popular culture and idioms of the U.S. location she would be calling. After the initial excitement of her first professional job wore off, she began to feel the toll of her nighttime work schedule and found herself increasingly disconnected from her daytime social world, family, and friends.28 She quit her job, but having gone directly into a call center after college, she soon found that her only job skills, including a neutral accent and her knowledge of U.S. geography, work processes, and people, were of no use to any other industry. Within six months, she joined another call center.29 Sujata-­ben, a lower-­middle-­class homemaker from a small town in northern India, shares much in common with other women who, like her, have been or are in the process of becoming a gestational surrogate for a foreign family.

Vora.indd 34

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM



Limits of Labor

35

She signed a contract with a medical center to become a gestational carrier for a couple in the United States with fertility concerns. After going through the medical process of hormone administration and embryo transplantation to become impregnated, she moved to a hostel for gestational carriers in northern India. In comparing her two prior pregnancies with her own children to her pregnancy as a surrogate, she remarked on the regular medical care she was receiving and the much higher level of care and attention she paid to herself as a surrogate. She had been employed as a maid for the better part of both of her previous pregnancies, whereas as a surrogate, she lived apart from her husband, children, and family duties and spent her days passing the time with other women who shared her condition, alternating between affects of boredom and camaraderie, depending on the context. Like other surrogates, she had signed a contract that she would not receive any money other than a maintenance stipend if she did not successfully complete her pregnancy.30 The preceding vignette about Bharati is taken from the portrait of a composite call center agent produced by sociologist A. Aneesh from interviews conducted in the New Delhi industrial suburb of Gurgaon.31 The story of Bharati’s necessary alienation from social relations and her social world, result­ ing from the temporal and cultural isolation of call center work from other industries and work schedules, combined with her access to a job only through the work of affect that reproduces an alternate version of herself, engages the concerns of feminist analyses of labor. It also raises questions about the specific content of the call center agent’s labor, which includes supporting a projected persona who occupies an alien world that the agent must learn and then inhabit through fantasy. Agents also do the work of managing the emotional reactions, expectations, and communication between depersonalized entities, such as brands or corporations, and individual people, reassuring them of their worth and existence as human beings. The blurring of the line between the subject and the work performed lends call center work to analysis as reproductive and gendered labor, which is distinguished by tasks and contexts in which it is difficult to discern the line between the body and subject of the worker and the work performed. Such tasks and work contexts point to the complexities of assuming autonomy when work involves affective and biological participation

Vora.indd 35

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM

36

Limits of Labor

and alienation and gesture toward the vast range of activities that fall into the “production of immediate life” that Maria Mies forefronts as the necessary core concept of a feminist theory of labor.32 The second vignette, excerpted from ethnographic observation and interviews conducted in 2008, takes place at a residence hostel in a small city in the Indian province of Gujarat, where women in different stages of pregnancy and postdelivery as contracted gestational surrogates live for nine months to a year while working with Manushi fertility clinic.33 The context of surrogacy varies from clinic to clinic in India, as there are only elective national guidelines for commercial assisted reproductive technology practice, but most clinics mandate or heavily encourage surrogates to live in designated hostels. Many, including Manushi, only accept married women who have borne at least one child to prove the viability of their uteruses and to work against their possible attachment to the fetus or infant. The latter requirement has also been written into draft legislation.34 Sujata-­ben’s narrative describes self-­care, concern, caution, and attention, which exemplify some of the affective labor and commodities produced by a surrogate while pregnant. These and the breast-­ feeding and nurturing of the newborn she may be asked to provide generate health and therefore yield future life opportunities for both the infant and its parents. The call center agent’s performance of affective labor blurs the line between the subject and the work performed. An important part of becoming a call center agent, where practical training occurs after hiring but before paid work begins, is the acquisition of fluency in the foreign culture he or she is calling, so that an agent may react appropriately and credibly to customers in their own cultural context. For example, agents must acquire the habit of showing culturally authentic emotions on the phone, such as performing empathy for a customer who relates a misfortune or keeping a smile on his or her face during the conversation. These efforts translate into the production of value for the call center’s employers in the form of increased customer trust and loyalty to the company or brand. In addition to the affective work of producing their caller personas, the time difference between India and North America means that call center agents are required to do the daily work of managing

Vora.indd 36

16/01/2015 11:38:26 AM



Limits of Labor

37

the friction created by waking up late in the afternoon when others are winding down their days and missing social engagements, religious rituals, and the other everyday interactions that constitute sociality. Gestational surrogacy as a paid service also complicates the line between the subject and work performed and links the historical complexity of women’s reproductivity as labor to imperial labor practices that relied on control of working and living conditions to realize profitability. As a paid service, commercial surrogacy is imagined in the context of the clinic as the contractual usage of a woman’s otherwise unused uterus as a space in which to gestate a fetus that is understood as someone else’s property and progeny. On one hand, surrogacy is a contracted agreement of payment for the gestation of a fetus created through in vitro fertilization and the delivery of an infant. However, the custodianship and intentional continued gestation of the fetus lend themselves in practice and in proposed legislation to the need to protect consumers by mandating that a woman submit herself to technologies and routine surveillance that is meant to protect the well-­being of the fetus, sometimes more than that of the surrogate herself. The surrogacy fee, which is highly attractive for surrogates but much lower than what commissioning parents would pay in their home countries, reflects a “lower cost of living” in their different spheres of life. The fee is also attractive to India’s urban “transnational capitalist class,”35 who share a similar earning differential with surrogates. Surrogates describe the unparalleled earning opportunity surrogacy represents as providing a sum that could actually change their material circumstances. Owing to their lower incomes and access to resources, surrogates often do without many necessities that commissioning parents would not do without, including basic health insurance, medical privacy, reliable electricity, clean and reliable water, a permanent home or residence, the ability to seek and find another job when one is lost, access to a variety of foods or the ability to grow them (requiring land and water), and so on. This disparity of conditions and access to resources is not accurately reflected in the argument that Indian surrogates’ fees are low because of the lower cost of living of the women who become surrogates. Transnational surrogates in India hired by distant commissioning parents provide an opportunity for commissioning couples to continue to live

Vora.indd 37

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM

38

Limits of Labor

at home, maintain their paid work, and build their careers in lieu of childbearing, even as surrogates themselves relocate and give up their other work to provide this opportunity. As emerging case law in a number of countries permitting transnational commercial surrogacy has begun to illustrate, the social relations and understandings of kinship outside the medical and legal definitions of the surrogacy contract are not as simple as represented in the agreement of nine months of gestation and childbirth in exchange for a set fee. In fact, surrogates themselves insist on the continuing obligation and duty commissioning parents should feel toward them and their families beyond the terms and time limit of the contract, arguing that the act of giving a child to a wanting couple is incommensurable with any fee. Even in the face of evidence that commissioning parents rarely keep up correspondence or support of a woman and her family after the surrogacy contract has ended, many describe the expectation that this should be so, given the relative power and resources of commissioning parents and the nature of what surrogates have given them in bearing their children.36 The call of such a duty or responsibility doesn’t transmit between the surrogate and the commissioning parents because of the organizing rub­rics of the liberal, individual subject and the contract-­based relationship that describes the responsibility of each party in terms of fee and services rendered.37 These expectations also point to a disagreement about the value of surrogacy as labor and about its content, which exceed what can be understood in terms of value and the autonomous, liberal individual subject. The requisite adjustments to the mode of living and attention and care of the self that Bharati and Sujata-­ben undertook to earn a living are indicative of vastly different yet parallel shifts in the conditions and valuation of new forms of labor. Whereas call centers are thought of in the United States as a sign of outsourcing and often as a mark of a shift in industrialized economies to postmodern, flexible production, commercial surrogacy is not often considered labor in the same way. However, for both call center work and gestational surrogacy, the category of labor becomes essential for making visible the types of value-­transmitting activities that subjects undergo for the benefit of those who consume them.

Vora.indd 38

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM



Limits of Labor

39

Attending to these forms of labor also allows for the continued political project of tracking their accumulation and exploitation. What call center work and commercial surrogacy have in common is the labor of producing and transferring human vital energy directly to a consumer, through the work of affect and the intentional or dedicated use of bodily organs and subjective pro­cesses. The work of producing vital energy through biological and affective labor is distributed unequally at the level of international exchange, as are opportunities for its consumption. In performing this labor with its trans­ national transfer of value, racialized and gendered bodies or subjects become the bearers of colonial legacies and neoliberal restructurings that create an opportunity to expand as well as think outside of current ways of conceptualizing labor. Examining these new forms of labor also provides an opportunity to reevaluate the role of race and gender in relation to subjectivity and humanity, forms of ownership and property, and technology as part of capitalist expansion and territorialization. The production of a persona as an instrument to communicate attention and service in call center work and the commercial surrogate’s allocation of time, attention, and care to her body and well-­being as an instrument in producing a child by contract evoke an image of the expanding commodification of subjects and humanity, and as such, it is useful to think about how they also complicate a strictly labor-­based analysis of this production. The geopolitical and structural location of this production, occurring in India but accumulated by consumers in the Global North, including the middle and upper classes in hyperdeveloped spaces and the transnational capitalist class and growing middle class in India, also invites connection to questions of use-­value, constraint, and autonomy raised by the history of imperial labor in India. As Sujata-­ben’s story suggests, the way surrogates compare previous pregnancies to contracted pregnancy through surrogacy, specifically the different orientation to the process and to their bodies, raises the questions of what affective labor is invested into gestation and what resultant commodities are produced by the surrogate’s self-­care while pregnant. Many women are asked to provide two days of breast-­feeding after delivery to give the infant immunity-­ building colostrum, but occasionally this period is extended for one or two

Vora.indd 39

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM

40

Limits of Labor

months for infants whose parents are delayed in their arrival. In addition to expanding the range of subject positions one can inhabit as “mother” and enabling one to perform mothering both as capitalist labor and as excessive to capitalist production, assisted reproductive technologies also create future opportunities for less-­wealthy women to step into devalued care labor markets and for more wealthy women to outsource the work of childbearing and child rearing to expand their own ability to pursue full-­time careers through their reproductive years, a process that, in the context of transnational adoption, Ann Anagnost calls “just-­in-­time” reproduction.38 Race and gender have historically operated and continue to operate to make some bodies more economically useful as biological entities than as the subjects of labor power. In the context of commercial gestational surrogacy in India, part of the work being done by the distinction between “gestational carrier” and “commissioning parent” in the clinical context is forming a separation between the physical aspects of human reproduction and the social– sexual–affective aspects. Much of the work of the clinic staff is invested in preventing the attachment of emotional meaning to relationships between surrogates and commissioning parents and between the surrogate and the fetus she carries. As a sign within the discourse of genetic essentialism, the gene distinguishes the provider of the service and reproductive space of gestation from the creative “author” of the child—­the “biological parents.” Patriarchy—­as assumed and affirmed through the state and supporting legal apparatuses, including paternity and property protections at the national level that are built into documents like the surrogacy contract itself—­identifies the commissioning parents as the intentional authors of a future child protected as property, though necessarily under the custodianship of the gestational surrogate for the period of gestation. Scientific knowledge and practices have played a role in erasing bodies from reproduction in surrogacy. For example, in the context of commercial surrogacy, genetic discourse dictates the property-­bearing and contract-­empowered status of the commissioning parents as the intentional, authorial producers of a child; the embryologist and ob-­gyn form a technical team that performs the high-­value work of engineering the surrogacy, leaving the surrogate positioned

Vora.indd 40

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM



Limits of Labor

41

as performing the passive, merely reproductive and nonauthorial work of gestation. How is a fetus produced? In vitro fertilization involves skills, knowledge, and instruments that require specialized training and education, as does the implantation of an embryo in concert with the administration of hormones to prepare a surrogate’s body to become pregnant with the implanted embryo. After this, the surrogate continues the process through to its completion, and her body uses its complex biological and hormonal processes to bring the fetus to term, processes that are influenced by her activities during gestation (nutrition, stress level, exposure to mutagenic substances, physical activity, health or illness, among others). The way these activities are read as being labor or not, and as being specialized or not, is heavily influenced by the assumption that the end product is a form of contract-­protected property belonging to the originators of intention and DNA. However, as one representative genetic biologist explains, “first, DNA is not self-­reproducing, second, it makes nothing, and third, organisms are not determined by it.”39 Conclusion The example of gestational surrogacy is an obvious illustration of how intimate expression, requiring the production of genuine feelings, can be completely alienated from the producer. The time surrogates spend away from their families and communities, which many surrogates describe as the most taxing element of their work, and away from the social and biological activities that produce their own immediate life and life world is invested in the lives of consumers and their environment in immediately observable ways. Bringing call centers together with commercial surrogacy in thinking about the promises and limits of labor as an analytical category suggests a new lineage for thinking about the production and circulation of vital energy represented in the categories of affective and biological labor. Naming the work of pro­ ducing an alternate self, as well as attention and care, in customer service call centers, “affective labor” connects it not only to the work of surrogacy and service work in general but also to feminist critiques of the failure of labor analysis to account for nonpublic and interior processes that contribute to capitalist accumulation. At the same time, feminist critique has shown that

Vora.indd 41

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM

42

Limits of Labor

attention to the devaluing effects of race and gender must counterbalance any approach to analyzing the raced and gendered subject of labor, as these effects present serious obstacles to accounting for the nature of production and accumulation in emerging “service” economies represented by commercial gestational surrogacy. As the history of Indian labor under British imperialism indicates, not all labor is visible as such, and capitalist accumulation is served by exploitation of both proper subjects of labor and those who do not always appear as (liberal) subjects. To accurately follow value’s production and accumulation therefore requires attention to the nature of autonomy in a given production setting.

Vora.indd 42

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM

2 Call Center Agents Commodified Affect and the Biocapital of Care

T

“

he Bangalore butler is the latest development in offshore outsourcing,” announced Steve Lohr in a 2008 New York Times article, referring to the growth of long-­distance customer service into the realm of personal assistants and primary and secondary school tutors.1 The Bangalore butler is a compelling phrase, redolent with a fantasy of the sensorium of British colonial elites, where brown men in crisp white uniforms and turbans served meals on silver platters to smartly dressed colonials, allowing them not only to get their work done in an unmanageable Indian environment but to experience indulgence and pleasure. The image is apt, because the outsourcing of personal care and assistance creates the potential for consumers to use more of their time as they please without sacrificing the feeling of having personal attention and service. Part of what allows for a spark of recognition in the phrase “Bangalore butler” is an economy of imagination and desire that prefigures Indian workers as cheap, easily replaceable, and servile. This figuration is a legacy of colonial material conditions, a product of contemporary biopolitical economic terri­ torialization, and a self-­fulfilling marker of a gendered and racialized position in the international division of labor. In the past fifteen years, as innovations in telecommunications reached a level that allowed affordable real-­time interaction with service workers abroad, English-­speaking middle-­class college grad­ uates in India became the source of inexpensive service labor for industries relying on English-­enabled customer service. This work is cheaper for U.S. corporate entities than in-­country labor both because of the international 43

Vora.indd 43

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM

44

Call Center Agents

strength of the dollar and because of the maintenance of a de facto lower level of life necessities for the Indian worker—­the material reality behind the lower cost of living and cheapness of Indian labor. What the phrase “lower cost of living” might mean in material terms is rarely interrogated with regard to relative quality of life, a fact that allows this international division of labor to extract and invest the value produced by Indian service workers into the lives of people living in the United States, where households and vitality become a repository for the accumulation of surplus value produced in India. In these terms, Indian lives are cheapened because the majority of Indian workers do not hold a position in the world economy that allows them to accumulate the surplus value they produce. It is exported instead through outsourcing contracts and other forms of labor extraction. Though it doesn’t have the same ring to it, the Indian call center agent is a figure closely related to that of the Bangalore butler. By focusing on the production of affective commodities and the concomitant inability of their producers to consume them, this chapter looks at how business process outsourcing (BPO) has rematerialized imperial fantasies of inexpensive and readily available service work in India, further cheapening it through the extraction of vital energy in the form of the affective components of call center work. The transnational nature of the interactions between Indian agents and global customers means that the biopolitical territorialization of this work leads to accumulation outside the worker and his or her immediate community and results in a net flow of affective resources to consuming nations at the expense of producing nations like India. Popular media discourses and political and economic analysis of outsourcing alike often fail to consider the subjective costs of performing transnational outsourced labor like that of call center agents and do not register the unique socialities produced by such work. The play A Terrible Beauty Is Born (2006), written by Arjun Raina, is a dramatic monologue that focuses on precisely these issues. The analysis in this chapter includes reference to ethnographies on call centers but foregrounds a dramatic monologue to assert the value of the fictive to a material analysis of the affective and subjective conditioning particular to call center labor as well as to provide an opportunity to examine

Vora.indd 44

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM



Call Center Agents

45

the political potential of the imaginative possibilities represented in the text. In contrast to ethnographic representations,2 the aesthetic representation of call center work in A Terrible Beauty Is Born can offer an imagining of an alternative set of political possibilities and modes of connection that paradoxically emerge out of the very affective discipline and extraction of call center technologies and connections. Ethnographic narratives about call center work describe the particular mode of production in customer service call centers, and the effect of this work on call center agents, describing how subjects mediate, produce, and circulate commodities such as attention, concern, and human communication. Together, the monologue and ethnographic narratives relate Durkheimian “social facts”3 in the intimate everyday interactions they depict and offer a theory of the nature of vital expenditure and social and historical connection produced through call center work. The representation of the subjective costs and socialities within the working and life conditions for the protagonist in A Terrible Beauty suggests some of the ways that the production of different types of use-­values in the everyday interactions of call center workers are entangled with complex social relations and histories of racialization as service work is transmitted to consuming nations outside India. Raina, a former call center agent accent trainer in New Delhi, performed the monologue for small audiences at theater festivals in India and Europe as well as on several American college campuses in the mid-­2000s as part of South Asia–­related events. The play exposes some of the compromises made in the lives of call center agents and points to particular forms of alienation experienced in call center work as well as the nature of social relations embedded in affective commodities. Creative Capacity and Call Center Service Work Service work is not typically understood as connected to a worker’s creative capacity. However, the harnessing of the agent’s efforts to produce a call center persona and the directing of this energy away from subjective self-­renewal is an important component of the value of call center work. In this way, service labor in India’s BPO sector expresses a number of qualities that are unique

Vora.indd 45

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM

46

Call Center Agents

within the current moment of global capital at the same time as it provides clues to the specific role of this labor market in the United States’ ability to accumulate capital.4 When a call center agent in India calls a customer in the United States, the caller and the customer must be transmitted in the form of data. The Indian agent becomes a projection of herself, with a new name, new training in accent neutralization, and unwieldy cultural knowledge of the country being called. The customer becomes a “profile,” chosen by dialing software specific to the call center industry. The software that manages this digitized interaction chooses profiles based on algorithms that determine the highest match rating between the profile and the type of call being made, whether this is sales, collections, and so on. In his ethnography of call center workers near New Delhi, sociologist A. Aneesh calls these specters of the agent and the customer their “data forms.”5 The production of the data form of the call center agent relies largely on her own affective labor. She must become familiar with the cultural context of the customer in order to effectively soothe agitated callers and make the contracting corporation appear accessible and approachable. She must work to follow and respond to emotional and conversational cues and to maintain a polite, patient, and attentive demeanor during the conversation in a way that seems authentic. When the data form or the Indian agent is projected successfully, it produces value for the company employing the call center. In the play A Terrible Beauty Is Born, we see that in the production of affect—­including support, kindness, attention, and the structure of desire that organizes the coherence of existence—­value flows primarily in one direction: from India to the United States. The main characters are formally linked only through a relationship of debt and demand for repayment, but the nar­ rative reveals other layers of social relationships they unknowingly share. The play is written in English, and the author resides in India and is informed by his experience as a trainer of call center agents.6 A Terrible Beauty features two narrators who present alternating monologues. The first, Ashok, who speaks with an “African American accent” and whose caller name is John Small, is an agent in the collections department of a call center for a big U.S. department store: “And when my transport [the shuttle to work] picks me up . . . John

Vora.indd 46

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM



Call Center Agents

47

Small . . . comes alive and blabbers away . . . speaking only in English . . . and with an African American accent . . . on call.”7 His calls are made exclusively to customers who are late in paying their account balance with the store. The second, Elizabeth, is a social worker, mother, wife, and grandmother who grew up in the Bronx and now lives with her husband four hours outside of New York in a small town. There is excess affect and social meaning in the relations between the Indian call center collections agent who assumes an American identity and the African American family from whom he is trying to collect, but this excess is not necessarily liberatory in the way Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri might imagine in their formulation of a global commons constituted by immaterial labor.8 The content that carries through his conversations with Americans over and above that required for his work haunts Ashok’s relationship to the United States and to his work, but it does not figure explicitly in the narrative. The characters recognize that they have shared interests, but these interests are based on false premises because John’s social location and identity are false. These interests also exist in a space that is marked as subaltern within American–­global hegemonies rather than as part of a global commons of affective resources. The play’s primary action takes place during and after the events of September 11, 2001. A few weeks after the attacks, Elizabeth is walking across the Brooklyn Bridge to meet her estranged daughter at an ice cream parlor in Manhattan. As she walks, she reflects back on the sequence of events that brought her to the present moment. The narration in the play alternates between Elizabeth as she walks across the bridge and Ashok (known as John to Elizabeth), who describes his perspective of the events around his initial collections call to Elizabeth. Ashok contextualizes his interaction over the phone with Elizabeth by describing the unforeseen tension in his life caused by the affective side of his work, particularly as this relates to his sense of identity and well-­being. As Elizabeth begins her narration, she reflects back to the time when she received her first call from John, just moments after the attacks on the World Trade Center have occurred. He is aware of the attacks, but the call center (located in India but imagining that it is in the United States) is still operating:

Vora.indd 47

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM

48

Call Center Agents

john: How are you doing today? . . . Isn’t it terrible . . . what’s happening in New York? elizabeth, narrating retrospectively to the audience: “Yes, John,” I told him, “it’s terrible out there . . . and for me personally . . . I have a daughter in New York . . . and we have no news of her. . . . We’re really very worried . . . so . . . what’s this about, John?” john: Yes, Elizabeth . . . this must be very tough on you. . . . I apologise . . . for bringing up your account matters at this moment . . . but I’ve got a job to do . . . and I am trying to do the best I can . . . to try and serve you well, ma’am. elizabeth: “Yes, son,” I told him, “you must always do your job well. In any circumstance. That’s America for you. . . . That’s why we are such a great country. You know, normally, I am not a patriot. . . . But at that moment with all those planes flying . . . and the talk of war . . . I too waved the flag.” john: Yes, ma’am, and god bless America.

John’s acknowledgment of the attacks is similar to the acknowledgment of American holidays and other social niceties that are built into the scripts read routinely by call center workers. John must express the same particular type of dismay at the calamity that Elizabeth feels, because he is supposed to be an American calling from America. The identity work of the call center employee functions to maintain a fantasy of social relations that exist within a shared cultural sphere. The fear is that customer realization of the foreign nature of the caller will disrupt the anticipated effect of customer service, that of a sense of the close proximity of support whenever it is needed. India does not feel close, and Indian accents do not make the agent seem accessible. For this reason, customer service work in India requires training in both cultural knowledge and the accent of the area being served. The sense of security in a given product or brand that is supported by customer service as well as the work of soothing and reassuring used to manage negative feelings in customers are two products of this work, which raises the question of whether customer service is productive in itself or rather simply allows for the maintenance of a system of economy and power that already exists, thereby reproducing it.

Vora.indd 48

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM



Call Center Agents

49

John’s expressions of concern and apology—­“this must be very tough on you” and “I apologise for bringing up your account matters at this moment”—­ are expressed in an active and intentional way by John for the purpose of expediting his business in calling Elizabeth. At the same time, this concern and care perform social work by giving Elizabeth a sense of connection to another person, effectively decreasing her worry about her missing daughter and the chaotic situation in New York. John’s efforts in producing such feelings and expressions accomplish two things at once. They promote the goal of collecting late payments from customers of his employing department store, thereby reproducing the life of the company and its interests, and at the same time they create a one-­sided sense of social connection, undoing (for Elizabeth) the alienation of both a stranger’s demands for money over the phone and an alienating crisis event. Call centers operate on a model where job descriptions are very particular to the type of call center in which one works, and the training one receives in a given position doesn’t always translate to another call center, and so agents must start the training process again from the beginning at another center. The different call “processes” determine the types of skills necessary, whether they be in sales, collections, or customer service (sales support). However, the main skill necessary for a call center job in India has been the ability to speak English, and so there is less training time and more mobility between call center jobs than there is, for example, in the software engineering positions examined in the next chapter. Despite paying a respectable wage, call center jobs are considered lower status than other jobs that require a college degree because they have little potential for upward mobility. They are also frowned upon because the youth culture around those who work in call centers—­going out to clubs and bars after work in the early morning, dating, and otherwise emulating Western culture—­has negative connotations outside of young urban social groups.9 The local labor system supporting the life and work of call centers are described by Patel as “ghetto camps” that exist in industrial suburbs like Delhi’s Gurgaon. Here migrant workers live in tents and under blue tarps held up by branches and bamboo poles, without running water, sanitation facilities, or electricity.10 These are the workers who build, maintain, and clean

Vora.indd 49

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM

50

Call Center Agents

IT and call center facilities but do not show up visibly in the global circulations and performances of the call center. This labor is a major component in the artificial cheapness of BPO services in India. Ethnographic material on call centers produced by labor sociologists points to the ways that management and quality control technologies shape not only the culture of the workplace but also the very subjectivities of the call center agents.11 The call center industry in general regulates the pace and nature of work through both computer-­regulated communication technologies, such as dialing software and fully automated call volume, and statistical and other more direct forms of performance monitoring. Technologies of virtual surveillance and the constant threat of the call center leaving the locality not only create a stressful work environment but produce a “machinic subjectivity” where workers must reorganize themselves as subjects to protect their personalities from their communication work while projecting a false persona and keeping up with the pace of the computer dialing system.12 The monitoring function built in to the dialing software tracks the average length of calls as well as time spent by agents off their phones, among other factors. These are then presented to agents to discipline their calling practices to more closely conform to company quality standards as measured by statistical goals. In his ethnography of Idaho call centers, Donald Winiecki argues that these statistics shape the very subjectivity of agents through how they imagine themselves and their work. At the same time, he gives examples of ways that experienced agents manipulate their behavior to “trick” the monitoring system into recording favorable numbers while they create extra time between calls to do their necessary work, find job satisfaction through substantive customer interactions that take longer than they are supposed to, and create opportunities to take breaks without the constant strain of rushing to keep up their statistics. Transnational call center work in India combines these conditions with the work of producing a call persona that is not Indian. In the documentary film Bombay Calling, call center agents are seen to be physically and emotionally exhausted by the end of a day of actively communicating not themselves but a false identity designed to be comfortable to the Americans and British they call by the hundreds.13 They perform not only

Vora.indd 50

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM



Call Center Agents

51

the labor of repressing their identity but also that of communicating a false message of themselves that is oriented toward promoting a system and culture that is successful only when they absent themselves. The logic is that a customer is more likely to hang up, or refuse a sale, if he knows that the caller is an Indian calling from India. This labor serves to valorize the sphere of the false identity, here the common denominator of American or British public culture, at the expense of the sphere of one’s own identity, which does not have currency in this work. In addition to commodities like trouble shooting and other technical assistance, customer service labor also requires the affective labor of call center workers to produce themselves as appropriate for their jobs. In addition, they produce affective commodities, such as personalized attention and the comfort of a continuing relationship with the service provider.14 In political economy, a commodity can be understood as an object for exchange into which labor power, or human vital energy, has been invested. Yet in service and care work, we cannot discuss a physical object as the repository of this energy. Capital accumulation is achieved by the realization of this value through exchange, when the value embodied in commodities produced by workers is greater than the purchasing power of their wages (in terms of commodities). For this reason, access to consumption is actually a point of organizing for the socialist worker or the concerned humanist economist. Moreover, it is important to ask how the accumulation of value in the United States relies on “cheaper” Indian service labor and how to explain the artificially lower level of affective and material needs in India that yield a cost of living lower than in the United States. The lower level of needs represented by this lower cost of living accomplishes two ends in providing cheap labor for the international economy: a false surplus of labor and an artificially lowered level of consumables necessary to support the lives of those working. False Surplus in the Production of Affect The global division of labor in the international customer service industry is an example of the creation of workers who are “appropriate” sources of customer care in India for consumers in overdeveloped nations. As mentioned

Vora.indd 51

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM

52

Call Center Agents

above, it is not just the strength of foreign currencies that makes locating call centers in India cheap; low costs are also due to an artificially reduced expectation of needs, of life support, for Indian workers. The common sense that dictates where to send this work and why to send it builds on the dis­cussion of appropriate laboring bodies discussed in previous chapters. As becomes clear in A Terrible Beauty and in ethnographic accounts of call center work, the surplus affective labor exported via call centers is not extra and is in fact necessary where it originates, having been made surplus artificially.15 The long-­distance transmission of affective labor engages the production of surplus and necessity through the management of use-­values, allowing for the cre­ation of structures of exchange between the Global South and Global North. The examination of commodities that are seemingly produced by an individual body without additional means of production provokes questions about the content of value carried by such commodities and at what cost they are produced. In the system of factory production as Marx describes it in volume 1 of Capital, a certain percentage of the value of the instruments of production goes into the commodity as those instruments are used up. In the production of affective commodities, the owner of the means of affective production does not accumulate capital because these commodities must still be exchanged to meet other immediate needs such as food and shelter. Instead, I argue that affective commodities act like human biological commodities, that is, as a kind of biocapital. They can be produced by what the body already contains and impact the ability of oneself and others to continue to thrive, yet they must be exchanged for the means of continuing to support the life of that body even as life is used up as the instrument of production. In other words, exchange is necessary for reproducing and replacing the life of the person producing commodified affect, just as it is for any other form of alienated labor, and though affective commodities don’t register as having a cost to the worker in the same way that manual labor would, I argue that they do deplete individual and community life. Affective labor and human biological materials also rely on specific technologies of extraction to be transferred to distant bodies. How value is carried and transmitted by affective commodities is an essential question for thinking about alienation as well, because for Marx, it was the ability of the

Vora.indd 52

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM



Call Center Agents

53

commodity to carry value that allowed it to enact the social relations of its producer. Use-­value is also entangled in this process, because any commodity must have it to be exchanged, but there is no guarantee that use-­value is stable for a given commodity. Therefore the use-­value of affective commodities, complex and multiple, can engage discrete realms of imagination and desire that are simultaneous yet conflicting and contradictory. In his analysis of call center work in India, Aneesh argues that our data doubles, specters that include the individual composed of a credit history housed at a credit reporting agency, or the individual consumer profile composed of spending and maybe even Internet browsing histories, and so on, have become more effective in predicting one’s life chances than physical and social forms of existence. He notes that “where attire, speech, social network and behavior once acted as an important form of social capital to secure jobs and loans, now tweaking credit reports and literacy in information systems have become more relevant to securing a life in the US.”16 As a result, the service worker is readjusted to fit her data forms.17 To communicate with the specters of customers, agents must be transformed into a compatible form of data. The data form of the call center agent turns out to be more useful to the global economy than her “real” form. Most of the college-­educated middle-­ class youths employed by call centers profess their lack of interest in call center work yet are attracted by the pay and the idea that this is something they can do to earn money for a few years while they find a “real job.”18 In truth, when an agent tries to leave the call center industry, she finds that the skills used in call center work are only employable in other call centers. The real form of the agent, the one that can’t find a job elsewhere, is revealed to be flawed in terms of market demands. The transformation of the agent into her data form requires the suppression of her real form and yet results in the enhancement of the real form’s life chances, because it gives her access to global flows of capital and labor demand. As Aneesh’s interviews indicate, the agent realizes that it is only through her data form that she can secure insurance of her future life chances. Her non–­data form can contribute only by reproducing the life of her data form. Though it appears in interview material, the affective cost of this labor of producing multiple forms of oneself is

Vora.indd 53

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM

54

Call Center Agents

difficult to track ethnographically, because there is not a quantitative method of measuring the output of affective labor. To understand how the production of immediate life through affective labor on one side of the world can serve to support life elsewhere depends on analyzing the impact of the electronic transmission of value, of alienation in its many forms, and on an understanding of the dual nature of the type of labor that for reasons discussed in earlier chapters is often referred to as reproductive. Labor in the customer service and domestic work industries serves both to produce life as a commodity and to provide a source of direct accumulation of capital. Human life is necessary to capital because it is the source of labor power. It is also necessary as a direct source of commodities for a type of primitive accumulation practice, fueled by biotechnology and the market for organs, tissues, and biological information (bioinfomatics). As discussed in the previous chapter, the dual character of reproductive work within capitalism occurs because it represents itself and its subject-­bearer as nonvalue, yet it simultaneously functions to siphon the value it produces into capital through the productive worker.19 The unmarked capacity of labor power for social and biological reproduction is therefore a source of valorization to capital in addition to its role as variable capital. The role and influence of biocapital in the life situations discussed in this chapter, then, become the compulsion to sell the body’s long-­term capacities, in the sense of both the ability to imagine a future and its future well-­being.20 In some ways, this process is not vastly different from the history of selling labor power for a wage, but the dominant currencies and epistemic understandings that shape this articulation of capital are different. Scholars who examine systems of capital dominated by the currency of code seem to agree that there is a growing tendency in the choices made by investors and workers in capitalist systems to be oriented toward securing a specific future.21 For example, scholars in science and technology studies, such as Donna Haraway and Kaushik Sunder Rajan, have noted that the biological sciences are increasingly becoming information sciences, as what are perceived as the basic units of life, DNA, are translated into binary code and managed by computerized information systems.22 The production of biological life as information, or

Vora.indd 54

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM



Call Center Agents

55

data, also results in epistemic changes in the very ways we understand how biological organisms, including the human, operate. It influences the language we choose to apply to biological systems and also the way we interact with these systems. Mediated by code, biological life in the form of data can be exchanged for commodities, which are themselves mediated by code. For example, the call center agent exchanges the data form of her labor power, composed of both applied knowledge and affective production, for a wage. Technology has allowed data, in the form of code, to become a highly mobile form of currency that can keep pace with the temporality of transnational electronic capital. Even service labor, which intuitively speaking would seem to rely on the presence of another physical being for its completion, par­ ticipates in electronic capital in the form of personality data doubles. Code becomes a dominant form of currency in the current moment of global capital, and access to this currency, like access to monetary currency for people whose lives are structured by debt, begins more and more to dictate not only people’s desires and imaginations of their own lives but the choices they may or must make to secure a future. Imagining Futures through Alienation As part of the process of creating artificial surplus, structures of affective labor, such as the global division of service and care work, create affective conditions that characterize certain populations of workers and not others. The character of John/Ashok in A Terrible Beauty Is Born lives a life characterized by a particular type of loneliness, which is a form of alienation specific to his work. The play portrays the experience of separation from Ashok’s immediate society that occurs as a result of his call center job. He works during the night and experiences insomnia as he tries to sleep through the day when everyone else is carrying on their lives. Even the access he has to people’s private lives in America as he calls them at home after their working day does not allow Ashok to feel integrated with that society. He gains entry only through the imagined persona he inhabits—­an African American man—­that allows the people he calls to accept him as someone like themselves. The better he becomes at his job of collection calls, which hinges on his ability to impersonate an American,

Vora.indd 55

16/01/2015 11:38:27 AM

56

Call Center Agents

the less connected he is to either Indian or U.S. society. In the reflections of Bharati, the composite call center agent profiled in the previous chapter, we saw that such loneliness can signify a type of social death, where the producer of affective commodities becomes cut off from the source of her own social reproduction through relationships with other people and society in general.23 In the first interaction between John and Elizabeth quoted earlier, we see that John must express the same particular type of dismay at the calamity that Elizabeth feels, because he is supposed to be an American calling from America. This is what makes him successful at his job. We see John’s reaction to the calamity and not Ashok’s. He is doing a certain type of labor to participate in structures of crisis reaction and suffering that aren’t his own, because he does not live in the United States. However, as we will see, John does identify with America in a way he finds distressing and damaging. Just before he begins his shift, and as the attacks are happening in the United States, John finds out that his coworker, a woman whose call name is Magda, has committed suicide. He briefly reflects on how she was too soft for the job, how some male customers she called would ask for sexual favors and otherwise mistreat her, and how manufacturing the appropriate persona to collect debts put a terrible strain on her. In their first conversation, Elizabeth eventually engages John to help her search for her estranged daughter in New York, but Ashok’s own loss is never mentioned. He must exist only in the world of the American calls, to the point where he himself must believe in his adopted character. As a result, the people receiving calls are spared the work of participating in the suffering in which he and his coworkers are engaged. This is one way to think about affective labor and the different affective structures that some must participate in, or may be spared from participating in. Part of the work John must do to successfully collect late payments is to convince himself that he is indeed the person he is pretending to be, and thus when he hears of the suicide, he drowns himself in activity, calling more customers than ever before. In this other version of himself, there is no room to think about the suicide or what it implies about his work. John’s reaction to his coworker’s suicide indicates something about how the value produced by affect is carried or embodied in affective commodities

Vora.indd 56

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM



Call Center Agents

57

and how it can be accumulated by some and lost by others. John/Ashok must provide the concern that allows him to do his job while repressing sentiments about his coworker and the relationship of their work to her suicide. This is an activity that supports the continued success of the American department store for which he makes collection calls and undermines the agents’ ability to discuss the implications of their colleague’s suicide and react to it. Not only is it impossible to perform his job while acknowledging its costs, as represented by Magda’s death, but there is simply no social space within the pace and structure of the telephone interactions, regulated by the clock within the dialing software, to mourn. This is an example of how the affect of mourning and its political potential are made unnecessary, channeled instead into the company’s interest. The time and space for acknowledging the costs of call center work are segmented from the actual time and space of the work by John/Ashok’s need to inhabit separate versions of himself. To accommodate the need to contain the world of John Small from the rest of his life, Ashok exists only behind the gates of Old Delhi, where he lives. New Delhi, where he works, is for John. Once the shuttle picks him up in the evening to leave for his shift, he switches to the language and personality of John. Ethnographic descriptions of the social spaces call center workers share after their shifts indicate that these spaces are dominated by the need to numb the mind overtaxed by the speed of work interactions and rest the faculties of social interaction.24 We can imagine that even in such a work-­related social space, John/Ashok would find it difficult to connect with other workers in a way that formed a political consciousness around Magda’s death. The style of the play, alternating between monologues by Elizabeth and Ashok, and the inward nature of the narratives convey a space of aloneness that is never pierced, the only change being the content of that inner space—­John or Ashok. Elizabeth knows very little about the life of her daughter, who left home years before the events of the plot. She knows that her daughter recently bore a child and that she claimed to work in the World Trade Center, which Elizabeth finds dubious, perhaps something said only to impress. Elizabeth speaks from a time that is about a month after the events of September 11, 2001. She

Vora.indd 57

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM

58

Call Center Agents

explains how at some point in the past year, her daughter called to announce the birth of her own daughter. Elizabeth recognizes a single mother’s unspoken need for support in the call. She gives her daughter the department store credit card for which John is a collections agent, with a spending limit of $250. When John calls Elizabeth during the attacks, she has an intuition to keep talking to him, even though it is a time of crisis and he is pressing her for money. During the course of the conversation, she realizes that John has access to her daughter’s spending records and recruits him to track this record for any new activity or patterns. We are never privy to his thoughts or feelings about these actions, as we hear about them only through Elizabeth’s account of the story. We hear through Elizabeth’s retrospective narrative that John keeps in touch with Elizabeth and her husband, Leo, over the course of the next few weeks, calling to inform them when and where the card has been used. John reports that the daughter goes to the same Manhattan ice cream parlor every week at the same time. Elizabeth and her husband take a bus into New York to find their daughter, planning to try to meet her at the ice cream parlor. Most of the narrative takes place as Elizabeth is slowly walking across the Brooklyn Bridge on the way to her first attempt to intercept her daughter, recounting this story and observing the people of the city with curiosity and appreciation. This gentle and appreciative curiosity about the lives of other Americans contrasts with the way that Ashok’s imagination of American lives erupts into his world, upsetting and complicating it. The type of loneliness that results from the alienation of other human beings into whom one has invested affective energy is a kind of loneliness that is more tangible than other types of alienation, because it fits a common social understanding of a type of being alone that is undesirable. Any conception of the “good life” includes the existence of specific needs and the ability to fill those needs in a way that does not entail suffering, yet in the scope of political economic thinking, affective needs are not often accounted for. However, needs are not stable, and as the discussion of the trade in human organs in the first chapter is meant to demonstrate, the generation of always new necessities is at the core of the operation of capitalist accumulation. The relative cheapness of someone’s labor and his life when compared to others’ lives in this scheme therefore reflects only the “outlawed necessities” that maintain this

Vora.indd 58

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM



Call Center Agents

59

cheapness.25 Thinking from within a space already reorganized by capitalism, Marx imagines the good life against different aspects of capitalism’s alienation of humans. One type is the separation of productive life activity from the living of life, because the work one performs as labor power is utilized in a narrowed way for the purpose of securing necessities through the wage. Marx calls this self-­estrangement.26 “[Under capitalism] life appears only as a means to life.” This is opposed to “being” one’s life activity.27 One becomes aware of this productive activity, which Marx sees as fundamentally human, as something that does not belong to oneself, making it a form of suffering. The content of this activity, what I would call vital energy, is also lost in a second form of alienation. The object produced by alienated activity is invested with one’s vital energy, yet leaves the immediate world of the person who produces it. In Capital, Marx imagines there to be a true loss in the life of a worker when he is no longer surrounded by the objects into which his own energy, or the energy of people with whom he has a relationship, is invested. This entails a third type of alienation, the lack of a feeling of contributing to the overall wealth and well-­being of a community. Marx refers to the alienation of one’s activity and its relation to a larger community as the alienation of “species life,” turning it into the means of individual life. It makes “life-­activity” and “productive life itself ” seem like the means of satisfying a need to maintain physical existence and nothing else.28 The loss of consuming power by the producers of affective commodities, represented in the alienation of Ashok in ways specific to his work, is an essential part of how “surplus” is created for export. Globalized demands for labor provide a call center agent the option of using his affective labor to produce a data double to take advantage of the apparatus that would transmit that labor to the United States. Such an apparatus does not exist to provide him with affective necessities. This manufactured surplus is then invested into lives that exist separately from the social sphere and existence of those who produced it. This produces a deficit on the model of the care deficit described by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas.29 In a sense, all labor operates as a type of biocapital, where the product of human vital energy is consumed to promote the well-­being and future life chances of someone else. However, one of the important differences is that the exchange of affective commodities is not mediated by the

Vora.indd 59

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM

60

Call Center Agents

embodiment of that energy into a commodity. Even with physical commodities, access to consumption of the vital energy they contain, and therefore the means to a secure and comfortable life, is restricted more in some places than others. The goal of identifying the productivity of affective labor is both to make it visible and to point to the flow of value represented in the lives of its producers and consumers. The previous chapter described some of the ways that workers are vulnerable to deeper versions of alienation from their work and its products, because of the indeterminate line between labor and persona in the performance of care, attention, and service work. This does not mean that such workers are necessarily prevented from sustaining relationships with other workers, or even their charges, but that it depends on the specific conditions of their positions. The alienation produced by affective labor in call center work entails a type of aloneness that generally occurs even as the agent interacts with a string of other people in their data forms, as a result of the commodification and one-­sidedness of the interaction. The customer is not necessarily required to produce affect. She can just hang up the phone. This does not mean exchange cannot happen, just that the structure of call center work is not organized to produce affective commodities that support the agent. However, as a result of the tension between the structure of call center work and the structure of the rest of Indian society, agents most often lose access to some means of meeting their immediate affective needs in their everyday lives yet are expected to continue to produce affect on the job. Gray Economies of Affect: The Transmission of Other Use-­Values History infects John’s imagined place in U.S. society, and we see that it is a basic component in the structuring of affect and imagination as social relations. A moment in the play that reveals the complications of both pleasure and dangerous excess in John’s entrance into American social structures is found in his account of his training in U.S. language and culture. Ashok describes the experience of learning about America and hence John Small’s life to better inhabit this caller identity:

Vora.indd 60

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM



Call Center Agents

61

We have a fairly clear picture of American life and culture. . . . The first month and a half of training is all about the way Americans live, eat, sleep . . . how they buy groceries, how they earn and spend money . . . that they often don’t carry any cash with them . . . which is why their plastic money is so important to them . . . All these details help us understand . . . sympathize . . . empathize with their situation. . . . Empathy is a very important part of our work . . . then the customer trusts us . . . that helps us do our job better . . . We were shown films . . . all kinds. . . . We spent hours discussing them. . . . Initially I used to try and imagine what John Small looked like. How he walked, talked . . . how he woke up in the morning . . . what was the first thing he did . . . did he go out of his apartment to get milk . . . a newspaper . . . I imagined his home, his family, his children . . . I mean it was all very mixed up in my imagination . . . not having ever been to America of course . . . but I started getting a picture of this man . . . and I started believing it . . . this idea . . . of who John Small might be . . . This really helped me succeed with my work. . . . It helped my calling persona stay stable . . . I mean even if the customer was shouting at me, cursing me . . . I would just imagine what John Small would do and then that would immediately help me find a way out. . . . Soon I found John Small being able to handle all situations. . . . It was a good feeling . . . But then I found I was carrying my work back . . . to this old, forgotten city . . . I mean all night I would be imagining the life of each of the calls I was making. . . . When you called someone in America you couldn’t escape that . . . often you’d hear . . . the TV in the background . . . people talking . . . parents scolding their children . . . couples fighting. . . . You could imagine the life in those apartments . . . the pets . . . the cats . . . the dogs barking . . . All night my imagination would be alive with the sights and smells of America. . . . And I would carry them back . . . through the gates of this forgotten city . . . to my home . . . to my room . . . At moments little details in my room would change, transform, start looking different . . . American . . . in a way.

Vora.indd 61

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM

62

Call Center Agents

Here John/Ashok hallucinates a blurry mixing of the world he has to imagine to do his job successfully and the actual physical reality of his room in Old Delhi. As part of his language and culture training, he is shown a number of films about the history of America. He sees an old Western film portraying the Battle of Wounded Knee, which contains a prophecy that the “American Indians” would rise from the dead and have revenge on the white man. The sign of this rising would be sightings of a creature that is half man and half beast. Coinciding with the time of his hallucinations and confusion, people in Delhi basti slums and shanty towns start reporting sightings of a wolfman and have the claw-­marked wounds to prove their encounters with the beast. John/Ashok wonders if the American Indian prediction is coming true in Old Delhi, or if perhaps he is just completely exhausted from daytime insomnia and long nights at work. The play shows us that the labor necessary to become a convincing part of the affective and imaginative structure of American society, undertaken as a form of waged labor, can lead to contagious fantasies where histories play themselves out in new terrains, out of the control of their originary social relations. Such relationships cannot be simply constrained to the realm of the economic. Ashok’s situation lends a new cast to Marx’s assertion that the commodification of labor power results in a “loss of reality” for the worker and an impoverishment of the worker’s “inner world.”30 In addition to the loss of access to the affects he produces as well as his own labor, Ashok loses the ability to relate to a history that has been thrust on him by the economics of globalization. The more he successfully lives, in continuing and succeeding with his call center work, the more he alienates life.31 One of Ashok’s trainers during this time is an African American woman who is well known in the world of accent training and is considered a master. She helps the trainees by pointing out that they are all trying to speak White American English, whereas in reality there are many Americas and English is spoken there with many different accents. The trainer has them read poetry written by Black American poets, including “To a Dark Girl” and “We Wear a Mask” by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. The first poem praises the beauty of the “dark girl,” who is strong even while carrying the history of slavery. There is resonance for the trainees in the second poem’s theme of wearing a “mask of

Vora.indd 62

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM



Call Center Agents

63

smiles” to hide suffering and pain, the smiles being described as “a debt paid to human guile.” Ashok/John says, “This was great stuff for us . . . reading all these wonderful words. . . . We had a feeling we were being cared for . . . a strange feeling.” This strange feeling of care is of great importance to understanding how affective commodities carry value and how they are transmitted both to and from Indian call center workers. The investment of value in a life, here through the affective commodity of concern and attention as found in Dunbar’s poems, improves the quality of that life. As in the case of the Native American prophecy, we see histories yielding progeny in unexpected places, among unexpected people. For the reader or audience of the play, there are also resonances between these separate histories, of people under slavery in America and Indians in contemporary call centers, as well as with the financial difficulties in Elizabeth’s family. The greater part of Ashok’s labor in producing John Small is masking the life of Ashok from the people he calls, the cost of which is the necessity to separate himself from the time and space in which he can address his coworker’s suicide, or parse what is real and imagined in his life in Old Delhi, where the world of John Small is not supposed to follow him. Ashok’s language and accent training is also a training in the history of oppression and abjection in America, a history into which it is suggested that the call center worker is being initiated. However, when that history is probed, it yields comfort and care from an unexpected place, to unexpected people. In training to be appropriate producers of affective needs for Americans (cultural fluency and idiom that will yield the necessary trust and respect to induce debt payment), these trainees also gain entrance into other structures of affect built to support those who have been exploited. Such informal affective economies and resources shadow the formal economy of affective labor. John speaks English with an “African American accent.” Is this why Elizabeth trusts him and reaches out for his help? Why does John choose to help her? There are some mysteries in their social relations that cannot be discerned, because Elizabeth does not know the true identity of the man helping her, and in some ways it is his job to serve her. We do not hear his thoughts about doing this extra work to help her, but it doesn’t boost his numbers of accounts paid. Is his willingness to be of more assistance than his job requires

Vora.indd 63

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM

64

Call Center Agents

an unintended result of his training and interpellation into American life, or is it a result of some other inscrutable intention to use his affect along with other paid company resources for a cause unrelated to the company’s interests? A Terrible Beauty Is Born points to a number of problems with the idea that affective labor simply reproduces capital and capitalist systems. Also, as pre­ vious chapters demonstrate, contrary to the claim that immaterial labor is new in its position outside a purely economic realm, no labor under capitalism is purely economic because of the nature of use-­value and because of the way that necessity, surplus, and representation are produced in concert with the production of appropriate labor and laborers.32 There is clearly exploitation possible in the production of social life and biological well-­being, as this play argues. At the same time, we do see something like a shared public and linked history being produced around an Indian collections agent impersonating an African American who is touched and infected by the histories of Native Americans and African Americans, and who becomes “a true brother,” at least in the perspective of the character Elizabeth, to an African American couple from whom he is trying to collect money. The creation of this connection, which is unique to the current instantiation of capital, yet fits historical tendencies, is achieved through a commonality of racialized and feminized labor exploitation in the relations of the American state and economy to African Americans—­and of the same to Indians. The play never suggests that these are the same relationship but rather that people enmeshed by these histories of labor have something to offer one another, most importantly in the feeling of “being cared for.” Conclusion: Strange Affinities and New Political Subjects Affective labor produces surplus value, but it also serves to compensate and “rehumanize” the worker who must believe in his future possibilities, “creating the illusion that he is an individual with unique characteristics and a real personality,”33 to continue selling labor power. The work of making people “feel better,” the primary product of customer service, is therefore central to the continuing existence of capitalist processes. If customer service work is

Vora.indd 64

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM



Call Center Agents

65

located more and more heavily in the Global South, then it becomes the work of people in “places like India” to restore to humanity those who live in the West. One consequence of this work is the making invisible of the worker’s own humanity. The work of making consumers “feel better” can contribute to a consumer’s life opportunities in the sense of their access to a socially valued life with the possibility of a future. Ashok’s response to Dunbar’s poetry in A Terrible Beauty Is Born suggests that there are also economies of affect that do not simply reproduce the system that evacuates value from India and deposits it in the United States. The restoration of the worker’s sense of humanity and future possibility can be viewed here as a type of biocapital smuggled against the flow of value from Global South to Global North and invested in the lives of those who are supposed to produce such commodities rather than consume them. The coalitional or general political possibilities represented in this transhistorical feeling and its contemporary shaping of the relationship between Ashok and Elizabeth can be apprehended as what Hong and Ferguson call “a strange affinity” in its confounding of existing comparative models.34 A materialist analysis that includes the subjective conditioning available in the aesthetic representation of call center work creates a framework to identify such politically important formations and feelings even as they escape ready analytical notions of identity, geography, and his­ torical time. The reterritorializing of India as a space of cheapened labor for the global economy entails workers producing a form of the self that has transnational currency, a process that occurs at the cost of forms of alienation and social detachment like those imagined in A Terrible Beauty Is Born. The gray economies of exchange that occur alongside the transmission of devalued affective labor, including historical affiliations that seem strangely familiar, as in the example of the Native American prophecy that shapes Ashok’s reality in Old Delhi, and the strange feeling of care transmitted through Dunbar’s poetry, complicate a straightforward reading of the global division of labor through a lens of race and gender that refers only to embodied difference. U.S. ethnic studies, an intellectual project that relies on U.S.-­based group identities as the platform for understanding how history comes to bear on political subjectivities

Vora.indd 65

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM

66

Call Center Agents

in the present, provides tools to understand the historical material under­ pinnings of new forms of transnational structures of difference. For example, a transnational ethnic studies approach to the analysis of how these politicized racial histories circulate transnationally and create connection through the conditions of labor and politics of everyday practices creates an oppor­ tunity for a relational analysis that isn’t simple comparativism. As I argue in chapter 1, focusing on the conditions of labor and the reiteration of racialized logics that devalue workers, rather than assuming a given subject of labor, can also provide the grounds on which to understand the politics of disparate subjects and new forms of political affinity and sociality under capitalism.

Vora.indd 66

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM

3 Information Technology Professionals Innovation and Uncertain Futures

I

n popular magazine articles about outsourcing to India, journalists writing         for U.S.-­based magazines in the late 1990s to mid-­2000s countered fear of American workers’ future obsolescence by asserting that the creative and innovative work of U.S. labor would always be essential for world economic growth.1 This creative and inventive labor is contrasted with a description of the kinds of jobs appropriate to people in South Asia, work that could be replicated almost anywhere and that is merely reproductive of prior invention. Giving voice to how this assumption is embedded in the international division of labor, Akash G.,2 a software engineering consultant in Bangalore, described to me a general anxiety about the dominance of outsourced contract work in Indian programming: “we are doing your work—­but what do we have [for ourselves]?” When asked to characterize the difference between Bangalore and the United States in terms of company culture and general quality of life, Akash pointed out some of the complexities of diaspora and immigration in the digital age: “There are people who want to be in both places. In terms of work, Indian companies and Indian subsidiaries do predictable work—­not challenging. Technical people tend to look for a challenge. The more innovative work happens in the US.”3 Discourses about India as a site of mimicry and reproduction of what the United States and Europe have initiated in high-­ tech industries, as opposed to innovation, engage colonial legacies of racialized labor allocation as well as an understanding of “reproduction” as relatively unimportant work. 67

Vora.indd 67

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM

68

Information Technology Professionals

As a result of the balance of production in India and consumption in America, a situation arose in the years around the turn of the millennium in which Indian programmers were made appropriate for highly specific types of work. This work supported projects external to India’s own needs in a way that recapitulated colonial practices of labor allocation, based as they were on a racialized geography that was folded into the contemporary international division of labor. The reterritorializing of labor occurred through a differentiation of laboring bodies and lives, achieved in part through the disciplining of workers by the threat of company relocation away from workers. It also occurred by the detachment of India from notions of innovation through its prefiguring instead as a site of service provision, as described in the preceding chapters. One practical result was that the majority of IT workers in Bangalore in the early and mid-­2000s always knew their jobs were potentially temporary and that they needed to strive to keep up with the ever-­changing skill sets necessary for maintaining employment. The control of worker mobility across physical borders between nation-­ states but also between rural and urban spaces supported the differentiation of labor, and many workers who were able to move across borders described their Indianness as marking that labor as less innovative and therefore undervalued. This differentiation was not necessarily only about racial difference as embodied but also about how it has been institutionalized in the form of business process outsourcing (BPO) contracts, body shopping, and documents like the H1-­B visa.4 Consequently, the process of differentiating labor in IT illustrates a tendency in the global economy not explained by traditional political economy, a phenomenon wherein the market actually determines people’s life options, rendering workers who are appropriate for only certain types of work. As this chapter explains, this process is quite different from the forces of basic supply and demand, which are often assumed to control the flow of workers within the global division of labor. Outsourced IT work is temporary and is organized to provide short-­term support rather than to develop a product through its life span. It also provides substantially less compensation in relation to work performed in metropolitan centers. The temporariness and displaced nature of IT labor in India

Vora.indd 68

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM



Information Technology Professionals

69

makes it similar to commercial gestational surrogacy as a form of contracted work, and as with surrogacy and call center labor, outsourced IT work requires that the worker submit to a partial capture, or limitation, of his or her life options to secure employment. Like loneliness and alienation in the work of call center agents, particular costs and conditions characterize outsourced IT work, including forced flexibility, temporariness, and the experience of differential valuing of labor and lack of access to creative and innovative work that contributes directly to Indian society. These concerns also represent use-­values of programming labor not acknowledged by the international division of labor. The ethnographic narratives presented in this chapter describe work in Bangalore, the hub of India’s IT industry in 2005–­6. I pair the narratives with a reading of the novel Transmission, written by Hari Kunzru and based on his own experience with this industry. Juxtaposed “to make the fictional, the theoretical and the factual speak to one another,”5 together these narratives insist on the centrality of creativity, innovation, and imagination in the social lives and experience of transnational IT workers. The life histories conveyed in the ethnographic narratives tell the story of how the IT industry in Bangalore was built on the demand for reproductive coding work outsourced to India by U.S. and European firms; the experiences of these IT workers also indicate the central role of creativity in work as both a need of workers and as a quality that—­when evacuated from the Indian tech industry—­cheapens Indian labor. The aesthetic rendering of the life of an IT professional moving between the United States and India in Transmission illustrates a theory of exploitation through forces of mobility and immobility and a form of partial capture of affective, creative, and social life that is unique to the IT industry; it also provides a portrait of hacking or piracy as a form of protest and resistance. The novel thus provides a theoretical commentary on the transnational IT industry that suggests that the transmission of one’s creativity and self has become a site of the coerced extraction of value, where only those with a wealth of accumulated value have the privilege to communicate themselves outside of relations of production. Creative work that engages a programmer’s full skill set is imagined in programmers’ narratives as the most desirable employment, but the general

Vora.indd 69

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM

70

Information Technology Professionals

perception is that such jobs do not come to India (though the hope is always that they will soon be coming). A restless dissatisfaction and future orien­ tation therefore characterizes those hoping for a more substantial stake in what is imagined as the cosmopolitan future of technology work in India. This restlessness stems in part from the friction between changes brought about by the growing globalization of everyday life and work in India and cultural values that discourage career moves that might be considered a gamble. The temporariness associated with these jobs clashes with Indian norms of a middle-­class profession, and as a result, those who find the best positions tend to have elite backgrounds that make them conversant and comfortable with real or virtual interfaces with foreigners and foreign “business culture.” These tensions reveal what Jonathan Inda and Renato Rosaldo call the “conjunctural nature of globalization,” indicating some of the “large scale processes through which the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and . . . how subjects respond to these processes in culturally specific ways.”6 The desire for creative and innovative work opportunities in India also carries a political content in its resistance to the cheapening of labor and the concomitant desire for India to be able to consume the value it produces, thereby allowing for more material equity between India and other nations. Programmers narrate a sense of their labor as having a potential social utility beyond its exchange for a wage, and beyond the basic contribution it makes to projects outsourced from high-­consumption countries like the United States. Interviews also suggest that being located in India means that conditions do not allow access to a stable and knowable future for even middle-­class Bangaloreans. This instability derives from the skittishness of transnational capital in Third World cities as well as the highly mobile nature of technology work. This particularity in the temporality of Bangalore life is specific to its position in global labor markets yet reveals the inflection of globalization’s reorganization of space and time as represented in Third World spaces hosting trans­ national capital.7 The fantasy of connectedness that engaged IT professionals through online forums in this period therefore had a political potential that was largely unrealized but was most potent in the open source movement, which continues to exists in tension with corporate and individual profit-­based interests in maintaining property rights to source code.

Vora.indd 70

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM



Information Technology Professionals

71

As a fictive text, Transmission explores elements of fantasy and imagination that cannot be contained by labor valuation. It suggests that the IT industry, which trades in and valorizes creativity and imagination, creates frustrated desires among “merely reproductive” laborers that can generate uncontainable political potential through the very technologies of code and communication that enable the industry. A reading of Transmission as a theory of communication and communicability points to imagination as a realm of power and productivity that is always fraught with and in conversation with the contingencies of constraint on the material body and the material world. As such it illustrates the relationship between co-­constitutive and differentially valued existences in both the Indian and U.S. contexts. These laborers’ lives can be read, through ethnographic and fictive narratives, as demonstrating the differential investment of value—the accumulation of vital energy as biocapital—in the realms of relative comfort, sensual pleasure, and the sense of risk versus security. The assignment and achievement of use-­values like comfort or security are thus revealed as evidence of the exploitation and accumulation of value. We also see the way that fantasy valorizes certain spaces of existence over others, contributing to their richness and supporting the lives of those who live within them. At the same time, these enriched spaces are populated by subjects who turn out to be unstable placeholders that always require work to be sustained. Bangalore’s Local-­G lobal Over the course of a year in 2005–­6, I spoke to both U.S. Silicon Valley–­based and Bangalore-­based Indian citizens who work or have worked in the IT sector. I conducted interviews with employees of two different BPO firms, one Indian owned and one headquartered in France, and both servicing contracts with the United States. TAMCO, a relatively young Bangalore-­based company, was founded by a transnational programmer who returned from the United States to invest his saved capital in this start-­up and hired colleagues from among peers in Bangalore’s open source community. It provided three services: outsourced medical transcription, legal software design, and general technology-­based services for Indian governmental projects. Allcom, conversely, imported top management professionals from France, but hired project managers in Bangalore. It specialized in telephone-­based communications

Vora.indd 71

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM

72

Information Technology Professionals

software for call centers. The TAMCO and Allcom employees I interviewed represented an elite and small group of workers whose perspective on the IT industry in India was often informed by having spent time in the United States or other Indian centers of high-­tech industry, including Mumbai and Hyderabad; this mobility is not a characteristic of the majority of IT workers in India. The city of Bangalore maintains a number of simultaneous profiles. Host to a collection of prominent technical schools, it became an international site of computer engineering and programming in the 2000s. By the time of my research, IT work in Bangalore accounted for one-­third of India’s IT export earnings.8 Bangalore is home to transplanted IT professionals from all over India and, to a lesser extent, all over the world. As the capital of the state of Karnataka, Bangalore is also a center for regional arts and culture, including a vernacular film industry, in addition to being an administrative and bureaucratic center for the state. As Karnataka’s city with the most resident foreigners, foreign currency, and domestic and international financial investment, Bangalore lures people from rural areas that aren’t located closer to Bombay or Chennai. Bangalore is also what draws the social scientist from the West: a site of seeming contradictions produced by transnational capital funneled into the technology sector of a country that has largely skipped the steps between comprador industry and postmodern electronically mediated capitalist production. This leap, however, has only occurred for portions of the population, and the tensions between rural interests in Karnataka and the interests of the small number of wealthy Indian and foreign technology companies reveal what happens when high-­tech centers of transnational capital come to roost among failing subsistence farms and generally unstable domestic production. Cities in the Global South that serve as hubs of transnational circulation, like Bangalore, Delhi, and Bombay, lend themselves to being imagined and configured as part of a highly interconnected world, one kind of cosmopolitan fantasy. The body of the worker in such places also gets reconstituted as it negotiates spaces in these cities and the economies that operate there, becoming an archive of specific skills and practices as well as a node within a larger production scheme of transnational business processes. Bangalore citizens

Vora.indd 72

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM



Information Technology Professionals

73

expressed a number of concerns that gesture to the city’s intersection with what is imagined as the connected world. For example, there had been ongoing demand for attention to the unmanageable traffic conditions in a city where so many people must commute along the single road leading to the area outside of town where the IT campuses are located. Local politicians must cater to such demands of the personnel of multinational corporations that set up branches in Bangalore, while also placating local constituents. Competing demands for political attention and state funding also included insistence from domestic noncommercial interests to improve infrastructure in the state of Karnataka’s rural areas rather than directing all resources to Bangalore. Meanwhile, the imagination of connectedness, the situation of increasing commercial construction, and the simple presence of capital attracted regional migrants to the city, putting a strain on civic resources, while corporations were constantly threatening to move to other Indian cities or alternate competing locations in the Global South.9 At the same time as a fantasy of connectedness gives members of the transnational capitalist class a sense of access to many of the things they identify with a cosmopolitan or American lifestyle, the divide between rural and urban Karnataka belied the reality of this connectedness. A divide also existed within the city of Bangalore, where college graduates coming to the city from outside of Bangalore had trouble going directly from their technical school training to U.S. jobs or jobs with U.S. subsidiaries in Bangalore, jobs in which office culture modeled itself on that of the United States. According to urban residents, male migrants to the city from rural areas also had trouble interacting with urban women and adjusting to urban social structures in general. This divide between rural migrants who are at a cultural loss and urban residents who feel cosmopolitan in their connection to the rest of the world suggests that Bangalore is as much a part of a network of transnational cities as it is part of Karnataka. Bangalore resident and software development consultant Anand N. would now be atypical, but he provides a portrait of the period when the IT industry developed in India. Programming was a hobby to which Anand devoted much of his time beginning in high school, and he actually quit school before graduation to begin managing the website for an IT industry magazine; this

Vora.indd 73

16/01/2015 11:38:28 AM

74

Information Technology Professionals

coincided with the dot-­com boom of the late 1990s in the United States and elsewhere. By age twenty, Anand had become head of the magazine’s tech­ nology department and was sent to the United States to build a website for an affiliate of his company. He had never built a website before, but as head of technology, he was the only person available. Anand later went back to finish his twelfth standard in pre-­university (the Karnataka equivalent of the U.S. high school) and then began working as an independent consultant in Bangalore. At the time of the interview, he had recently taken a position with the small start-­up TAMCO. Anand’s story describes how rapidly IT took root in India, heavily relying on people with computer experience, no matter their age or range of skills. Like many others in his level of the profession, Anand had access to a personal computer in high school, a rare situation in the early 1990s even among middle-­class and upper-­middle-­class families in urban India. To have a computer at home before 1991 would suggest that someone in the family was conversant with computers and had connections overseas through which to obtain a personal computer. Uniquely positioned to take advantage of the IT boom in India, and part of the attraction of India as a site for IT development, the class represented in Anand’s narrative predates the growth of the telecommunication technologies sector following India’s liberalization of the national market in 1991.10 As Smitha Radhakrishnan points out, “most of those who make up what has been dubbed India’s ‘new’ middle class had parents who were part of the ‘old’ one.”11 Middle-­class professionals like Anand tended to feel that Bangalore was burdened with the discomforts of ill-­planned urban growth, and there was also an underlying sense that the presence of transnational capital in the city was only temporary. The growth of Bangalore was driving up the prices of consumables, labor, and, consequently, rents, because with growing compe­ tition, it was difficult to sustain “cheap labor” and low salaries. Some IT companies were becoming impatient with both rising operating costs and with Bangalore’s city administration and were moving to other cities in India, such as Chennai and Hyderabad. Cities in Maharashtra and other nearby states were rearranging their tax structures and construction regulations to entice

Vora.indd 74

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM



Information Technology Professionals

75

these companies. There was also speculation that some companies were planning to leave India for Southeast Asia, where there were cities whose IT labor was cheaper than labor in urban India. Meanwhile, Karnataka’s politicians who paid attention to the needs of the rapidly growing city of Bangalore were perceived as ignoring the needs of rural Karnataka, and vice versa. In general, newspaper articles and editorials cited the state government’s failure to acknowledge how fast Bangalore was growing and the attraction this held for people from the surrounding areas. The city’s population was around four million in the early 1990s, and by early 2006, it was between six and seven million; by decade’s end it would be well over eight million and still increasing. The opinion of residents of Bangalore was that the government, by failing to promote programs to advance rural development, also failed to discourage the high rate of urban migration. Just as Bangalore’s administration and infrastructure were operating simultaneously in the realm of Indian and international demands, the programmers interviewed in Bangalore cannot be described accurately as residing only in India. Their location in Bangalore is one that is always informed by Bangalore’s relationship to transnational capital, and they themselves often travel along the paths that capital takes in and out of India. In his sociological study of IT work performed in India for foreign contracts, A. Aneesh describes the state of workers who visit the United States or even migrate virtually for their jobs as the “transnational condition”: One can easily see how immigrant programmers miss being in the United States when they have left it, and look forward to coming back for another spell and renewing their attachment. One can also see that they wish to return to India during their stay in the United States. The transnational condition means that one loses a single cultural or national mode of being without being aware of it, that one is reborn without the memory of the past life; only those who saw the person before are struck by the change.12

The excerpts from Akash’s interview at the beginning of this chapter provide details of how this condition differs from the situation of diaspora, which is

Vora.indd 75

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM

76

Information Technology Professionals

characterized by residence in a place that is not home yet is haunted by the migrant’s longing for home. The transnational condition points to one type of cosmopolitan habitation, where no singular place is really home, and where travel, whether it be virtual or actual, is less a choice than a means of living. The particular transnational condition of the programmers interviewed for this project is one mediated by access to transnational capital and to code as a transnational language and currency of labor. To gain a better sense of the lives of Indian IT workers living abroad in the United States, I spoke with several software engineers of Indian origin in the area known as Silicon Valley before departing for India. These men (the majority of software engineers are male, as was every person whom I was able to interview in California) lived permanently in the United States on green cards or were on multiyear work visas through the companies that had hired them. In general at that time, Indian middleman agencies, known as “body shops,” were the main source of tech labor recruited from India and placed guest workers with different clients for project-­based labor. In their initial recruitment of programming labor, body-­shopping firms use fantasies of the West, “tapping into desires produced by the earlier colonial system.”13 These intermediary companies work as go-­betweens for independent Indian technicians and U.S. businesses, keeping a fee or sometimes a percentage of the employee’s income by accepting a dollar salary on their behalf and then paying them an Indian salary plus a living allowance to meet the much higher cost of living in the United States. People who travel to work in the United States through body-­shopping firms usually return within a year or two, spending some if not at least half of that time “on the bench,” meaning they wait in crowded, inexpensive housing with other recruits to be picked up on a contract.14 The body-­shopping firm refers them to possible jobs, but there is no guarantee of employment. This system keeps a surplus of Indian programming labor close at hand for contract work with U.S. companies. The interviewees with whom I spoke were part of a minority who were not placed through body shops, though they were in the United States on temporary work visas. Often American companies will request that technicians be sent to the United States, in which case those people will work on contracts supported by

Vora.indd 76

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM



Information Technology Professionals

77

employer-­specific work visas for anywhere between two weeks and two years. Such employees are often expected to attend virtual meetings with the home company during the Indian business day (the U.S. evening and night) and to otherwise keep up with their responsibilities at home after hours in their U.S. positions. They are paid their Indian salary in rupees by their Indian employer and are given a living allowance in dollars to cover the vast difference in living expenses between India and the United States. The Indian employer is paid a fee in dollars for the contract of its employee, a portion of which goes toward the worker’s rupee-­based wage. The daily lives of the software technicians I interviewed in Bangalore involved a full Indian workday, which usually meant eight to ten hours at the office with short breaks for tea and lunch. IT professionals described spending their leisure time in activities they associated with an urban middle-­class lifestyle, such as eating in restaurants and cafés and shopping in malls, as well as other non-­class-­or location-­specific activities, such as spending time with family and seeing movies. They shared a feeling that you could now buy anything in India that you could buy in the United States, allowing you to approximate the same lifestyle with a few small differences. One earns less because the wage is in rupees, but the buying power of that wage is more, because labor in general is cheap in India, particularly when one is paid by a transnational company whose salaries tend to exceed domestic wage brackets. A person in Bangalore organizing his or her life around the fantasy of a U.S.-­style middle-­ class existence can also pay people to cook and clean in their homes and to drive their cars in the formidable Bangalore commuter traffic. Many of the programmers interviewed also spent significant time talking online and in person with other IT professionals who belong to a social and professional collective of open source aficionados in Bangalore, meaning that their hobby and social interests, like their paid work, partially revolve around programming. They would meet in cafés or at each other’s houses to socialize and talk shop and lamented the lack of common public space for such meetings as is available in U.S., European, and to some extent larger Indian cities. A universal interest was in the latest technological developments and getting hold of them, because they were usually not immediately available in India.15 Most

Vora.indd 77

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM

78

Information Technology Professionals

of the interviewees have personal web logs (blogs) and generally participate in virtual communities that are international, giving them acquaintances and collaborators outside of India.16 Bangalore’s situation in 2006 was largely the product of a specific moment in transnational capitalist production: relying on electronic transmission of labor and commodities, the high-­tech industry could move its minimal infrastructure to whatever location offered the cheapest cost of production. Because the major variable in these costs has been labor, competition between industrial centers for such jobs becomes a competition for which places can offer the lowest global price for labor. As the previous chapter on call centers argues, the “cheapness” of Indian IT labor is artificially produced and entails costs for the worker and locality that do not figure into the calculation of the “local cost of living” that determines wages.17 It also shows how the development of public policy, city infrastructure, and regional planning, represented by Bangalore’s city and Karnataka’s regional planning, were reoriented to attracting and retaining the interest of transnational IT companies and managing the traffic and demands their presence created to the detriment of existing local and more rurally based needs and interests. Making Indian Programmers Appropriate for Outsourced High-­Tech Work Working as a project manager for TAMCO at the time of the interview, Ramanathan (Ramu) N. described the typical Indian IT professional as having completed high school through the twelfth standard then having spent several years working on an engineering degree while trying to get absorbed by one of the major IT companies through on-­campus recruitment. He explained that many large IT companies in India pursue this mode of recruiting as their primary way of finding new employees. Once someone is hired, she enters training programs that are designed to produce her as the desired type of employee. In this sense, a company “creates its own talent.” He said that the Indian engineering education system doesn’t produce people with a lot of marketable skills, just theory. “Tata Consultancy Services [one of India’s largest IT companies] and others like it have perfected the mode of producing their ideal

Vora.indd 78

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM



Information Technology Professionals

79

employees. Most students would think of this as another step in the education process. It pays them minimally, and they aren’t working on any real projects. This leads to talent lock-­in, because when you are hired, they tend to sign you into an agreement that you’ll stay four to five years, with a penalty clause for breaking the contract.” Ramu believed that this process is the reason why the IT industry in India is service oriented rather than product development oriented, which would require horizontal knowledge. This kind of training produces a type of employee that Ramu had trouble imagining as someone who could participate in product development or problem solving. For example, he said most of these companies would produce specific parts of IT systems for Fortune 500 companies, with contracts on a piecework basis. He contrasted this to the development of something like an Indian Microsoft Word. “Software products don’t exist in India because of the very nascent domestic market. We would have to compete internationally, but the problem is that India is so far away from the consumer’s market.” The process of actively forming workers as appropriate for the specific demands of outsourcing interests becomes visible in the tapping and recruitment of college-­educated Indian youth for both BPO programming and call center work. In the case of computer programming BPOs, most companies recruit directly from college engineering programs, putting their new hires through a lengthy training period where they develop the applicable skills that supplement their theoretical college training. These skills are very particular to the position for which they are being trained, and as trainees, they are not paid what a regular employee earns. In this way, companies make a very small and low-­risk investment in creating their own employee pools. Those who cannot perform at the end of the training period are told to leave and must start the whole process again with another company. Someone could thus spend years in a position without having achieved a full salary for his level of skill, a pattern similar to that found in call centers, although in call centers there is far less of an opportunity for upward mobility. Ramu’s comments about the “typical IT guy” indicate that India’s system for producing software engineers is organized around providing flexible and just-­ in-­time skills for the specific requirements of BPO work rather than around

Vora.indd 79

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM

80

Information Technology Professionals

building products for a domestic market. As he explains, this does not result in a population of engineers who are likely to have the necessary time, skills, and resources to do product development. He sees the software engineering education system in India as contributing to the lack of jobs doing innovative work in India. The educational system is reactive in that it is focused on producing people who can get the types of jobs that are sent to India. The structural logic of this educational system, which is both compliant with and reinforcing of international labor demands on India, recapitulates the logic of the colonial labor allocation in India under the British, where local labor was organized to serve the needs of a distant consuming population, in the interests of building a distant society. This structure is more complex because of the transnational and non-­governing nature of IT companies, but the impact on education and the limited opportunities for professional development, employment, and engagement with the needs of India’s society are at least in part a material inheritance from that system of organizing labor and education in India.18 The just-­in-­time production of appropriate labor for the needs of outsourcing firms has also contributed to the general sense of temporariness and lack of future stability in Bangalore. In the mid-­2000s, there was a growing sense of the temporariness of employment in relatively new sites of middle-­class jobs like programming BPO firms and call centers. This existed in tension with the general valuing in Indian society of jobs based on their long-­term potential.19 In their sociological report on trends among Bangalore’s population of IT workers, Carol Upadhya and A. R. Vasavi describe some of the shared traits of the Indian IT industry and its employees.20 They note the general sense of precariousness most programmers experience in relation to the security of their jobs, knowing that they are likely to be laid off or transferred with little notice if there is a downturn in the economy or if the company loses a foreign client. As a response, these software engineers must constantly develop a new supply of technical skills to be marketable in an ever-­changing industry. They found that among engineers in India, there was a general expectation and understand­ ing of job insecurity and the need to remain flexible in response to changes in the U.S. and other foreign economies. Men in particular experienced pressure to find stable, long-­term employment, no matter how the individual felt about

Vora.indd 80

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM



Information Technology Professionals

81

the nature of the work itself. Call center and IT work through BPO units carries the weight of impermanence and constant change associated with the so-­ called electronic age and, as a result, generates anxiety and a lack of a feeling of futurity among those employed in these industries. Open Source and Gray Market Creativity The delimiting of Indian IT labor as appropriate only for reproducing existing invention and knowledge forms, which occurs through a feedback system of the stereotyping of Indian labor together with the response of Indian educational and IT institutions, constrains the autonomy of the worker in a way that alienates her ability to engage with society through that work, for example, by creating software that would serve the immediate needs of the Indian public. This constraint is not complete, as some privileged programmers find ways to make connections to Indian society through start-­up companies. However, in general, as in call center work, where an agent must produce a persona that divorces him from his immediate social context and affirms the value of the society of the transnational consumer by protecting it from his otherness, or in the work of the gestational surrogate, who is figured by her contract as a subject of biological reproductive service rather than as an author or creator of the child with property rights and therefore grounds for social connection to the fetus and infant, the gendered allocation of reproductive labor to Indian IT workers advances accumulation for those who are recognized as authors, inventors, and owners at the expense of (reproductive, service-­providing) workers. The resistance of the free and open source software movement to the definition of creative authorship as strictly individual and property protected;21 the insistence on creativity as evidenced, at least in part, in a product’s immediate social utility; and the circulation of open source code outside the logic of currency and intellectual property has made it a space of alternative creation. Through open source coding and the open source movement, some programmers find a way to engage with society in India and perform nonalienated labor,22 for example, by utilizing code to participate in nongovernmental organization work or shareware projects, while challenging implicit rules and assumptions embodied in law without necessarily breaking the law.23

Vora.indd 81

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM

82

Information Technology Professionals

Nearly every software engineer with whom I spoke in Bangalore mentioned that open source “hacking around” by a few people has yielded the most successful software development in India. Open source software serves as a site of innovation that does not rely strictly on the international economy. For those who have regular access to a computer and the Internet, it can operate as an alternative for innovation to the circuit of intellectual property and patents around knowledge commodities. As Ramu mentions, programmers anywhere can interact with a market and community of users through open source. If code represents both a language and a currency in mainstream global capitalism, then open source represents a domain that is at least partly communal and where this currency has different means and ends. Though access still depends on a privileged knowledge of computer language and the availability of hardware and Internet communication, open source is a sphere that uses a currency of capital (code) but does not necessarily circulate it to generate further capital. The space and culture of creativity offered by open source programming was idealistically imagined against the standard ways that authorship, invention, and innovation are regulated as knowledge commodities in the corporation-­driven market. This primary understanding of creative authorship is gendered and relies on a distinction between authorial, masculine discovery and feminine, reproductive, servile support labor. In biological and biotechnological research and development, and in genetic therapy research and development in particular, there are very particular notions of what counts as invention, and these are engaged with legal protections of intellectual patent and property. The history of scientific invention and experiment is characterized by a privatized system in which a privileged investigator, almost always an independently wealthy man, was legally and officially the author of the discoveries that came out of the work of hired technicians in the lab, “because of [his] resources and class standing.”24 In their discussion of the Supreme Court case Moore v. Regents of the University of California, Waldby and Mitchell describe the way that biotechnological innovation in the field of genetic science is mediated by a discourse of invention precipitated by the potential of research to become commodifiable intellectual property. This

Vora.indd 82

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM



Information Technology Professionals

83

case examined the property rights John Moore had to knowledge derived from the study of cancer cells from his body that turned out to be economically valuable for the development of therapies. Part of this discourse was determined by earlier cases and the passage of the Bayh-­Dole Act in 1980, which was “designed to reinvigorate ‘innovation’ by assigning patents to corporations rather than the U.S. government, because . . . assigning them to the government has resulted in a huge waste of innovation.”25 Innovation here becomes the creation of commodifiable knowledge-­as-­property with the fastest turnaround time possible. Any other use of patents to protect research is then wasteful. The passage of this act together with other changes in intellectual property law boosted the early software industry into high profitability, particularly through legislation in the mid-­1980s through the early 1990s that deemed new materials, including even algorithms and business models, patentable, and in the 1990s, software was legally redefined as a technical innovation akin to physical machines.26 Waldby and Mitchell point out that the Moore case raises the question of who is performing the inventive labor in a context that involves, in that instance, materials produced by individual human bodies that yield marketable knowledge commodities. The case was settled in favor of the Regents of the University of California, in part because it was determined that individual body parts could not be owned by the individuals from whom they were derived, meaning that the production of these parts was not in itself considered the creative, inventive labor.27 This labor was predetermined through earlier legislation to be visible only through the lens of property and patents, which are now part of the means of (commodified) knowledge production in the Marxist sense. Laws protecting intellectual property rely on historically gendered notions of active and passive creativity, where “support” labor, like that performed by nonauthorial lower-­class hired workers or through embodied or physical production, does not figure as producing property and is therefore not recognized as an invention or the result of creative labor. The lack of property and patents in the Open Source Initiative, which provides protection of this status through trademarks and licensing protocols,28 engenders an arena for inventive labor that is visible as such to the market

Vora.indd 83

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM

84

Information Technology Professionals

but does not require the same access to state and legal power that protects this status in the private or commercial realm. The enthusiasm of Bangalore programmers for open source resulted in part from its ability to give them a community of like-­minded creative laborers whose goal is to push forward technological innovation outside the temporality of the market and of property relations while remaining a challenge and an interrupting presence to that space and temporality. The sentiments of computer programmers in Bangalore around the desire for creative work that connects them with a community and provides a sense of contributing to the global progress of technical knowledge raise a number of questions about how capitalist accumulation depends on the distribution of labor worldwide. One such question is, What are the necessary conditions for accessing creative work and having one’s innovation recognized as such, and how are they distributed geopolitically? Waldby and Mitchell’s discussion of inventive labor suggests that it is American and U.S.-­inflected intellectual property rights and patentability that dominate access to the realm of inno­ vation in technology fields. At the same time, those with the right nexus of capital, education, and cultural knowledge of the United States can gain access to circles of creativity that have been organized against this hegemonic definition of innovation, mainly in the form of open source programming. Even as open source programming supports many for-­profit software systems, its global popularity, relative accessibility, and community-­based ethos suggest potential instability in the current mode of producing knowledge commodities and the system of global distribution that determines who gets to create them and who will reproduce them. Despite the life of open source programming in India as a site for creative production, it is the American start-­up company that has become the organizing model of creative achievement in the Indian market. Although companies such as TAMCO that have begun to switch from BPO to Indian contracts are still the minority, many people in IT want to see them as a positive sign of future trends. In an interview, Akash said that he felt that the lack of demand for innovative work by Indian workers may also be connected to a risk-­averse attitude among Indian software engineers: “I’ve gathered that the average

Vora.indd 84

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM



Information Technology Professionals

85

person here—­the HR person, engineer, manager—­wants stability and avoids risk. If you look at the history of the US, a lot of innovation has happened. Ten years ago, the main concern [for someone trying to build a career] was that you had to survive. Now peoples’ parents have already established themselves, and so they have more freedom to take risks.” The kind of risk taking necessary to establish a business in which one can choose to do innovative work connected to the Indian public, rather than outsourced contract work, is limited to a small number who have the financial and cultural capital to create a start-­up company. Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s ethnography of genetic research and development firms in India examines the fantasy of the start-­up in India in the specific context of biomedical research and design firms.29 He points out that Silicon Valley start-­up culture is precisely what Indian biotech companies and public labs are trying to incorporate into their own functioning. Sunder Rajan argues that this makes entrepreneurship both a cultural form and a form of subjectivity.30 He notes that although there is a formula for running a start-­up that is taught in MBA programs, how start-­ups evolve is quite varied.31 Indian cultural practices in business were described by IT professionals in Bangalore’s transnational class as not directly meshing with the sense of personal freedom and possibility necessary to initiate a start-­up or even to negotiate the structured notions of innovation within corporate software development. In other words, to incorporate the U.S. start-­up model as an opportunity to work around the infrastructure of BPO work requires a major shift in cultural attitudes and resubjectification and will be materially limited to those who already have significant capital to invest. In this way, the fantasy of the start-­up reproduces, or at least fails to challenge, the management of access to innovation by the electronic transmission of labor in outsourcing—­or the business models and labor valuation that are part of its structure. Future prosperity in Bangalore, and in the current moment in global capital, is often a game of attracting venture capital that is transmitted electronically.32 The late 1990s marked the financialization of the IT industry, linking waves of hiring and firing to stock market changes and setting the current norm for professionals to develop ever-­new skill sets at the ready to keep or

Vora.indd 85

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM

86

Information Technology Professionals

find new jobs.33 The understanding of this access to future prosperity and the promise of creative work showed up in interviews as a structure of desire around the idea of the start-­up company paired with the immediate practice of open source coding or “hacking around.” Venturesomeness, a distinct type of capitalist risk taking, relies on a specific understanding of the future. This idea of the future is particular to a transnational capitalist business culture that only partially overlaps with Indian business culture.34 At the time of his interview, Jehan had recently attended a conference on starting a small IT business sponsored by venture capitalists and owners of small start-­up companies in the United States. He said that one of the speakers described Delhi as the only place other than San Jose where he has seen so much start-­up interest. Jehan speculated that middle-­class people in India were getting to a point where they could start to save capital. In the years following this interview, Bangalore appears to have taken the lead from Delhi as the greatest producer of Indian start-­ups, though start-­ups remain more of a desire than a reality in most Indian cities.35 Because it reinforces the hegemonic model of innovation deriving from the U.S.-­centered IT business culture, this mode of self-­ imagining valorizes the lives of those who already have access to “innovative” ways to invent their future lives, whereas the Open Source Initiative represents a somewhat more accessible terrain of innovation for programmers. Futures: Temporariness and Risk One tendency of contemporary capitalist processes that is reflected in the sense of temporariness described in Bangalore is the drive to cut costs by operating only in the present moment. This temporality offers another way to think about the flexibilization of labor. Aneesh notes, “In a competitively structured field of capitalism, body-­shopping and just-­in-­time labor are important schemes to tap globally dispersed labor while avoiding the overhead costs of large labor inventory.”36 As mentioned earlier, BPO projects in IT and to some extent call centers have short-­term agendas and do not often incorporate Indian firms into the full life cycle of projects. In the discussion of call center work in the previous chapter, this temporality and lack of career trajectory also showed up among call center workers when agents talked about their

Vora.indd 86

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM



Information Technology Professionals

87

future hopes in terms of what they will do after quitting their call center jobs.37 As we will see in the next chapter, contracted surrogacy also operates in a forced temporariness, which creates tensions between the different expectations for future social connection among surrogates and commissioning parents. The tendency is to offer minimal training and commitment to the future of the worker or the site of production, with maximum energy going into the production of a given product right now. This emphasis puts the burden of flexibility, of constantly adapting skills and knowledge, on the worker.38 Meanwhile, the future is conceived more and more in terms of risk and risk management. Bangalore becomes a place of temporary prosperity for some but not a place that can manage its own future prosperity. The feeling of temporariness and instability around the presence of jobs, international capital, and Bangalore’s general boom in IT was a theme that came up repeatedly in interviews and casual discussions. Siddhartha, a graduate student from northwestern India, noted that even for someone outside of IT, there is a general feeling of temporariness in Bangalore. Akash agreed when I relayed Siddhartha’s comment, adding, “A lot of people feel that the city doesn’t make you want to settle here. Places like Chandigarh [a city in the state of Punjab] and Gurgaon [an industrial suburb of New Delhi] are growing, so it will be interesting to see how many people stay in Bangalore.” Interviewees expressed concern that many companies were dissatisfied with the rising costs of doing business in Bangalore and were considering cheaper places in India and abroad, to which they could relocate. The large number of rural migrants who have come to Bangalore in response to the perception of increasing amounts of money to be found there are another element contributing to the feeling of temporariness Bangaloreans expressed. Many wondered how these migrants would be absorbed if the flow of money from IT companies were to stop. The condition of a suspended future is not exclusive to IT workers in India and in fact connects physically mobile labor migrants to those whose labor is transmitted electronically or through transnational export. For example, after Ramu moved to the United States to finish his graduate education, he worked at two prominent consulting firms and did independent research at another

Vora.indd 87

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM

88

Information Technology Professionals

well-­known research university. Despite its prestige, he became dissatisfied with his work, which did not allow him to use his technical skills. But his visa status, dependent on full-­time employment, wouldn’t permit him to take time away from work to sort through what he wanted to do next. H1-­B visas allow programmers to stay in the United States for one to two years, renewable up to six years. In the United States, immigrants are discouraged from having children with this uncertain future, and spouses who are allowed to accompany visa holders cannot work, meaning that most of those who choose to come to the United States are young and single.39 The application process for getting a green card in the United States would have required him to apply after working there for five to six years, then to wait two or three more years to hear the result. Ramu was not willing to take the risk of putting ten years of his working life into a largely uncertain future. As a result, he moved back to India one year before our interview and ended up at TAMCO. For programmers like Ramu who have the flexibility to make changes to their situation to secure a better chance at a stable future, going back to India can mean an increase in control over life options in comparison to those of the H1-­B visa holder. Ramu described a situation in which his choices were either to put his life, including career, social community, and future plans, on hold indefinitely for the chance to keep his current life in the United States or to cut his losses and return to India, where his citizenship at least gave him the right to stay in one place long enough to attempt to plan a future. Of course, the positioning of Bangalore as a temporary place for transnational capital to alight is beyond his control. Even so, he remains optimistic about the future of IT in India and therefore of his own position in relation to it. Aneesh describes this quality of immigrant lives as being caught between transnational capitalism’s demand for free labor and the pressure of state and nationalist concerns.40 One cost, then, of participating in short-­or indefinite-­term labor is the security of future earnings and stability. This is evidenced by people’s sense of temporariness about Bangalore’s situation in the mid-­2000s and their accounts of the risks involved in India’s IT industry. Aneesh notes, “The more integrated an economy is into the global ebbs and flows [of capital], the more

Vora.indd 88

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM



Information Technology Professionals

89

vulnerable are people’s social worlds.”41 This vulnerability is caused by the reliance of those who work in industries organized around BPO contracts, such as IT and call center work, on the whims of transnational investors.42 The knowledge and sense that a person’s current life situation is unstable characterizes a position without a tenable future or a position that has a future that must always be deferred until there is present stability. This lack of a future was described in the previous chapter as one aspect of a compromised quality of life. In the analysis resulting from his ethnographic research with genetic research and development firms in the United States and India, Kaushik Sunder Rajan argues that biotechnology is a game constantly played in the future to generate the present that will enable that future. He describes this as a “grammatical” change in which life gets transformed into a calculable market unit, oriented toward conjuring “corporate promissory futures.”43 Similar to Waldby and Mitchell, Sunder Rajan imagines a temporality and “grammar” of capital that depends on the calculability of “life,” particularly as it pertains to risk and risk management. Sociologist A. Aneesh sees the management of future risk as a part of the organization of a growing variety of disciplines, including biology and computer science, around code and communication. Like Sunder Rajan, Aneesh sees an epistemic shift around “life itself.” For Sunder Rajan, the regime of biocapital names this shift, whereas for Aneesh, it is the rendering of life as language, his example being the genetic code.44 The goal of promoting life, whether it is the life of an institution or the life of an individual, is organized around the ability to program the future, both in the sense of writing code within IT and also in the sense of providing a dependable plan for the future. In the lives of the many people in Bangalore whose income depends on IT and communications companies who do BPO work, life cannot be calculated in a way that allows for risk management, nor does it allow for a dependable plan for the future. As Ramu’s story indicates, there is a similar lack of futurity in the lives of Indian migrant workers in the United States, so that temporariness is not exclusive to geopolitically separate spaces of production but works through technologies like work visas to constrain the mobility and futurity of workers in centers of consumption as well. As theorists begin to describe an epistemic shift in life under capitalism toward

Vora.indd 89

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM

90

Information Technology Professionals

managing future risk and future plans, we can see a tendency among Indian workers at many class levels to live under conditions without a sure future, which characterizes their role in supporting lives elsewhere. Fantasy and Differential Lives in Transmission Whereas the open source movement points to the ways that alternative social and economic spaces can be created through the same technologies as the formal economy and social relations of capital, Transmission suggests that even within the dominant capitalist system of value, we can think about alternate use-­values for interstitial spaces that form around and between legitimate spaces of capitalist production and redirect their resources to other ends. It also underlines the potential of fantasy and imagination as realms of pro­ duction that do not always follow conventions that lead them to reproduce already-­existing systems of value, production, and exploitation. Like the Banga­ lore programmer Anand profiled earlier, the protagonist Arjun Mehta in Hari Kunzru’s novel spends most of his free time before moving to the United States hacking around with networking and coding. The programs he writes rely on spare resources from idle computers, situating themselves as small pieces distributed across multiple machines. Together these fragments form an “interstitial world.”45 Arjun’s exercise in creativity, consisting of various experiments with programming code, take place not apart from legitimate spaces—­here the normally accessed areas of his former college’s computer network—­but between the legitimate areas of the college network. This production of use-­ values outside the system of legitimate production and consumption is one way that otherwise outlawed needs are addressed in the novel. The primary example of this form of production is the main action that drives the plot: Arjun’s creation of a computer virus as the means of using and demonstrating his unique genius and creativity to secure a job. Hari Kunzru is a British-­born author who worked on the U.K. edition of the technology magazine Wired during the late 1990s dot-­com boom. This period was presumably his source of background information for the novel, published in 2004, which is a comedic and also tragic account of the inter­ woven fantasy and material worlds of Arjun, an Indian software technician

Vora.indd 90

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM



Information Technology Professionals

91

who moves to America to “become his dreams.”46 The juxtaposition between ethnographic interviews and analysis of the novel is meant to open up multiple possible readings of these narratives as well as to trouble the genre distinctions and truth-­claims of the fictive, empirical, and theoretical. As explained in the introductory chapter, the fictive nature of the novel functions as a repository of the living labor of fantastic social relations, which Tadiar argues are “unrecognized productive forces of globalization itself.”47 Its aesthetic rendering of the life of an IT professional who moves between the United States and India presents both a theory of exploitation operating through forces of mobility and immobility unique to the IT industry and a unique mode of resistance in the form of hacking or piracy. This reading of the novel as a theory of the particular limits and politics of IT work is thus helpful in reflecting on the role of the open source movement in Bangalore’s IT community, even if its motivations are not self-­consciously the anti-­labor-­exploitation politics of a socialist labor consciousness.48 The novel sheds light on how the opportunities of IT professionals are part of a larger structure of differential global mobility and privilege, where the relative discomfort and immobility of the many serves to provide the comfort and pleasure that valorize the lives of the few, and how this differential is tied into the very ways that subjects imagine the value of themselves, their lives, and their access to a meaningful future. The narrative of Transmission begins just as the main character, Arjun, successfully secures a job with an IT headhunting company called Databodies. He subsequently moves from India to the United States and joins a group of other programmers who share an apartment in a low-­income housing unit somewhere near Silicon Valley. Once he arrives, he realizes that rather than placing them with the desirable jobs promised to get recruits to come to the United States, Databodies brings programmers from India and then markets them as cheap labor to companies without the guarantee of even an interview. Arjun does eventually get hired into a good position with an antivirus company. A year into his work, Arjun feels like he has finally achieved a long-­ held fantasy of his life. This life, to which he has always felt entitled, is defined by the postcolonial logic of Bollywood cinema and the American dream in Indian popular culture, which locates wealth and individual achievement as

Vora.indd 91

16/01/2015 11:38:29 AM

92

Information Technology Professionals

not only possible but attainable through travel to the United States. But then Arjun is downsized and must leave the country because of his visa status. Unable to let go of this fantasy, no less admit failure to people back in India, Arjun hatches a plan to get his job back. In a moment that testifies to the material power of commitment to shared fantasies and their role in organizing and producing the meaning of the good life, Arjun responds to losing his job by joining the world of computer virus writing, a gray economy of creativity that exists in between the legitimate spaces of production. He plans to crack the virus in front of his old boss and get rehired. Arjun explains how to solve the virus to his former boss, intending to impress him and regain his lost job, but the plan misfires when his former boss instead takes credit for Arjun’s solution and refuses to give him his job back. Arjun is not seen as a legitimate source of such knowledge by his former boss, or worthy of credit by his former coworkers, who witness his solution.49 In desperation, Arjun responds by launching another version, and the virus grows uncontrollably, disrupting the entire world economy and making Arjun a fugitive from the law. Arjun’s existence and experience are juxtaposed with those of a number of other characters, particularly Guy Swift, a high-­powered, London-­based management consultant whose life takes place both literally and figuratively above that of Arjun’s as Guy jets around the world in the first-­class cabin. The differential nature of the lives portrayed in Transmission suggests a global economy that leaves certain types of individuals and their conditions of existence more invested with value than others. The volume and kinds of use-­values available to different characters and the varying ability of individuals to consume what gives them pleasure demonstrate these differences, which are always situated in specific juxtapositions between characters or events. Similarly, in discussing the valorization of the First World through consumption of Third World cinema and images of the Third World in general, Jonathan Beller says, “Just as global capital needs the reality of the Third World as labor to valorize itself, the global psyche/aesthetic requires images of Third World reality as realism to valorize itself. These two registers of production are not essentially separate spheres—­they are codependent.”50 This mode of valorization supports Trans­ mission’s suggestion that the discomfort, terror, and unease of the Third World

Vora.indd 92

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM



Information Technology Professionals

93

are required to valorize the sensory pleasure of the First World. Such juxtapositions in Transmission mark uneven flows of value from one space into another. These flows of value occur when certain use-­values are designated as necessary to one space of living and not another, becoming visible in the uneven distribution of room to move, of comfort, of the time and effort it takes to get something done, and of the experience of temporality itself. For example, denied use-­values haunt the fantasy life of Arjun and are what bring him to the United States in the first place. However, the reader sees that even in America, his life is characterized by differentials, experienced through the insecurity of his immigration status, the taking away of his job, and the lack of opportunity to express creativity and value in his labor. The work done by Arjun’s imagination is structured by dominant conventions, expectations, and designations of meaning and use, but the world of Transmission is also a space where it becomes obvious that those structures can break down. Bollywood, in collusion with larger structures of the global market and its cultural norms, is the primary organizing structure of the fantasy and value that inform Arjun’s knowledge of what is necessary for a good life. Bollywood film structures Arjun’s desire for a good life and his imagination in producing his life, making it central to the way his needs are created and the way these spheres are valorized. Neferti Tadiar describes this process as “fantasy-­production,” explaining that fantasies often operate as alienated means of production, appropriated by the system that produces desires which valorize only specific lives and experiences.51 The productivity of fantasy in this sense is multifold. Fantasy represents and produces the real world as we understand and experience it, marking some lives as more valuable and some lives as less valuable, and as the plot of Transmission suggests, its effects can create ruptures in its own structures. When he eventually loses his job in the United States at the antivirus firm, Arjun is thrown into a state of disbelief and desperation, expecting that once he achieved a programming job in America, he would be able to maintain it as part of his fantastic understanding of American life. The knowledge of his own value and his fantasy-­based expectations do not line up with his now problematic visa status, his family’s expectations and inability to hear or understand

Vora.indd 93

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM

94

Information Technology Professionals

his situation, or his anger that he remains invisible and disposable. To enact and demonstrate his value, Arjun writes a brilliant computer virus housed in a video file featuring a musical dance clip of Leela Zahir, his favorite Bollywood actress: “Arjun knew what was going on behind the eyes and the smile, how Leela was stealing resources from other programs, taking up disk space, making herself at home. How perhaps she was doing other things—­malicious, corrupting things.”52 This description of Arjun’s virus working behind Leela’s smiling face indicates hidden power that doesn’t get communicated because it isn’t in a recognizable currency, because those who open the file are confused and caught off-­guard by this appealing yet unfamiliar feminine figure. The figure of Leela doesn’t carry universal value, because her fame doesn’t exist outside of spheres that consume Bollywood film, but it does carry the product of Arjun’s creativity, which is able to “make itself at home” in any computer system, utilizing resources for its own devices. The virus speaks and acts for Arjun in demonstrating his skills and his right to a good life. This insistence is mediated by the Bollywood actress who is part of Arjun’s self-­imagination, the language of programming which is his own language, and the self-­knowledge that he has the creative potential and skill to create something that antivirus groups will not be able to decode. Reflecting on the period of the Leela virus from some unspecified date long after Arjun has disappeared and become a legend among computer programmers, the narrator points to an inability to know the content or presence of imaginations that do not line up with dominant narratives. “Ringtone is also one of several Leela variants that have never been conclusively linked to Arjun Mehta, a gap in the record that opens up vertiginous and troubling possi­ bilities. Were other people out there dreaming of Leela Zahir?”53 This comment also expresses the extent of the intrusion of the virus’s effects into valued life: the realm of the imagination does not exist fully within the metabolism of capital, reproducing the status quo of use-­values. Because of the way fantasy and imagination work to valorize some lives over others in occasionally unpredictable ways, what denotes a “fully human life,” or “the good life,” is always potentially impermanent, even for those who have seemingly attained it. At the same time, this depiction of power and imagination in the novel is not

Vora.indd 94

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM



Information Technology Professionals

95

redemptive, and though there is space for its existence and impact on the world, the price for stepping away from the legitimate economy of creativity and production is the potential annihilation of one’s being: At that moment [Arjun] understood. Sooner or later they would find him and then life as he knew it would be over. All I wanted was my job back. All I wanted was to work and be happy and live a life in magic America. . . . They were calling him a terrorist, which meant that he would probably just join the ranks of the disappeared, the kneeling figures in the orange suits against whom anything was justified, to whom anything could legitimately be done. It was the revenge of the uncontrollable world. He had tried to act but instead had made himself into a nonperson.54

Cyberspace functions as a liminal region between spaces of reality and fantasy for Arjun as well as for the world of the novel. This liminality emphasizes the way these spaces actually permeate one another, with very material effects. As we find out from the historical narrator who speaks at the end of the novel, on the day the virus was released, a number of new things came into existence and many old things simply disappeared. For example, the day “came to be known as ‘greyday,’” a day on which a “certain amount of money simply ceased to exist.”55 People’s identifying information got muddled as government databases were rearranged, communications broke down, and people were unable to navigate in the world. The metaphor of the hidden power behind the virus is a reminder that the benefits of a given system of valorization are unstable, as is much of what we consider the material balance of our reality. Part of this instability derives from the unknowability of the fantasy realm and what is transmitted between it and the material world. In many ways, the questions raised by Transmission address the physical and experiential consequences of the segregation of different types of lives intended to maintain the density of “valued” existence in only some of those lives and spaces. The balance between spaces of outlawed need and hyperconsumption requires a differential investment of value into those spaces, something that traditional political economic measures of value cannot indicate.

Vora.indd 95

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM

96

Information Technology Professionals

One of the difficulties in arguing for the generation of value through the work of imagination is that this form of production does not entail a method of quantifying the value it generates. The use-­values that are central to Transmis­ sion have material consequences in their production and consumption but cannot be measured by the socially averaged labor time invested into them. Transmission shows how imagination, existing as both a shared social structure and as part of individual identity, is a practice in which use-­values do not necessarily line up with what is dominant. Arjun takes action in his life on the basis of a system of value that derives from a dominant fantasy of the good life but mistakes himself for a subject fully entitled to a position in that fantasy. To him, a good job in America is so fundamental to his subjecthood that he must take any measure to preserve it. This use-­value for his job is, of course, not accounted for by the human relations representative who fires him or by the terms of his visa. Though it originates in fantasy, the mandate to pursue only the “good life” and nothing less—­here a relatively straightforward job and residence in America—­is undeniable. Differential Experience and Valorizing Other Lives Operating in parallel to the conditions of call center work in the previous chapter, in Transmission, communication of oneself is a pleasure and a privilege, and most of the novel’s characters communicate messages that serve the interests of others rather than themselves. Moving back and forth between Arjun’s story and the stories of other characters, the narrative provides a critique of the fantasy of the good life as characterized by the pace of electronic communication and the material conditions of hyperconsumption. The novel suggests that the fantasies sustained by characters that must remain outside of spaces of socially and culturally valued life, spaces that prove to be sites of the accumulation of others’ vital energy, are part of what valorize those spaces. In Arjun’s experience of waiting months for a job while on the bench in the United States with the headhunting agency, and in his inability to communicate his value as a person and worker once he obtains a job, the novel also points out details that elaborate how the unavailability of creativity and innovation in jobs available to Bangalore’s IT workers as well as the enforcing of a

Vora.indd 96

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM



Information Technology Professionals

97

condition of insecurity and instability with regard to the future are characteristics of spheres of existence where value is more extracted than accumulated. The reader can also see, however, that even those who achieve this valorized life are susceptible to the instability of the system that has privileged them. The forced temporality of IT present in both the Bangalore ethnography and Transmission, characterized by lack of a sense of stability and a dependable future, denies IT workers a sense of future possibility and potential, use-­ values, and life necessities that are denied as part of the devaluing of Indian labor, even in elite IT circles. The unmarked costs of being made into flexibilized and reproductive workers under conditions of unending instability and temporariness correspond to affective expenditures by Indian IT workers that are not compensated and, as such, are reflected in the workers’ devaluing as “cheap” labor. Interviews with Bangalore IT professionals indicate that there is no difference in the quality of Indian contract workers and their U.S. counterparts. It is also clear that though many IT professionals chose to reside in India and work for a lower rupee-­based salary, they remained sensitive to the ways that Indian IT labor is figured artificially as less innovative and creative and therefore of lower value. What has been described in other chapters as the costs and illegibility of reproductive labor appears in IT as taking up the work of communicating and reproducing the projects, code, and social or market agendas of others. Added to this is the particular orientation of the IT industry toward an ever-­decreasing future horizon. The experience of time and movement through space is defined sensually in moments of juxtaposition in Transmission. Guy Swift, the character juxtaposed most starkly with Arjun, is a thirty-­three-­year-­old British citizen who is a “millionaire on paper” and president of his own image-­consulting and marketing firm called “Tomorrow.” Swift experiences his relationship to the future as a sensation of pleasure in the present moment, a pleasure that results from the failure of others to get to this moment, and hence to the future, as quickly as himself: “He feels the future as actually connected to him . . . he would feel cocooned in the even light and neutral colors of a present that seemed to be declaring its own provisionality, its status as a non-­destination space.”56 Because he is often traveling between various global cities to visit

Vora.indd 97

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM

98

Information Technology Professionals

clients, Guy is often seen sitting in first class, being attended to by people and technological devices designed to increase his comfort and pleasure. In fact, he perceives the very objects in his environment as instrumentally oriented toward a future where the present is defined only as a transitional moment. Guy’s existence is almost entirely “future” in its content. More specifically, these objects, including other human beings, are stationed to “get him into the next world, ahead of the curve.”57 The comparative element of this experience invokes not only Arjun but also the original context from which Arjun emerges from among the sweaty interviewees in the Databodies office. Here there is no certainty of arrival in any kind of “future,” and the terms of the present are composed of the denial of the very use-­values in which Guy is ensconced. Transmission’s juxtaposition of separate realms of existence and the conditions resulting from their differential valorization denaturalizes this separation. Because different people and spaces become useful within capitalist production in divergent ways, and in fact the differential life available denotes the transmission of vital energy from one to another, attention must be paid to the specificity and difference of types of labor and its conditions. Not all labor is the same (neither in a temporal, epochal sense nor in a horizontal, democratic sense). Gayatri Spivak addresses this relationship in the context of time: Whereas the Lehman Brothers, thanks to computers, earned about $2 million for . . . 15 minutes of work, the entire economic text would not be what it is if it could not write itself as a palimpsest upon another text where a woman in Sri Lanka has to work 2,287 minutes to buy a T-­shirt. The “postmodern” and the “premodern” are inscribed together.58

The co-­constitutive spaces characterized by vastly different qualities of living, including the qualities of time, space, and sensual comfort, must necessarily remain separate to support the different uses of the people who live within them. This naturalized separation is belied through their situation of close proximity in Kunzru’s narrative. The juxtaposition of Guy Swift’s context of travel with that of Arjun’s highlights the fact that though communication may be happening constantly,

Vora.indd 98

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM



Information Technology Professionals

99

communication of oneself can be a privilege and a pleasure. Facilitating communication of the messages of others, on the other hand, is another performance of devalued and potentially depersonalizing labor. Those who may not communicate themselves, for example, the Indian call center workers discussed in chapter 2, do the affective work of both repressing their identity and communicating a false one in its place. The coerced transmission of the messages of others operates to invest value in those others, through esteem, idealization, and increasing their access to pleasure and ease at the expense of the lives of those doing this labor. Jonathan Beller describes a similarly invisible labor performed by the title character of the film, Curacha: A Woman without Rest, as she involuntarily participates in preexisting representations of herself as an image.59 Beller describes the film as about the last day in the life of a live sex performer who understands her very body as a sign for the city of Manila. Because of her work as a performer, but also because of the relationship she experiences as coproducing the set of signs that constitute Manila, Curacha experiences herself as merely a representation of herself. She must submit [her body] to [the images’] logic in order to survive. . . . Evacuat[ing] her body and its living connections . . . she can no longer grasp Manila in a way that is experientially immediate . . . because her experience of the city is always already mediated by her decorporealization, that is, her experience of herself as an image.60

The labor of providing the medium or form for relaying the messages of others is also a kind of decorporealization and a severing of “living connections.” Like the call center agents described in the previous chapter, characters in Transmission invest time, energy, and affect to gain cultural fluency and to support enabling fantasy worlds at the expense of the ability to sustain living connections to others in their immediate social environments. In fact, this lack of connection spares the person on the receiving end of this labor from the need to treat these figures as anything other than a commodity, increasing the sense of pleasure and security in the knowledge that they are meant to consume and hence accumulate the value these others produce.

Vora.indd 99

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM

100

Information Technology Professionals

Transmission gives us a character who, like the IT professionals in Bangalore who turn to open source programming with the hope of using creativity and skills disallowed in their paid work, turns to hacking and cyberspace as currency and space through which to express the value and social connection of meaningful work and creative intellect, as well as the right to a good life as promised by mainstream fantasy economies. Transmission reiterates the neces­ sity of the venues of expression and alternative production sought out by IT professionals in Bangalore. The frustration of Bangalorean software engineers is similar to that of Transmission’s main character: they feel an inability to access creative work through employment because of the way that U.S.-­based high-­tech companies undervalue Indian innovation and business culture as nonentrepreneurial and most fit for reproducing prior invention. Like call center workers, software engineers express the frustrated desire to connect affectively and socially with their immediate world through their work. Instead they are held in a state of limited action, a sort of partial capture characterizing reproductive labor in the global economy that allows them to exist in a temporality specific to reproduction of the messages and invention of others. This temporality suspends the future in favor of an extended temporariness of life and work. Conclusion The curtailment of opportunities for IT professionals to do work that directly serves the Indian public, and that allows for production that is recognized as creative and innovative, and therefore high value, is part of what enforced the cheapness of Indian IT labor in Bangalore in the early 2000s. These losses to quality of life, together with structural reorganizations that shifted public policy toward developing support for temporary needs at the expense of providing long-­term support for the needs of residents, represent forms of evacuation of the means of individual and social thriving. Such “outlawed necessities”61 and limits on future thriving characterize Bangalore IT’s role in the contemporary life support system that, as previous chapters have argued, has inherited the legacies of colonial labor allocation and the international division of labor that formed in the wake of European colonialism through globalization.

Vora.indd 100

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM



Information Technology Professionals

101

The limits on the nature of work and forms of subjectivity that arise from the enforcement of a devalued and reproductive role for Indian IT labor are a somewhat surprising corollary to the other forms of capture and limitation found in India’s labor history and in contemporary call center work and commercial gestational surrogacy. In Bangalore’s IT industry in 2005–­6, available work consisted primarily but not exclusively of outsourced projects contracted from the United States and Europe. Software programmers described their desires for the potential to be creative and innovative in their work and for access to and realization of a fantasy of middle-­class conditions organized around consumption. The concern among programmers that the value they produced did not primarily benefit India, and the desire to instead be part of the entire life span of a project, including its benefit to the immediate community, represents use-­values of the programmers’ labor not acknowledged by the international division of labor. As testament to the desire to keep the fruit of their labor “at home,” programmers described open source as a space of promise for skirting the limitations of the global division of labor on Indian programmers’ ability to create products that enact living connections to society and other people. The non-­market-­regulated space of open source programming represents one place where programmers can imagine that these desires can be pursued and can bring together the like-­minded as a community. This promise and desire represent investment in a potential future where the flow of value from India to the United States is destabilized. The particularities of the social lives and imaginaries of transnationally mobile IT professionals in Bangalore point to trends in the imagination of what types of labor are appropriate, and therefore what types of jobs are sourced, to Indian IT workers.62 These details illustrate common experiences that provide insight into the globalization of high-­tech labor while also indicating the diversity of everyday practices that constitute the complex reality of IT work. The experience represented in these narratives underlines how fantasy and imagination produce and impact material practices and opportunities for such workers who are conscious of both the limits on their mobility and future options and of the hypermobility of their labor. The narratives point to the ways that processes that generated new use-­values in India and

Vora.indd 101

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM

102

Information Technology Professionals

the United States created new consumers and structures of feeling among the small but growing middle class in India as represented in Bangalore, alienating this population in some ways from the majority of Indian society. These representations of the experience of working in IT suggest that even at an elite level, India has been largely illegible as a site of innovation. They also point to the centrality of the actual and imagined hyperconnectedness of people and events in the contemporary world and how the sense of human belonging and future possibility that such connection can entail is alienated when communication is both a primary and privileged realm of conveying one’s value as a social being and also a biopolitical form of transmitting and accumulating value. The structures of imagination that hold up the fantasy of middle-­class life through consumption that transcends location, for example, in Jehan M.’s assessment of living in the United States versus India, and in Arjun’s Bollywood-­ riddled confusion of reality and fantasy in his sense of entitlement to the good life, are also revealed to be inconstant in these narratives. Where living in the United States once represented the realization of an Indian middle-­class dream, it has been replaced by the imagination entailed in middle-­class consumption. Like the market itself, these fantasies exhibit tendencies in specific directions but are ultimately unpredictable. Finally, as is evidenced in the hopes attached to the open source movement, the role of imagination as a political space and activity with material consequences promulgates alternatives to the dominant processes of valorizing some lives over others, yielding use-­values from in between the legitimate spaces organized by the capitalist metabolism that harvests vitality and deposits it into privileged lives and lifeworlds.

Vora.indd 102

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM

4 Transnational Gestational Surrogacy Expectation and Exchange

T

he Manushi fertility clinic, located in northwestern India,1 features a gestational surrogacy practice that caters equally to affluent, primarily urban-­based Indians and to transnational clientele from the United States, United Kingdom, Israel, Japan, Taiwan, France, and Germany, as well as other less commonly represented countries. The United States and the United Kingdom produce more than half of these clients, whom I call “commissioning parents,” in line with the legal language about assisted reproductive technology (ART) regulation in India. They often come to India after encountering legal and financial obstacles to pursuing gestational surrogacy in their home countries to arrange for the conception and birth of a child from materials that will transmit, at least in part, their own genetic inheritance. Most international clients have never visited India before, and doctors and staff tend to inform commissioning parents of their next step only when it is imminent. As a result, Dr. T, one of the directors of the clinic, says patients become very close and even dependent on one another, often scheduling day trips together when there is no need to be at the clinic. Commissioning parents describe their relief and surprise at the feeling of community and closeness they find during their usually brief visits to Manushi, even as many explain the desire for social and physical distance from the women assigned to be their gestational sur­ rogates and gratefulness for the transnational nature of the transaction that will separate them from their surrogates permanently after the commissioning parents return home with their children. This desire for distance is supported 103

Vora.indd 103

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM

104

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

by the clinic’s careful organization of the limited contact between surrogates and commissioning parents as well as the language barrier between most foreign commissioning parents and gestational surrogates.2 Transnational gestational surrogacy, a relatively new and growing industry in India, gives a particularly valuable perspective on the intersection of social and biological reproduction as part of biocapital, recalling earlier forms of biological and social reproduction outlined in chapter 1. Novel forms of intimacy and alienation are promoted by reproductive technologies, and this was particularly true in India, when the relatively new industry of transnational gestational surrogacy was still developing. These forms of intimacy and alienation occur around and despite relations of monetary exchange and the policing of kinship feelings in commercial ART clinics. This chapter highlights the ways that ethnographic narratives from one Indian ART clinic convey some of the subjective conditioning of affective and biological labors and the political potential of imagination that are part of the material context of biocapitalism. It continues the project of tracking the circulation of biological and affective labor and commodities by considering gestation and other forms of commercialized mothering performed by low-­wage-­earning women in India for transnational consumption. Women who work as gestational surrogates come from a variety of regional and caste backgrounds. In prior employment, many earned wages they described as inadequate for providing any sort of long-­term security, such as dependable housing, education for their children, paying off loans, saving for dowries for their daughters, or paying for any major legal or medical service that might come up unexpectedly. This insecurity is what makes the surrogacy fee appealing, and narratives attach the decision to participate in surrogacy to hopes of accessing a greater level of economic security. Outside of the service of gestation for which they are contractually paid, the biological labor, the subjective retooling, and the work of self-­and family care surrogates perform to ensure a successful pregnancy are consumed in a way that subsidizes and valorizes transnational elites. The ways that women describe their partici­ pation in commercial gestational surrogacy as an immeasurable gift they give to commissioning parents offer a complex view of the meaning and value of

Vora.indd 104

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

105

surrogacy that opposes the clinic’s narrative that surrogacy is merely the renting of an otherwise empty womb, though these descriptions do not circulate as widely as the products of their labor. These narratives offer a telling argument about the value of surrogates’ labor and its productivity. They also evidence the surrogates’ contribution to the well-­being and future potential of themselves and their families and to a sense of a social or otherwise unquan­ tifiable common good that differs from market ethics. In early 2008, I was invited to observe the gestational surrogacy practice within the Manushi clinic and to interview interested participants, including doctors, technicians, clinic staff, commissioning parents, gestational sur­ rogates, and individuals in the area whose livelihoods depend in part on the clinic’s presence. It was a particularly interesting time in the growth of commercial surrogacy in India because the practice had only recently gained widespread visibility in India and internationally, so clinics were still in the early phases of adjusting to the pressure of public scrutiny, which eventually translated into the 2008, 2010, and then 2012 Draft ART (Regulation) Bill and Rules in India’s parliament. This was also a time when ART clinics could form idiosyncratic policies of practice based on their discretionary adherence to the guidelines set forth by the national government; what a clinic could offer and what arrangements it might make were limited only by medical capabilities and the management’s sense of responsibility and ethics. For these reasons, the clinic setting raises a set of questions about the relationship of commodification to the forms of sociality forged during an extended moment of unregulated industry growth. The provisional nature of the arrangements in the Manushi clinic required those who participated to create similarly provisional relationships. Com­ missioning parents and surrogates had to make some social sense of the use of their own and others’ bodies through new technologies, for example, many commissioning parents described a lingering sense of connection to their surrogate that needed to be parsed out as some form of sociality, despite their own interest in adopting the commodity and contract relations supported by the clinic. The result was often a haphazard and coalitional model of kinship that was unfamiliar to commissioning parents and gestational surrogates alike.

Vora.indd 105

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM

106

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

Much of this context will change when proposed ART regulation is passed by the Indian parliament, but the flexibility of this period of high growth and low regulation presents a unique opportunity to examine forms of sociality and exchange that occur through transnational Indian commercial surrogacy. The transnational ART clinic represents a site out of which I trace the coexisting histories of women who are disadvantaged in socioeconomic terms by caste, class, and gender in India, which intersect with the history of the growth of the global circulation of care workers and care labor as well as particular nation-­based histories when foreign commissioning parents come to India to hire gestational surrogates to bear their children. As is true with the other sites of analysis in this book, an eclectic body of literature is necessary to bring these intersecting histories to light and to assemble an archive for what is an endeavor yet to be completed—­a historiographic project originating in largely overwritten decolonizing and feminist projects. In this chapter, the forms of analysis on which I draw include decolonizing subaltern historiography, medical anthropological studies of ARTs and gestational surrogacy, the analysis of literature in juxtaposition to ethnography, and feminist analyses of empire and accumulation. The ethnographic context of the clinic engages this scholarship in provocative ways. It does this through its practical insistence on the availability of surplus biological labor that can be sold through the “renting” of a woman’s otherwise unused uterus while simultaneously presenting evidence that while surrogates may reproduce the explanation of surrogacy as the renting of a womb for a contracted fee, another theory of value and sociality inhabits their narratives of surrogacy. The biopolitics of transnational gestational surrogacy in India trouble the categories of value and labor and create a productive tension around Marxist and general materialist understandings of the subject of labor. Outsourcing as a capitalist production strategy and biocapital as a form of accumulation depend on reproductivity in ways both historically established and, in the case of some industries, reliant on novel technologies. Prefigurations of Indians as servile, India’s population as numerous and prolific and therefore replaceable, and its labor as best suited for reproducing or mimicking metropolitan innovation, all of which became dominant representations during the

Vora.indd 106

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

107

colonial period, continue to naturalize the redirection of the vital energy of women who become surrogates to other communities and nations.3 For exam­ ple, when the clinic uses strategies to manage and discipline the sexuality and affect of women who become surrogates as part of the process of coaching them into proper conduct under their contracts as mentioned in chapter 1, it engages a colonial history of consolidating power through conditioning subjectivity. Similar disciplining practices were central to the politics of European colonialism,4 particularly in India, where medicine was advanced under colonialism to create docile subjects who would be productive in a way that served the interests of those in power. Female reproductive work can be seen as having continuity with colonial modes of subjectification in these specific ways, as can outsourcing more generally, as it takes up colonial discourses of Indian race to justify the cheapening of labor and the differential valuing of life that preserves it.5 Rather than looking only at the state as the agent of neocolonial expropriation, such analysis points to how the global differentiation of populations and their vastly incommensurate ability to accumulate value is simul­ taneously a process that relies on colonial structures while also creating new modes of exploitation specific to the technologies and histories they engage. In this frame, the relative elite, which in the context of the clinic includes the doctors and the Indian and transnational commissioning parents, are provided a structure through which to accumulate value generated through constraint on workers whose vital energy is channeled to consumers alongside other more recognizable commodities like the service of gestation delimited by the surrogacy contract. The removal of vital energy is marked by the constrained ability to reproduce life in nonprivileged spaces. The control and constraint of life and its inherent excesses in the practices of commercial surrogacy link the biopolitics of the vitality economy and its differential lives to imperial practices and politics and illustrate how biological and social reproduction function together in biocapitalist production and accumulation. In reading surrogacy narratives not as representing a group but rather as theorizations by a group, I begin by positing a confluence of feminist scholarship detailing the central role that the racialization and gendering of labor have played in the accumulation of capital with scholarship examining the

Vora.indd 107

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM

108

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

exploitation of rural nonelites in India’s colonial history as enabled by Western medicine and its disciplining of subjects into particular modern sensibilities. In this context, I attend to the Manushi clinic’s emphasis on the rehabilitation of surrogates into recognizably self-­disciplined and professionalized money earners and savers. This project is described by clinic directors as “social work” and echoes discourses of profitable microlending in both the conditions that motivate women to enter into surrogacy arrangements in the first place and in the language of “rehabilitation” of surrogates that recalls colonial projects of uplift as a moral imperative of the colonizer. I then juxtapose the theme of expectation in narratives by gestational surrogates with a reading of expectation in Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Stanadayini” as a way to examine the particular forms of alienation possible in commercialized mothering work. Contextualizing the work of gestation in sociological literature about the value produced and meaning circulated by the work of care and nurture in commercial mothering, I discuss what these narratives suggest about the accumulation represented in the vitality and humanity of the subjects who benefit from the product of such labor, and how the sociality and expectation they describe refute the primacy of the parent-­relation and the linking of birth to the production of the child as patriarchal property. Intersecting Histories of Commercial Mothering Labor As political, economic, and cultural structures have been reorganized through independence and later neoliberalization in India, the relationship between Western medicine, power, and the body has been cast and recast in important ways that are reflected in the ethnography of the Manushi clinic. In his work on epidemic disease in nineteenth-­century India, David Arnold has demonstrated how the body and discourse about the body have historically been sites of colonization and conquest.6 His observation points to the corporeality of the British colonial project in India and also marks the importance of the body and discourse about the body as sites for contestations of power in Indian history. A number of diagnostic and therapeutic technologies, instruments of measure and examination, and materializations of the body were

Vora.indd 108

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

109

introduced in India within medicine as an institution that was part of colonial rule. Gyan Prakash argues that the mode of governmentality that was functioning in colonizing European nations could not be replicated in colonial India because the British could not rely on colonial knowledge and colonial regulation to function as self-­knowledge and self-­rule the way they could at home. For this reason, governmentality had to become part of imperial domination, and “the colonization of the body had to operate as the care of the native body.”7 The colonial project was therefore an experiment in creating new types of governable subjects that both were and were not part of the same organism as British modernity, and one of the sites for these governmental techniques was the medicalized and disciplining discourse of care of the body. The narrative that most surrogates first related when discussing their assess­ ment of the practice of surrogacy at Manushi clinic produced a genetics-­based and property-­interested explanation of parentage, an explanation that relies on a specific medicalized materialization of the body. The genetics-­based explanation, where the persons providing the egg and sperm are considered the true parents of the fetus and child, is used by surrogates to legitimate the carrying of “someone else’s child” without it being seen as a form of adultery and as an explanation for why she does not worry about becoming attached to the child during pregnancy or after its birth.8 These narratives are repeated to potential and new surrogates by clinic staff and former surrogates, who act as informal counselors and coaches in this foreign version of conception and pregnancy, and it is here that they learn this new mode of understanding unlikely to be encountered in the communities from which most of the women originate, where they would be unlikely to have access to the necessary level of biology education in school or popular discourse.9 Though clearly not in the mode of colonial governmentality, the clinic utilizes practices of subjectifying women and disciplining their embodiment that connect to colonial biopolitics. This occurs primarily though the effort by clinic staff to guide women into a new understanding of their bodies without their full knowledge of the technologies involved and to train them into a previously unimagined relationship (or lack of relationship) to the child they will bear. Feminist scholars have tracked the ways that the use of medical, and

Vora.indd 109

16/01/2015 11:38:30 AM

110

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

particularly visual, technologies has altered how women understand and relate to their bodies.10 As chapter 1 argued, the connection a woman makes between her body as a surrogate and the limits of her social entitlements is disciplined through medical and genetic discourse and enforced by the surrogacy contract, which renders her legally constrained as a medical and laboring subject of the state. This disciplining also displaces other conceptions of the body that entail alternate ethical responses to surrogacy.11 Women who enter surrogacy contracts are also constrained by the disconnection between the worldview represented by the clinic and its clients and that of their own communities. Most surrogates hide their pregnancies from extended family and their communities because there is no way to communicate this technologically mediated mode of understanding the body and reproduction. When women spoke about a need to keep their participation a secret, they explained that people at home would not understand that their body has not been involved sexually in the conception process and therefore the surrogacy would not be accepted. Since in the eyes of the surrogates I was associated with the clinic, each person to whom I spoke first explained interest and participation in terms of this official genetic narrative of parentage and surrogacy as a service. Even so, the women to whom I spoke also readily asserted that whatever the origin of the eggs and sperm, it was the surrogate’s body that was building the baby, through its blood and nourishment, a perspective Pande also found in her conversations with women acting as gestational surrogates in India.12 The Manushi clinic mandates that any woman who wishes to be considered as a gestational surrogate must already be married and have the written consent of her husband. These requirements protect the clinic from reproach on the basis of public sensibilities about marriage and childbirth.13 Jayanthi, a current surrogate, explained that she originally visited the clinic with a cousin who had been a surrogate there in the recent past. She met with the directors and, after learning about what the process would entail, decided she wanted to proceed. She then went home and convinced her husband that the disruption to their lives and the danger of the stigmatization that would occur if anyone in their communities or family found out would be worth the fee she would earn. A number of surrogates with similar stories described the way that they

Vora.indd 110

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

111

repeated the basic description of IVF given by doctors during their interviews to their husbands to convince them that the gestation of someone else’s child could occur without it being a form of adultery and without it being a woman’s own child. One additional requirement imposed by the clinic is that a potential surrogate must already have borne a child, which proves to the clinic that she can successfully complete a pregnancy and is seen as added insurance against the possibility that she might become attached to the child she carries for others. Taken together, these policies mean that any woman who works with the Manushi clinic as a gestational surrogate must involve her family in the clinic and some of the social complexities of navigating commercial motherhood and ART-­inflected questions around kinship. The clinic directors also urge surrogates to live in one of two local hostels catering to the clinic’s surrogates. Commissioning parents pay their room and board, and it is seen and publicized to commissioning parents by the directors as a way to make sure that women eat well, rest away from their usual paid labor and unpaid domestic work, and receive regular medical observation and care. This means that surrogates live apart from their children and larger families as well as their home communities. Every woman with whom I spoke had told at least her neighbors and extended family, if not her in-­laws and children, that she was going to a distant city in India or as far as Dubai for a temporary job. Women whose homes were within a reasonable driving distance could entertain visits from their husbands and children on weekends, and these children were told different stories, sometimes that their mother was receiving special medical care for a nebulous condition. In the case of one family with whom I spoke during my visit, the children were told that their mother was going to have a child for another family who couldn’t have children. The possibilities for misunderstanding and mistranslation occur at every step, as doctors explain biotechnologies to people who haven’t had access to education in biology and have their own understanding of what IVF really means and when these people in turn explain this to others, including children and outsiders from the press and the academy. As a paid service, commercial surrogacy is imagined in the context of the clinic as the contractual use of a woman’s otherwise unused uterus as a place

Vora.indd 111

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM

112

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

in which to gestate a fetus that is understood as property and progeny of someone else. In terms of compensation, the work of commercial surrogacy is understood to be nine months of gestation as a service, including labor and delivery. To flesh out the actual efforts, energy, and additional labor performed by surrogates, I want to consider an example of the necessary self-­care performed by surrogates to preserve themselves and the pregnancy while they carry a fetus. Bhumika, a young woman who lives about twenty kilometers away from the clinic and was five months pregnant as a surrogate mother when I met her, explained that she was not nervous because she had already given birth to three children, although she was more careful about exertion now as a surrogate. For example, she avoided lifting heavy objects, including her children during their visits, and was no longer doing manual labor. As a contracted surrogate, she paid careful attention to the condition of the pregnancy and mentioned that she was eating much better and resting more. Like others, she mentioned that she didn’t have any doctor’s attention in her previous pregnancies, no less the kind of technologically mediated care she was receiving as the gestational surrogate to a U.S. couple. For the course of her pregnancy, she would be staying in one of the two surrogate hostels that serve the clinic, and like the other surrogates working with the clinic, her contract stipulated that if she did not complete her pregnancy, she would receive no fee beyond the small living stipend earned while pregnant. Bhumika’s actions are simultaneously acts of care for the fetus and herself as well as economic acts that protect the fetus and future child as a com­modity. Her acts of self-­care also protect her well-­being as a surrogate, the only worker who can produce that unique (genetically speaking) commodity through her biological labor. This, and the breast-­feeding and nurturing of the newborn she was to provide, yields well-­being and therefore future life opportunities for both the infant and its parents—­life support that is both delineated by and also exceeds contractual definition. Bhumika’s narrative points to some of the affective commodities produced by the surrogate’s self-­care while pregnant. The surrogate performs both sides of what Fortunati calls the “dual nature of reproductive labor,” generating a replacement worker and creating value through gendered care and domestic labor in the public domain through the

Vora.indd 112

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

113

contract. The very source of living labor, the vital energy necessary to keep her alive as a worker, is itself redirected in a way that only biologically reproductive energies can be, but because the contracted labor includes gestation, even her biological self-­reproduction is inseparable from “labor.” To go on existing while pregnant, from the perspective of biocapitalist vitality economies as defined in the introduction, is also to go on existing as an engine of reproducing others and as a channel for the investment of one’s own vital energy into others. Even so, the contract and patriarchal and medical common sense indicate that the surrogacy fee is for the minimal self-­care and management necessary to preserve the pregnancy, an inconvenience and service provided along with the rented womb. The anxiety that commissioning parents describe, set up as they are to understand the surrogate as a necessary, temporary, yet potentially harmful custodian of their unique progeny and, at least legally speaking, their property, is evidenced in the somewhat guilty admission commissioning parents express of desiring to have their surrogate live in a hostel.14 Because she is the single person who can safely deliver this particular fetus to term, the commissioning parents, structurally gendered male as discussed in chapter 1, exert the interest of the inherent patriarchal bias in the discourse of genetic parentage. They have a patriarchal interest in controlling her behavior to the maximum extent possible, which is privileged by a common sense and legal structure that recognize this privileged status. These conditions, together with the more systematic complications that come with the performance of gendered labor in its blurring of the boundaries of the body and person of the worker and the work itself, mean that surrogacy is uniquely positioned to show some of the biopolitical complications of how gendered labor operates. The surrogate’s body is an essential instrument of both production and reproduction in the Marxist sense, therefore surrogacy reengages the feminist materialist concern for understanding how such labor both perpetuates the capitalist system by creating new workers, as in Marx’s analysis, and is productive in its own right through the direct consumption of reproductivity. This labor generates life and vitality, or in a Marxist frame, replacement workers, for spheres of existence more highly valued. These spaces receive and accumulate this artificial

Vora.indd 113

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM

114

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

surplus of vital energy generated by women in relatively devalued spheres of life, as it is redirected from their own bodies, households, and communities. This system of evacuation of one sphere in support of lives in another characterizes the biopolitics of outsourcing, and transnational commercial surrogacy in India currently plays a unique and illustrative role in connecting colonial histories to contemporary biopolitics of globalization and biocapital. The emergence of transnational commercial surrogacy as an industry has been preceded by a history of complex relations between foreign economic demands on India, projects of the Indian urban middle class (elites),15 and rurally based Indians as workers and subjects. The relationships between colonial governance, Indian elites, and the subaltern rural majority population of India traced in the work of subaltern historiographies are reproduced in the clinic, but the contemporary ART clinic adds new dimensions, such as the privatization of medicine and transnational commerce, the liberalization of India’s economy, and the attempt at liberalization of subjectivities and modes of sociality. The clinic continues a historical relation of power and exploitation between the Indian middle class, here represented primarily by elite Indian commissioning parents, and the rural, less educated, and less connected lower-­class women who act as gestational surrogates. At the same time, the transnational reach of clinic directors, and their ability to command technology and resources at a global level, represents a new permutation of that historical relationship. Even as transnational Indian surrogacy represents a unique conjunction of technologies of colonialism, gendered subjectification, and biotechnology, analyzing it relationally creates a platform to address the particular relationship embodied in, for example, the hiring of gestational surrogates in India by U.S. commissioning parents. This relationship depends on the current legal disjunctures that situate surrogates as service providers through their surrogacy contracts, a status that garners more legal protection than their status as low-­income rural women citizens. It also depends on the vast differential access commissioning parents have to resources and mobility, which provides physical and legal distance for commissioning parents who remain privileged subjects as protected by laws whose corollaries for Indian surrogates have not

Vora.indd 114

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

115

and may not ever be created.16 The conditions privileging commissioning parents are historically unique in some ways, but the direct and indirect legal privilege and protections they enjoy connect the surrogacy industry to the accumulation and growth of capital in other sites, such as the United States, that have been a project of valorizing white life and middle-­class property ownership at the expense of producers’ lives and futures, and where the project of exploitation continues to occur at the site of the family.17 A trans­national and relational approach to such sites of production could build on the work of U.S. Native and black feminists, who have analyzed the promotion of birth in privileged populations and repression in others; the redefining of land, humans, and biology as private resources or property; and the denial of legal subjectivity as techniques of exploitation and accumulation of value in the United States.18 U.S. feminist historiography, together with postcolonial critiques of the imposition of logics of privacy and property onto gendered bodies and existing life worlds they encounter, also provides the framework within which to analyze gestational surrogacy as a project of accumulation of vital energy and outlawing of life necessities through the coercion of economically limited “choices” of employment.19 Discourses of surrogacy are mediated by the language and meaning that biological science and, specifically, biomedicine have assigned to the reproductive body. As such, the female reproductive body is figured as a commons and becomes one’s own property only in specific legal moments, yet is simultaneously legally defensible only as property. The female human body also gets figured as empty space through biomedical instrumentalization and objectifica­ tion of female reproductive processes, organs, and gametes. At the same time, the product of reproduction is organized socially as the property of he (the commissioning couple’s position as gendered by the contract) whose legal intention was to produce a child, rather than she whose empty organs and raw biology were used to produce it. Though Indian commercial surrogacy is taking place under the jurisdiction of Indian national law, in cases where U.S. citizens enter surrogacy arrangements in India and bring infants back to the United States, we must insist on the convergence of these histories and discourses to fully examine how the status of Indian surrogates is intertwined

Vora.indd 115

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM

116

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

with their freedom, their choice, and, to use Rosemary Hennessy’s phrase as explained in chapter 2, their outlawed needs.20 Placing the role of rural working women who become gestational surrogates in the context of the history of colonialism, medicine, and the body in India, together with more recent liberalizing histories, raises a double sense of familiarity as these women supply a source of biological reproduction for consumers in the Global North. We can identify a process of production and accumulation that replicates the colonial governance and peripheralization of production and also, through its transnational clientele, engages histories elsewhere to reinforce privileged communities as sites of accumulation, as in the United States, where the (normatively white) middle and elite classes have been a site of the accumulation of labor and vital energy of gendered indigenous, black, and immigrant women. This perspective points to how the gendered transmission of vital energy and its resulting accumulation continue to occur across broad geographic, national, class, and racial divides. It also suggests one way the subject of mothering work can be detached from the subject of sentimental maternity. This detachment provides insight into important forms of alienation, subjectification, and value as well as maternity and the family as sites of exploitation and the accumulation of value. As a form of paid service, it not only escapes the explanatory capacity of a Marxist labor theory of value but also the materialist feminist duality of reproductive labor. As it harnesses self-­perpetuation as economic value in itself, commercial surrogacy uniquely highlights the role of biology in the gendered economy based on social and biological reproduction. Intimacies of Gift and Debt Sonali, a college-­educated urban woman in her twenties who had worked with the clinic as an occasional translator between Hindi, English, and regional languages for visitors and press agents, shared the reasons one woman had become a surrogate: There was this nice case we [she and a visiting journalist] heard. There was a surrogate, a single mother, and we asked her why she had gone for surrogacy. She was a divorcee. She had two daughters and her husband had

Vora.indd 116

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

117

custody. And she had to pay that money to her lawyer to get her daughters back. And she didn’t have any other reason, because she had very old parents. She had come back from her in-­laws’ place, and her parents had grown old, and she herself could not earn that much money, so for that reason she fell into surrogacy. . . . Her husband had already gotten the divorce, but you know she wanted custody, wanted the daughters back, and wanted to pay the lawyer that much money to get them back. What reasons there can be for surrogacy. I met her again last time I was here. She said yes, I got them back, and am sending them for their education and I am also earning right now. I really felt that this reason . . . I had tears in my eyes.

Sonali told another story that relates another common narrative, one that is less likely to be propagated by clinic directors than the first: One woman, she was forty-­five years old, went into surrogacy, and she had four daughters, the first already married and pregnant. She wanted that money for her second daughter’s dowry. We asked her, would she like her son-­in-­law to know, she said no. She was here [in the hostel] for six to seven months. The community doesn’t understand that only the uterus has been used, it is nothing to do with her body. The sperms are from the male and the eggs are from that female only.21 They are just using the uterus. They don’t understand this thing. They feel that she has gone into a physical relationship and that is why she is pregnant. And that is why she has to hide it from the community. She stays here and gets the money and uses it.

Unlike practices such as saving surrogacy fees to pay for a child’s education, to afford a new home, or to support a business, or even narratives like the custody story that celebrates women’s empowered agency, the practice of using fees to give a dowry upon the marriage of a daughter is a very common one that is not circulated to foreign guests and patients by clinic staff. Paying for a dowry does not fit the model of rehabilitation of surrogates that the clinic promotes, because it does not fit the organizing logic of surrogacy fees as funding for social uplift.

Vora.indd 117

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM

118

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

The narrative that surrogacy fees serve as a project of social uplift for women accomplishes several ends for clinic directors. It directs attention away from the material conditions that lead women to become surrogates, which are presented as something that can be overcome after surrogacy. It also works to mitigate the financial quality of the transaction by framing it as ultimately one of charity on the part of commissioning parents. The meaning and value of surrogacy thus emerge as a layering of narratives, sometimes contradictory. These include surrogacy as a simple transaction of renting or selling gestation as a commodity for a fee, the stories that commissioning parents and surrogates tell for why they became involved, and the multiple ways that people meanwhile explain their participation through the language of altruism and giving rather than financial exchange. When I was still a relatively new arrival to the clinic, Dr. T commented to me about how smart one of the newer surrogate mothers appeared with her starched salwar kamiz and tidy hair. The surrogate had just left the room after picking up her first trimester’s stipend. Noting the payment in the appropriate file (that of the commissioning mother, under whose name hers was listed as “Surrogate: [Name]”), Dr. T also went on to explain the progress of another surrogate who had recently delivered an infant for her commissioning parents. He described her as being “thin and malnourished” when she first came to the clinic but pointed out that she had since developed a healthy and self-­confident appearance. Clinic directors, doctors, and staff tell similar stories again and again of the “rehabilitation” of the surrogate mothers through their encounter with the clinic. The directors explain that women see the success other women have had in using their fees to change their material circumstances, which is the primary way they become interested in participating. At the time I visited, a few part-­time courses to develop job skills were also being offered on an irregular basis to women living in the two surrogate hostels affiliated with the clinic. These courses included computer literacy, English language, and sewing instruction, meant to make the women more employable. One aspect of this program of uplift includes helping surrogates manage their finances. In January 2008, the directors of the clinic had just begun offering to place fees earned by surrogates, between five and seven thousand U.S. dollars, which for most surrogates is equivalent to eight or nine years of their

Vora.indd 118

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

119

family’s income, into trust accounts so that the money could be preserved, upon the woman’s request, until the time was right to use it for the purpose she wished. At that time, the clinic would pay the funds directly to a home builder, bank trust, college fund, or similar business or institution. Dr. T said that before the clinic oversaw the financial planning of the surrogates and their families, the women would misuse their funds. He reported families choosing to buy cars, scooters, or other consumables, and in at least one case the money was spent on gambling. Another popular use for part of the sum received with a successfully delivered baby was funding large-­scale religious ceremonies and rituals. Though such ceremonies could be interpreted as redistributing the wealth gained through surrogacy among the immediate community, and scooters and cars could be instruments in securing employment or improving social status, the doctors saw all of these uses as wasteful and began counseling the surrogates on how to use the money to buy a house, start a business, or put it toward the education of their children. These were the main uses for surrogacy fees that clinic staff members gave, though a number of surrogates talked about paying off debt or saving for dowries as goals, in addition to the projects emphasized by staff. The narrative of “rehabilitating” the surrogate mothers through counseling them in how to manage their fees, with a stated goal of making tangible material changes in their lives, does other kinds of work in addition to mitigating the tension between intimate and economic exchange in the clinic. One afternoon, Dr. T explained to me how women who pursue surrogacy at this clinic are very different than those who become surrogates in the West: From what I understand, the purpose for becoming a surrogate is different. They want to start a small business, and they see the choice as concerning the well-­being of their whole family. The surrogates here are very serious, they don’t spend on leisure activities or shopping. [And in comparison to surrogates in the United States,] they are pure, modest women who are also religious, and so they are not smoking, drinking or taking drugs.

Whereas, according to the directors of this clinic, most other fertility clinics in India have trouble recruiting surrogates, the Manushi clinic claims that it is

Vora.indd 119

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM

120

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

successful because of the counseling women receive from doctors and through the changes women observe in the lives of other, former surrogates. The stories told by the surrogate mothers, commissioning parents, and doctors with whom I spoke at the clinic all worked to produce a narrative of care and responsibility that was at least in part a response to the volume of news media in the United States, United Kingdom, and India in late 2007 and early 2008 focusing on the exploitation, or potential for exploitation, of surrogates by clinics and commissioning parents. When I arrived at the clinic, Dr. T politely asked me a few questions to make sure I was “the right person, the one [he was] supposed to be talking to,” adding that the clinic was forced to pay more and more attention to the persons to whom its staff gave interviews because of what they felt were inaccurate and maliciously false portrayals of the clinic and of commercial gestational surrogacy as an exploitative business preying on poor Indian women. Anecdotes that downplay the business aspect of the clinic’s surrogacy practice also work to mitigate what is perceived by the U.S. public as the dangerous mingling of economic and intimate exchange in surrogacy, a separation that, as Viviana Zelizer explains, requires the erection of complicated narratives and often the intervention of legal structures to negotiate the coexistence of economic and intimate relations.22 Scholarship on commercial surrogacy shows that questions of exploitation and commodification, often voiced as the critique of womb renting or baby selling, have been at the center of surrogacy debates since the practice began to gain visibility in the early 1980s.23 As Elly Teman explains, related concerns about surrogacy have led many countries to ban the practice.24 Surrogate mothers as well as the clinic staff and intended parents organize narratives and social relationships to mediate this cultural anxiety about the commodification of human bodies and parts, one of the perceived threats of the practice of surrogacy. To explain her interest in expanding the transnational surrogacy practice, and to strengthen the emphasis on its altruistic rather than commercial aspects, Dr. B, codirector of the clinic, describes her interest in surrogacy to journalists, researchers, and potential commissioning parents as stemming from a legacy of social work in her family. She claims that it is this legacy, rather than business or economic imperatives, that motivates her work in the clinic. In her

Vora.indd 120

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

121

narrative, this altruistic drive is directed toward both the infertile couples whose plight she keenly feels as a mother herself and toward the surrogates, whom she wants to have better lives. In talking to the Indian and international media, the directors further emphasize that their surrogacy practice is not a business because they do not charge for the work they do in matching surrogates and commissioning parents. They point out that this is a service often provided through paid intermediary agencies located in other countries where commercial surrogacy is legal, such as the United States. They emphasize that even though they do expend effort to recruit and vet good surrogates, they only charge for their medical and technical services. The project of rehabilitation also functions at least partially to relieve commissioning parents of the fear of exploitation; instead, they are given the opportunity to feel that they are improving the surrogate’s chances in life. Karen, an administrative assistant from eastern Ohio, had been at the clinic for just over a week with her husband, Jim, a salesman by profession, as they began the process of IVF and arranging for surrogacy. After several unsuccessful attempts to become pregnant through IVF at a U.S. fertility clinic, Karen had been diagnosed with an incompetent uterus, a condition that prevents pregnancy, but she had viable eggs. She had looked into several fertility clinics offering surrogacy in India, including two in Mumbai and the Manushi clinic. They chose Manushi after conversing with the clinics over e-­mail and by phone. She said: The other clinics felt like such a business, I mean obviously everyone does things for financial gain, but it just had a very negative feel to it, and being here it feels like you are helping someone who really needs it and they are doing something amazing for you. It is such a positive feeling for you. This clinic seemed much more open and like they weren’t hiding anything.25

Karen said that the experience of going through IVF cycles in the United States had been dehumanizing. “You feel like a number. Sometimes people in the clinic even refer to you by your number rather than your name. The experience here has been very personalized, and I don’t feel like just a number.”

Vora.indd 121

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM

122

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

These comments reflect the general anxiety about participating in the exchange of intimate labor for pay. Despite a discourse that emphasized liberal notions of doing good and engendering social uplift over financial exchange, themes of giving and charity were entangled and held in tension with more commercial and alienated relations. In the majority of gestational surrogacy arrangements through the Manushi clinic, surrogates and their clients have little or no communication between their initial meeting and when the couple comes to receive the child, though commissioning parents who wish to communicate with their surrogate, if there are no language barriers, may do so.26 Some of the clients who had newly entered the surrogacy process related lofty intentions for how they would reward their surrogates once the child was born, for example, by bringing her and her family to visit the United States or by helping pay for her children’s education. The doctors collect these anecdotes and relate them to the media and to potential clients, circulating them to deflect from the financial nature of the relationships involved, including their own relationships to clients. A number of clients with whom I spoke, particularly those who were nearing the end of their time working with the clinic, cited helping the women working as surrogates to overcome their poverty as one of the reasons they chose this clinic over others, and almost all of the foreign intended parents (including Indians living abroad) expressed a wish to do something for surrogates beyond the required fee. However, the wish was usually expressed only in financial terms, such as through sentiments of wanting to give additional money to the surrogate or to contribute to her children’s education. These statements of intention, at least based on the evidence available, did not often, if ever, manifest but worked to repress the commodity nature of the exchange and functioned in part to address the sense of uncertainty and sometimes guilt that commissioning parents felt about potentially exploiting the surrogates. Instead, commissioning parents could feel that they were improving surrogates’ lives. However, despite these expressions of benevolent intention toward surrogates, when commissioning parents expressed feelings of connection, it was to “India” rather than to individual women, and those who said they would inform their children of the circumstances of their birth expressed this as a

Vora.indd 122

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

123

hope to bring them to India to see where they were born. Anecdotal evidence suggests that commissioning parents from India tend to be less involved in concerns about the surrogate outside of her pregnancy. The altruistic content of the commissioning parents’ feeling of helping the surrogates improve their lives by hiring them through the clinic, written over the unequal material and power differences in their positions, is evocative of the relations entailed in microlending. Dr. B’s project of financial management and counseling of surrogates also makes sense to potential critics and, depending on their home context, potential surrogates, in part because of the growing prevalence of microlending as a development discourse and its circulation of the need to perform the financial planning and self-­discipline expected of borrowers by lenders. As a discourse of development, microlending promises real social change by ensuring that money stays in the hands of women, who are said to be statistically more likely to use it in ways that benefit their families and communities, and also to pay it back. In a parallel way, the clinic ensures that the surrogate’s fees are kept under her own control, at least nominally.27 Sujata-­ben, a recent surrogate, said, See, I make people understand that the finances I have earned, I have kept them for proper use, but I don’t always tell people. Only people I already know well. To say this to strangers can cause problems. I haven’t had any problems with neighbors, and my father-­in-­law knows what I plan to do [and does not interfere]. So things are fine in the family and neighborhood.

Dr. B’s promise to potential surrogates, through the word-­of-­mouth recruiting strategy, is that she will assist them in keeping control of their earnings, even against the will of the husband and father-­in-­law in the house, whose money it is ultimately understood to be by the conventional patriarchal social logics of the joint family economy. Part of this project is that the husband’s relationship with the clinic does not end with signing the permission form for his wife to become a surrogate but that he is also, at least by association, included in the clinic’s program of uplift or restructuring. For surrogates, and sometimes their husbands, working with the clinic becomes a career plan. Directors relay stories

Vora.indd 123

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM

124

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

of the former surrogates who have been hired into service positions like nursing assistants or custodians and, when possible, or in cases where the directors feel it will be particularly important, their husbands are also incorporated. For example, the cook in one of the hostels is the husband of a former surrogate who needed a job, and other husbands have been hired as ancillary clinic staff. The story of the husband who gave up vices like alcoholism or gambling under pressure from Dr. B is another trope of reform or rehabilitation of husbands. In her analysis of microlending in South Asia, Megan Moodie describes the way that narratives about the women borrowers and the transformations of their lives made possible through small loans motivate investors to feel connected to and emotionally invested in the project of microlending. She argues that this particular social and emotional bond is a necessary precondition for investors to see loans as a worthwhile risk, in terms of potential financial profit but also in the promise of the improved material circumstances of the borrower, her family, and her community. In the same way that the ART clinic must shield commissioning parents from the reality of the material conditions that lead women to become surrogates in the first place—­the inability to attain financial stability with their family’s labor alone—­by perpetuating and enacting a program of rehabilitation through entrepreneurial investment of the com­missioning parents’ payment, Moodie describes the way that Kiva .org—­the most prominent Web-­based microlending organization of the mid-­ 2000s—­writes over the fact that loans do not fund small-­scale entrepreneurship because there are more pressing needs, such as debt, dowries, and other forms of social reproduction. In this way, Moodie argues that peer-­to-­peer microlending, facilitated by organizations like Kiva.org, only works when investors see financial risk but not the actual “gendered peril,” the reproductive work of getting by under harsh conditions, that provides a form of insurance for lenders and that characterizes the social and material context in which borrowers use their loans.28 Microfinance as a scheme for development of postcolonial, Third World nations, which is supposed to intervene at the most immediate level in the restructuring of subjects and local economies to make them more functional and compatible with larger neoliberal structures, is a part of the background

Vora.indd 124

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

125

for Dr. B’s narrative of the social work imperative of her desire to make sure that surrogates use their fees in constructive ways. At the very least, there is an important parallel in these narratives, and likely some interchange between them. One important power dynamic that emerges through an analysis of the similarities between the Manushi clinic’s program of “rehabilitation” and the gendered dynamics of microlending is the way that commissioning parents, whether men, women, or both, are situated as rightful and legitimate parents of a child through a masculinized and patriarchal relation of property ownership toward the surrogate as the temporary custodian of that property. Because of a lack of other options, women who choose to work as surrogates take up an embodied program of risk management for subjects in the Global North. Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell explain this phenomenon: “The poor in the South, unable to participate in the high-­technology fantasy of endlessly renewable life, sell a portion of their bodies’ capacities to wealthier patients in the North.”29 The high-­technology fantasy is one of endlessly extended fertility and reproduction, where raising children can be postponed until a moment in the middle-­class career or earning curve where the arrival of children won’t compromise the material underpinnings of the middle-­class lifestyle in the North. The gendering of dynamics of power between commissioning parents and gestational surrogates is matched with a gendering of risk taken on by the surrogate mother. In the case of U.S. commissioning parents, part of this risk management includes subsidizing a fantasy of middle-­class life that continues to include children despite the increasing material difficulty of maintaining the lifestyle that goes with this identity, producing the postponement of childbearing in favor of career building. The risks for surrogates include exposure to high levels of the synthetic hormones that allow their bodies to become pregnant through IVF, the more general risks of pregnancy and childbirth (often with twins), and additional social and emotional risks.30 These gendered risks are organized and largely effaced through the naturalization of a masculinized and patriarchal position for commissioning parents as property owners and therefore rightful and legitimate parents of the child. In the previous chapter, Indian IT workers in the United States and India described a sense of the lack of future stability connected to their positioning as temporary and

Vora.indd 125

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM

126

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

replaceable. The structural positioning of surrogates and their work means that their lives cannot be organized in a way that allows for risk management or a dependable plan for the future. As seen in previous chapters, this tendency among Indian workers at many class levels to be living without a sense of future stability characterizes their role in supporting lives elsewhere. Expectation and Transnational Commercial Mothering Work I was introduced to Radhika, a woman from a town near the clinic, while she was resting on a hospital bed in a common room containing three other occupied beds. Her husband had accompanied her to the clinic for an examination that had determined that the first attempt at embryo transplantation was successful and that she was therefore pregnant as a surrogate. She planned to stay in a surrogate hostel for at least the full nine months of pregnancy and likely some additional time after delivery. She had two children of her own, a twelve-­ year-­old daughter and a six-­year-­old son. She told everyone in her community that she was going to Dubai for a job as a cook, “to make people understand that this was something only a lady would do,” justifying the need for her to travel rather than her husband. Only she and her husband knew the real story. Her husband, Deepak, said that he planned to visit her every week, and though she said she was worried about missing her children, she saw what she was doing as ultimately for their benefit: We haven’t properly planned what to do with the money, but the aim is education, tuition. We are financially stable; he [gesturing to her husband, who was standing slightly behind her as she sat on the hospital cot] is an assistant to a lawyer. Things are fine, but what income we had, it was not enough to last long, it was not sufficient for a quality education. So this is the aim, to get quality education, to send the children to college.

Until beginning the process of visits to the clinic for the various interviews, tests, paperwork, and procedures leading up to IVF and pregnancy as a contracted surrogate, Radhika had been working at a shop that sold electrical

Vora.indd 126

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

127

equipment. She found out about the surrogacy opportunity from a well-­off friend who had heard about the clinic’s surrogacy program and thought it would be a good opportunity for Radhika “to get ahead.” She said, “Everyone back home had invited me over for meals and going-­away festivities because I was said to be leaving for one year to a foreign country.” Her husband, Deepak, expressed his worry. “We have never been separated before, and the only time I had to leave her before I was in tears with worry for her well-­being, and will be worrying about her for the entire year.” Sujata-­ben, a former surrogate who had completed her contract a year prior, also acknowledged the role of worry and anxiety in surrogacy. Before she became a surrogate mother, she worked as a maid in a large bungalow owned by a wealthy family, but shortly after her surrogacy, she was hired to work with the custodial staff for the clinic. She described the way that other women sometimes have moments of panic once they have entered the sur­ rogacy process. “It is a natural thing and common among surrogates to have moments when you will get worried or doubt what you have done, because once it is there, you have nine months ahead of you.” When this happens, she says the directors or other clinic staff, “in a natural, human way,” step forward and counsel them. “There are many people who get panicked, but I was not one of them. I had already delivered three sons, so I did not have that problem.” After acknowledging how difficult it was to see their husbands and children at most once a week, as well as managing the isolation of living away from their homes in general, women who stayed in the hostel I visited described one positive aspect of living there throughout their pregnancy and postdelivery as an experience of sisterhood with other surrogates. The vast majority of surrogates in general, and all of those with whom I spoke, have not had the opportunity to attend college, and some imagined their experience away from the demands of family in this feminine space to be analogous to living in a student dormitory or hostel. Some women described missing others who had left following delivery, and one woman noted that she dreaded the time when she would leave her sisters at the hostel behind after she completed her surrogacy. At the same time, many women explained that they were only

Vora.indd 127

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM

128

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

staying in the clinic hostel because the clinic almost mandates it and because there is a pressing need to keep this work a secret from their extended families to escape its social stigma—­and living in the hostel gives them a place to stay away from home and out of sight. This desire for anonymity emphasized in media photos and interviews underlines the potential for shame in this work, though surrogates emphasize that the work is morally defensible—­a common position, as also evidenced by Amrita Pande’s study of commercial Indian surrogacy.31 Case studies by Sheela Saravanan of four Indian women who were gestational surrogates in a similar clinic in 2009 suggest that the boredom of living in a hostel can be extensive because of the small number of activities and reduced freedom; this is compounded by limitations on the surrogate’s mobility, because she wouldn’t be driving and often wouldn’t want to become known to people living in the area. Saravanan’s cases also suggest that the experience of mourning among surrogates after giving the infant to its intended parents is more common than is represented in the clinic or media, an argument supported by the feminist organization Sama’s study of clinics in Delhi and Punjab.32 This mourning would necessarily have to be kept private, given the secrecy of most surrogacies. In her discussion of the impact of postmodern and neoliberal global political and economic restructuring on the Philippines and on the concomitant formation of political subjects and projects, Tadiar explains in Things Fall Away, In the midst of the [increasing reliance] on service labor and the social logics of cooperation invented by the private sector, these practices of care are fundamental because they create and sustain the subjective conditions of that labor as well as the social relationships and flexible collectivities that capitalist management and production so eagerly seek as the conditions of new strategies of accumulation. At the same time, these practices of experience are tangential to [those strategies]. (260)

The bonds that form between women living in the hostel as the result of their shared conditions and their sentiments of sisterhood simultaneously work to keep them in the hostels, where the clinic wants them to reside for purposes of

Vora.indd 128

16/01/2015 11:38:31 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

129

surveillance, hence making the clinic more attractive to potential commissioning parents, while also creating social relationships and discourse about the meaning and value of surrogacy outside the discourses of the market and clinic. One example of the way surrogates talked about the value and meaning of surrogacy outside of clinic and market discourses was in an emphasis on a feeling that in carrying someone else’s child, they were doing something extraordinary, often described in religious language of being like a god or of being able to give to an infertile couple a gift usually given only by God. Those who spoke to this topic emphasized that this exalted aspect of their actions was much more important than the money aspect and, in fact, was their primary motivation. At the same time, when I asked one former surrogate mother how she would feel if one of her daughters wanted to be a surrogate when she was older, her reply was immediate and negative: she explained that the whole reason she herself undertook surrogacy was so that her children could become educated and wouldn’t have to do such things, and that she would not want her daughters to experience such pain. Her comments suggest that despite, or in addition to, the narrative of the gift nature of surrogacy, with its divine components, surrogacy is also a type of work that is not desirable, except when economically necessary. Discussion of the divine aspects of surrogacy points to simultaneous and competing logics for the social meaning and value of gestational surrogacy that don’t translate or circulate through the genetic definition of a biological parent, or the economic logic of the value of the labor of surrogacy as technologically mediated “women’s work” in the global economy. For the reader and scholar who does not originate from within the communities where the women working as surrogates reside, the logic of surrogacy as a divine act that creates a future with connection between the world of the surrogate and the world of the commissioning parents suggests one way to imagine the significance of gestational surrogacy in terms that exceed those of market-­based understandings of labor and economies. As Radhika’s story illustrates, women working as gestational surrogates for the Manushi clinic also described the undertaking as an unparalleled earning opportunity that must be pursued for the benefit of their families. Despite

Vora.indd 129

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

130

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

being told again and again that the only relationship they will have to the intended parents of the fetus they carry to term will be monetary, discussions in the residence hostels and comments by women aspiring to become surrogates pointed to different expectations. Former surrogates with whom I spoke said that despite their coaching, they missed the children after they left India and hoped to hear about their development and to receive pictures as the children continued their lives away from them. That said, none mentioned the hope of a future relationship specifically with that child, even if some said they liked the idea of meeting the child again someday. Rather, some described the hope of and, in a few cases, the attempt to create, an ongoing relationship with the child’s commissioning parents that would continue to benefit themselves and their families in the future. Some women have tried to establish a reciprocal relationship modeled on that of patron and client, where the surrogate expects the commissioning parents to sustain a sense of duty toward the surrogate mother after the child is given to them, and even though she makes no kinship claim on the child, the surrogate might feel that she can make a claim on the parents as patrons.33 For example, Sita had just given birth a few weeks prior, and although the commissioning parents had gone back to the United States with their infant, she was still staying at one of the hostels for her recovery. Her family would not be expecting her back home for another month, because when she decided to become a surrogate, she told them she had taken a job for one year in Chicago. Sita explained that even though she missed the child, she felt good about what she had done: I feel that I have done something for someone that has given them great happiness, and I feel connected to this person. I feel like I have known her for a long time, and she keeps calling on the phone to ask how I am feeling, how I am doing, and that makes me feel good.

I asked Sita if she thought this would be able to continue after she moved back home. She said that she expected calls from the United States, which she planned to tell her family were from people she met at her job while she was away. “I hope it will continue over the lifetime of the child.” Even though

Vora.indd 130

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

131

women with whom I spoke admitted that it hasn’t happened very often, there was a tendency to dwell on the stories of those rare surrogates who did receive continued or extended communication and support or even just promises of support from their commissioning parents. To think through the theory of meaning and value proffered by this dwelling on the potential, if unlikely, future return on the unquantifiable gift and labor of gestational surrogacy, I juxtapose this expectation with that of the protagonist in Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Stanadayini.”34 Set in 1960s India, the story tells of Jashoda, who, as a hired wet nurse to an upper-­class family, nourishes both her own young children and the children of her employer through early childhood over the course of more than twenty years. After breast-­feeding her employer’s children all day, she sometimes cannot offer milk to her own hungry sons, Nepal and Gopal. After her many years of “professional motherhood,” Jashoda contracts breast cancer, but her disease remains undiagnosed because of the general lack of interest or care among those she calls all together her “milk-­children.”35 Jashoda eventually dies alone and in great pain without being cared for by her husband, children, or former charges. As she is on her deathbed, she says, “If you suckle you are a mother, all lies! Nepal and Gopal don’t look at me, and the Master’s boys don’t spare a peek to ask how I’m doing.”36 She expects a return on her attention and care that she does not receive—­a return that is part of what situates her subjectivity in terms of kinship and not just as a professional nurse. In this moment of Jashoda’s hindsight, “Stanadayini” suggests that the alienation of commercial care work can spill out to infect supposedly noncommercial, filial relations. The labor contract and provision of milk and care do not seem able to carry that surplus value and meaning of the work of mothering in this reading of Jashoda’s disappointed expectations. In an essay accompanying her translation of this story from Bengali to English, Gayatri Spivak focuses on the failure of exchange embodied in Jashoda’s ill health. Mahasweta Devi’s own discussion of her narrative dwells on maternal sacrifice and cancer as an allegory for the postcolonial Indian nation. In my reading of expectation in “Stanadayini” alongside the ethnography of the ART clinic, I want to juxtapose the two forms of expectation of return in mothering

Vora.indd 131

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

132

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

work. Jashoda’s milk is described in the story as “surplus,” and this surplus is manufactured as Jashoda reorganizes her entire existence to provide milk for her clients. At the end of her life, Jashoda is a woman abandoned by all of the people for whom she spent her life caring, a socially tangible state of unwanted solitude. This separation from the product of one’s life work, also a condition of capitalist production, is very visible in the case of Jashoda and the work of mothering. Yet in some ways, this alienation is exacerbated in cases, like that of the Indian gestational surrogate, where the producer and the product are both human subjects and continue their existences on opposite sides of the growing division between service producers and service consumers. This type of separation isn’t socially coded as loneliness, but like the unique form of affective alienation from social life in call center work, or from connection to socially productive creative work in IT, this alienated social relation is an affective cost that lingers as a tangible and present absence, like the children who were not there during Jashoda’s final moments. Spivak frames her analysis of this story by insisting that one responsibility of teaching the importance of literature is to unravel a text and make visible the assignment of subject positions, and to “re-­constellate” the text by placing it “out of its proper context and putting it within alien arguments.”37 She describes setting aside the author’s own (in this case nationalist) reading and instead focuses on Jashoda as “subaltern as gendered subject.” She then follows Jashoda’s shift from “domestic to ‘domestic,’” where the activity of breast-­ feeding in her home and with her children becomes an activity she exchanges for a wage. Spivak argues that reading Jashoda as gendered subaltern allows the reader to distance herself from both the assumption of the male body of the free worker and also the naturalizing of women’s bodily–­affective function as mother.38 Rather than “reasoning” the figure of Jashoda into “existing paradigms,” Spivak instead asserts the need to focus on the literary, or aesthetic, nature of the text, apart from a project of reason or empiricism. She argues that, in this frame, the failure of exchange is the heart of the story, in particular the material impact of the fact that “mothers will give more than they get,” a phrase that characterizes the particular nature of exploitation of the gendered subaltern and also the shift from unpaid to paid domestic labor.39 In this way,

Vora.indd 132

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

133

she argues that “Jashoda’s body is the place of knowledge, rather than her consciousness/self/subjectivity,” thereby complicating the assumption of the materialist predication of the subject in Marx’s labor theory of value.40 We can see that in the selling of her labor power and her milk, protected as these are by the work of her own self-­care in the novel, Jashoda produces herself and her wards–­children as commodities. Even her husband’s labor is enlisted in this production when he is told by her employer to stay home and do the cooking, cleaning, and additional child care so that Jashoda might save her energy for breast-­feeding alone. Here it is easier to imagine the role of affective wage labor producing care, love, attention, nurture, and nourishment in the form of commodities that take residence in bodies that will not remain in the social arena in which the worker lives. Spivak imagines Jashoda’s milk-­children growing up to become feminists in the diaspora, populating the Anglo-­American academy. Similarly, we must wonder about the children born to women in the Manushi clinic in India: what happens when affective labor and human vital energy are invested into a person who then goes off into the world, never to be seen again? Marx argues, “The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object . . . it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.”41 Marx’s text itself suggests that any wage labor alienates the worker from a commodity, whether that commodity is love, guidance, support, or, in the case of surrogacy, the birth of an infant as the production of human life. What Jashoda experiences as abandonment toward the end of her life, when the children who are products of her care and nurture confront her as alien, is revealed to have been, perhaps, alienation from the very beginning. In the work of maids, nannies, and other service workers, the provision of comfort through smiles, soothing remarks, or the meeting of subtle wishes and desires of the client often requires the person providing such commodities to evoke the actual feelings of indulgence, care, worry, and concern behind such actions.42 The example of a wet nurse is an obvious illustration of how such intimate expression, requiring the production of genuine feelings, can then be completely alienated from the producer. The state of living in alienation from the physical products of one’s labor is a kind of loneliness, even in

Vora.indd 133

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

134

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

the traditional understanding of productive labor found in Marx’s work. In The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx explains the difference between working to live, when selling labor-­power for a wage is the only means of subsistence, and working in a way that is integrated with a good life. The alienation of self and of individual vitality that results from the necessity of working to live is not the “good life” in Marx’s imagination. The more hours of the day spent in such labor, the less time there is for what Marx calls “human use” and Neferti Tadiar calls “human potential.”43 I read the question of the good life, and the potential for a future good life, as an expression of a person’s ability to accumulate the investment of value into that life. As elaborated in the introduction, this value invested into someone’s potential future can be described as a form of biocapital. The distinctions between these several examples of alienation in commercial mothering work are helpful for understanding how both colonial exploitation and labor allocation, followed by globalization and outsourcing, have led to a large structural biopolitical system that supports life in valued spaces by evacuating it from less valued spaces. This system resembles in many ways other forms of the exploitation of gendered care and domestic work, like the class-­based exploitation described in “Stanadayini,” and in many cases intersects with such locally specific differentials but is not identical to them. For example, transnational surrogate mothers and immigrant domestic workers leave their children to care for the children of others. In these examples, the mother and the child continue their existences on opposite sides of the growing separation between producers in the developing world and consumers in the overdeveloped world. This separation reveals the alienated vital energy invested into others’ lives, lives that may remain as present absences to haunt the lives of those who made them. In “Stanadayini,” the work of care, nurture, and nourishment produces a commodity that we can call vitality or thriving. We could also call it a child-­as-­ future-­productive-­adult. These grown children, also commodities, are incomprehensible to Jashoda in their failure to carry an overt and expected social relationship. In the case of transnational Indian surrogate mothers, this relationship is bounded by contracts that are designed to favor the rights of the

Vora.indd 134

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

135

commissioning parents over any claims of the surrogate. One might expect that in the case of a paid wet nurse, where the work of care is based on a contract, it should not be a surprise when that labor does not entail a social relationship.44 However, it may be more surprising that Jashoda’s biological children are similarly alienated at the end of the story. Jashoda’s expectation exemplifies the way that commercialization alters acts of mothering, where there is a promiscuous mingling between work and nonwork, as both are constituted of overlapping acts of care and the performance of affect. Her expecta­ tion further suggests that commercializing affect qualitatively reorganizes affect and the social relations it reproduces even outside of commercial exchange. Going back to the clinic and its contracted gestational surrogates, the expectation of the subject of commercial mothering seems to deflate, if not defeat, a simple reading of alienation and objectification in this work. As with Jashoda’s wet nursing, the work of commercial mothering at the clinic is recognized by those who perform it as producing social relationships in excess of commodities—­but the mediation of transnational capital and the contract mean that surrogacy also produces the alienated social relations that character­ ize capitalist being. The juxtaposition of the literary and ethnographic narratives requires attention to simultaneous and coextensive systems of value. The heteropatriarchal nuclear family gets subsumed into global structures of capital in different ways, and discerning the role of the state is not always the key to understanding this process. For example, “Stanadayini” could be read as a theory of how gendered labor and kinship intersect to produce relatedness and social value, rather than capitalist value. The details of how women are included in economic relationships are paramount—­how and into what? For example, the women taking employment as surrogates are entering into the industrialized workforce as both reproductive workers and biocapital, rather than just as workers. The way surrogates describe their actions as exceeding clinic discourse, and the resulting expectation of social and monetary compensation, therefore becomes a theory of the particularities of alienation in industrialized biological and affective reproduction and its necessary forms of compensation. The expectation of future relation on the part of surrogates also refuses the definition of the surrogates’ social role and value as temporary. Temporariness

Vora.indd 135

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

136

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

is a common temporal condition also characterizing the types of biological and affective labor described in other chapters, including IT work in Bangalore, with its lack of future stability, and the frictive temporalities between agent and customer, and agent and local society, in call center work. The refusal to accept the condition of being temporary also refuses what Cooper calls “neoliberal speculation,” in biotechnology markets that invest in processes of “permanent embryogenesis [rather] than states of suspended animation.”45 In more general terms, refusing temporariness also refuses the assignment of social nonvalue that comes with the denial of ongoing social connection. Tracking these imaginations through reading the two narratives in juxtaposition points to a rejection of the reductive logic of capital and capitalist labor. It presents an insistence on the complexity of the subject of commercial mothering work and asserts the potential for an alternative value of, and ethics for, the practice of commercial gestational surrogacy. It also invites us to seriously contemplate the ethics of any system that only allows someone the means to a secure life at the cost of an unquantifiable surplus that must be removed from the vitality of his or her own biological and social existence. Expectation, Surplus, and the Subject of Transnational Commercial Mothering Labor The affective commodities of the surrogate’s self-­care while pregnant and the breast-­feeding and nurturing of the newborn yield immediate well-­being and therefore future life opportunities for both the infant and its parents upon their consumption. For this reason, I have argued that they operate as biocapital.46 The commodification of these affects also suggests how the subject of mothering work can be detached from the subject of sentimental maternity. This detachment creates a way to think about important forms of alienation, subjectification, and value that bear upon the discussion of reproduction, illuminating in particular maternity and the family as sites of exploitation and the accumulation of value. Nurture and love, as commodities in the work of surrogacy, have a complicated relationship to motherhood. Motherhood (as pregnancy) is a precondition of, but also excessive to, the work of gestating a fetus who is defined

Vora.indd 136

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

137

through Western medical epistemology as the “property” of its biological progenitors. The commodification of nurture in gestation, where the care of the self and the care of the fetus are one and the same, provides a useful illustration of the ways that affect can be taken for granted in commodity relations, because in it we can see the fetishization of motherly feelings toward the fetus as an object. The intended parents of the child carried by a surrogate pay for her room and board and medical fees in addition to the fee for her surrogacy. These provisions allow her to rest from other labors while gestating the fetus, as well as ensuring that she and the fetus receive adequate nutrition and preventative care. The surrogate’s physical needs are cared for as an instrument in the work of child rearing and nurture. The costs to her physical vitality from pregnancy and breast-­feeding are obvious. However, there are other expenditures involved if we see the use-­value of this labor as multiple, and as a necessity diverted from her own life and social world, and if we acknowledge the intricacy of social expectation in the nurture of both biological and client children. In the work of mothering, reproductive labor can function as productive labor invested into a commodity with exchange value, and as a result, love, affection, and mother’s milk can all become an exchange on a future return—­ that of the child’s future care, attention, and resources offered to the mother once the child becomes an adult. Looking at such labor as simply reproductive fails when, as Spivak points out, we recognize the woman providing such labor as a complex subject. The reproductive (Third World, Global South, woman of color, and/or subaltern) woman as an economic subject can provide affective commodities with the goal of exchange, “giving more than she gets” in a parallel but different model of exploitation to that of the subject of labor-­power, an act that necessarily impacts the way we read the commodity’s use-­value. Full realization of the expenditure of the surrogate, and its social impact, only possible through an analysis of the racialized and gendered colonial legacies at work in the surrogacy industry, may not be feasible but at the least would require much higher compensation and recognition of the kinds of social indebtedness and responsibility that surrogates articulate against the limited logic of sociality recognized in neoliberal market exchange.

Vora.indd 137

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

138

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

If affective labor is not actually a secondary, but in fact a primary necessity for life, then labor-­power is not the single predicate of the capitalist subject. We need to ask, is the use value of affective labor the same as other expressions of labor power?47 Who is the subject of commercial mothering work, when that work is conceptualized as affective and biological labor? If we accept the argument that living labor is never completely translated into a static commodity that represents a static value, as I have argued in the introduction to this book, then the question of what is exchanged through the work of commercial mothering becomes a dynamic site for reading the contradictions of capitalist mothering as they are tied to histories in India and global centers of consumption and accumulation like the United States that are connected through transnational neoliberal capitalism. Exchange between the owner of the genetic and technical means of production (the commissioning parents and the clinics), the owner of labor and the uterus as a means of production (the surrogate mother), and the commodity, which is the vessel of the vitality of that living labor (the new infant and its care and nurture as a fetus), thus has a complex and layered set of meanings and material effects. In addition to expanding the range of subject positions one can inhabit as “mother,” and performing mothering both as capitalist labor and as excessive to capitalist production, ARTs also create future “opportunities” for less wealthy women to step into devalued care labor markets abroad and for more wealthy women to outsource the work of childbearing and child rearing to expand their ability to pursue careers full-­time through their reproductive years. The imbalance in the global movement of affective commodities, where surplus is artificially created in the Global South, leads to their accumulation in (over)developed spaces where they are consumed to fill ever-­increasing demands for such commodities. The loss of consuming power by the producers of affective commodities, represented by the alienation of Jashoda, and the lack of access to basic necessities like obstetric care for surrogates until they become gestational service providers for more privileged consumers are essen­ tial parts of how “surplus” is created for export. This manufactured surplus is then invested into lives that exist separately from the social sphere and the lives of those who produced it. Extensive systems of mobility and technology

Vora.indd 138

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM



Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

139

exist to supply affective and biological necessities to spaces of high consumption, systems that do not exist to provide producers with “affectively necessary labor”48 and other affective and biological necessities. These life support systems produce a deficit in spaces of production.49 In a sense, all labor operates as a type of biocapital, where the product of human vital energy is consumed to promote the well-­being and future life chances of someone else. However, one of the important differences is that the exchange of affective commodities is not mediated by the embodiment of that energy into an object. Even with physical commodities, access to consumption of the vital energy they contain—­and therefore the means to a secure and comfortable life—­is restricted more in some places than others. The goal of identifying the productivity of affective and biological labor is both to make them visible and to point to the flow of value represented in the lives of their producers and consumers. The suggestion of a temporality of expectation on the part of gestational surrogates, oriented toward the commissioning parents, projects a logic of extended mutual dependence into an indefinite future. This expectation refuses the logic of just-­in-­time reproduction50 but does not insist on an assertion of kinship in the frames so carefully guarded against in clinic practice and in the Draft ART Bill (2012) active in India’s parliament. The expectation of surrogates is largely invisible to the non-­Indian commissioning parents, as it arises from the ethnographic context of Indian relations of power and reciprocity, which do not fall into the form of the patriarchal nuclear family. At the same time, it does not engage in the logic of the child as property of its legally defined parents. Expectation in this instance is not about the expectation of a parental relation but rather of an ethics of mutual benefit that acknowledges the role of the surrogate as more than a hired service provider and as more than a womb for rent. Recognizing this ethics means to understand the seriousness of discourses of the altruistic and divine nature of what surrogates give to commissioning parents, even as it is used as a marketing tool by the clinic and as a reassurance for anxious commissioning parents who do not want to believe that they are taking advantage of the poverty of their surrogate. This is a different, and perhaps additional, kind of alienation than just that of

Vora.indd 139

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

140

Transnational Gestational Surrogacy

the commodity. The failure of this expectation to translate to commissioning parents other than as an occasional request by a surrogate for noncontracted payment51—­awkward for commissioning parents in its mixing of intimacy and money, but structurally irrelevant to them once the child is delivered—­ does not erase the expectation and should not erase the need to attend to it in a comprehensive ethics of transnational surrogacy in India.

Vora.indd 140

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

epilogue

Imperial Pasts and Mortgaged Futures

D

“

id my iPhone kill 17 people?” Joel Johnson asks in his investigative re        port on Shenzhen’s Foxconn facilities in a Wired magazine article published in 2011.1 The concerns voiced by the author and those he represents, the consumers of iPhones, are not framed as a socialist-­style politics of “workers of the world unite” but rather as a liberal politics that engages the conditions of production and labor to the point where the relatively comfortable inhabitants of the Global North, the readers of Wired, don’t have to feel guilty about consuming high-­tech gadgets. The highly publicized suicides of workers in the Foxconn facility run parallel to the story of a paper note found hidden in a package of Halloween decorations written by an incarcerated Chinese worker. The handwritten note politely implored the finder to report repressive incarceration and extensive abuse in a Chinese labor camp to the “World Human Rights Organization.”2 Recent controversies surrounding the globalized neoliberal economy, from iPhone-­related suicides to smuggled human rights pleas, highlight the growing gulf between racialized, gendered, and ostensibly endlessly exploitable populations who labor in places like China, Bangladesh, and India and consumer subjects who worry about their own ethical position within the globalized economy they enjoy.3 Aside from the hidden note, and the attention paid to some workplace deaths, the circulation of the commodity seems to be the only opportunity the incarcerated worker has for political speech and communication to his other, the consumer. In the seemingly singular time and space of the postsocialist 141

Vora.indd 141

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

142 Epilogue

present and its lack of a horizon for capitalism, the relations between spaces and subjects of production and consumption seem to grow more distant and antagonistic, and the politics uniting them consequently harder to articulate within existing frameworks, even though international human rights regimes symbolically function as a space of mediation for an internationally defensible ethics of human life.4 The advent of a postsocialist global condition that followed the dissolution of the USSR implied the beginning of a seemingly all-­capitalist era in which biological life is imagined as the unifying feature of humanity, both in its vulnerability to exploitation and its ethical value as worthy of protection. Models of recognition and group-­based rights that emerged from U.S. civil rights struggles and more broadly from World War II in terms of human rights continue to structure the imagination of how life can be protected from exploitation and biopolitical pressure. While not losing sight of the continuity such collectives may have with historical forms, we may also attend to the importance of ongoing social justice imaginaries as they have been adapted to ever-­emerging new social–­technological platforms, political imaginaries that protest capitalist development and neoliberal cultural and economic projects of capture. For example, such models may not currently accommodate the incorporation of partial rather than whole subjects, or the maintenance of permanent exclusion not just as surplus labor but as what Hong calls existential surplus: being excluded from full subjecthood to maintain the valorization of protected spheres of life.5 Keeping up with the impact of ever-­new technologies on the social body and concepts of the human, with their manifold modes of marking difference, is a challenge for ethnic studies and gender studies formations, whose very entrance into the academy was preceded by group-­based initiatives that in part support a nation-­based and representational model of legibility. Biopolitical legacies of colonialism, indenture, slavery, and other forms of constrained autonomy linked to the extraction of value urge us to decenter the recognizable subject (of labor, of gender) as the privileged mode of getting at histories of labor and political consciousness. The role of new technologies in globalizing labor therefore requires an expansive critique of how specific technologies may operate in the service of racializing and devaluing particular populations

Vora.indd 142

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

Epilogue 143

and extending various techniques of imperial domination. At the same time, alternate socialities formed through such technologies also have the potential to disrupt the processes that make bodies available for translation into property, possession, and annexation. The same technologies developed for the extraction of life for accumulation elsewhere can be used to form, or imagine forming, different types of collectives beyond the nation-­state, institutionalized religion, class-­based organizing, and so forth. Though new technologies generate new labor issues, the Foxconn facility and the Chinese forced labor camp demonstrate the continued centrality of factory-­based production and compromised autonomy that underpins the avail­ability of artificially cheap consumables. It is this factory-­based production that escalates the possible speed of consuming ever-­new technological devices, rendering earlier models obsolete at an increasingly rapid pace. Despite techno-­utopic projections, human labor power continues to be an irreplaceable commodity, outpacing robotics in its adaptability and cheapness in producing the always almost obsolete new objects of high consumption demand.6 Workers continue to bear new kinds of risks in the name of producing value elsewhere, as the instruments of production of postindustrial life include the very bodies of producers in expanded ways. Stories about coercion in factory production like the preceding belong in the discussion of biopolitics and vital energy in the contemporary biocapitalist world economy as much as those about seemingly newer forms of labor do. However, we should continue to ask how we can think about the subject who performs labors of care, attention, and biological (re)production when it is only through the lens of capitalism and new industrial production that we can see these acts as labor to begin with. This inflects how we understand the political nature of the actions of such subjects. Racialization and gendering continue to shape how different subjects are positioned in circuits of production and consumption. For example, in addition to the imaginative and generative ways that actors in the transnational surrogacy clinic encounter one another and the technologies involved, they can also be seen as tools in a kind of territorialization of subjects through genetic essentialism and of their bodies through the discourse of the uterus as

Vora.indd 143

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

144 Epilogue

unproductive “empty space.” One of the potentials of gestational surrogacy is a spatialization reminiscent of colonial figurations and fantasies of newly encountered land as empty and unpopulated. This figuring positions land (and resources within) as in need of organization and management to become productive, which in turn justifies its seizure. Assisted reproduction, tissue engineering, and stem cell research all share in the process of using technologies to reorganize, or reconceptualize, the body as a site of potential productivity.7 Together the chapters of this book indicate that some individual and community futures become mortgaged, or placed at risk, for the gain of others. This is not just a question of value but a question of politics and temporality, a problem represented in the formulation of vital energy as what is transmitted between individuals and communities whose interactions are mediated by capitalism’s technologies of exchange. At the same time that the technologies responsible for the new biopolitics of outsourcing enable expanded exploitation and management of affective, biological, reproductive, and flexible labors, the narratives examined in each chapter demonstrate that they can also precisely provide for the refunctioning of those processes for different material and ethical ends. I suggest that one way to think about value and accumulation is in the obvious differential allocation of quality of life, whether it is phrased in terms of spaces of hyperproduction versus hyperconsumption, of socially valued versus socially undervalued lives, or of “creative” versus “merely reproductive” lives. While measuring this value has not been the objective of this book, examining the balance of who is free to consume affective and biological commodities versus who must primarily produce them is essential because this also indicates a division of who may accumulate this type of biocapital and who may not. The mode of understanding what constitutes a good life in terms of the needs that must be met to achieve it valorizes some lives at the expense of others. As a central object of the process of fantasies and structured imaginations, the desire for a good life is a primary engine in establishing the balance of whose life is seen as more valuable. Just as limits on the workday and the workweek, as well as minimum wage, needed to be legislated to protect and define the time and space for life that

Vora.indd 144

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

Epilogue 145

does not belong to production, we must ask how this can happen with regard to biological life and affect. For example, it remains difficult to calculate the value of an organ for transplant—­though they are traded and therefore have a price—­because it is so closely tied to the social and economic value of a person as a worker. If you can’t find work, you sell something else; the going price for an organ or for gestation by a surrogate is thus partially determined by the seller’s own value in the marketplace. There are additional ethical queries to resolve. What are the limits on necessary biological and social integrity? These are currently dictated by a partnership between scientific, legal, and neoliberal market discourses—­we do not “need” a second kidney, nor do we need to invest our vital energy into our immediate society and environment, and the ethics of circulation and responsibility for these unnecessary parts and practices is determined by the mandates of privacy and property as mediated by citizenship. However, while a secular science-­based frame asserts that corpses do not need their corneas, hearts, or other organs, notions of bodily integrity based in religious traditions and philosophies do not always agree (for example, most Islamic traditions would deny that a corpse does not need its parts). In the context of assisted reproductive technologies, interested communities would need to think through the ways that technologies, human needs, and market-­driven development of necessities are intertwined. An examination of bioethics above and beyond the interests of property and privacy that dominate mainstream bioethical discourse would need to examine the limits on what aspects of a life and subject can and should be commodified. Ongoing patterns of worldwide overconsumption, relying at least in part on systems of over(re)production that exhaust the lives of producers who are allowed only limited consumption themselves, compose a potentially terminal destructive force. An opinion editorial titled “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” written by a former U.S. soldier who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, illustrates this in the context of a philosophical orientation to devastation he learned in combat that he extends to the inevitability of global climate change. He explains how going to his likely fatal military assignment every day required an orientation of being “already dead.” He argues that the only way to regard the way of life that caused and will continue to cause

Vora.indd 145

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

146 Epilogue

irreversible climate change is the same: “this civilization is already dead.”8 This argument represents a familiar logic of dialectical systemic revolution extended to the biosphere, totalizing in its claims and universalizing in its subject of interest. It asserts a universal time, space, and subject that the project of this book cannot uphold, yet the necessary end of a terminally destructive system remains compelling. Hiring surrogates and spending what are in a global comparative frame vast resources on assisted reproduction in an overpopulated world is both contextually defensible and philosophically indefensible. The same can be said for hyperproduction and hyperconsumption in general. Given the problems with assuming a common space, time, and subject of ethics, what ethical limits can be raised on consumption, and how can they be defined? Despite the supposed end of history and the dialectic tension between capitalism and communism, the inevitable “afters” to the seemingly monolithic present are being imagined through multiple forms of political engagement. These afters remain only partially apprehendable through available models of politics, such as the regulation or ordering of social association or the need to overcome them through systemic revolution. Close attention to both the politics of exploitation in biological speculation and the ways that existing lifeworlds and modes of life stand against the projected futures of such speculation necessitates redeveloping language and modes of perceiving what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence,”9 in which the temporality of actions and their effects slowly degrade the conditions for sustaining life over multiple human generations. For example, Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest tropical storm on record when it struck the Philippines in late 2013, caused an unprecedented scale of devastation that exceeded the government’s capacity for crisis management. Resulting discussions raised essential questions about how historical injustice and exploitation continue to play out on a global scale and pointed out that the effects of global climate change may not follow rules of privilege in terms of where they land, but their impact is differentially devastating due in part to histories of colonialism and other forms of ongoing resource extraction.10 Both violence and political action need to be considered in terms not just of space, bodies, and resources but also of time and the

Vora.indd 146

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

Epilogue 147

irreducible heterogeneity of the subject, which allow for connections and shared ethics between subjects of exploitation. The flexibility that underwrites market experimentality is borne by those who mortgage their present, evidenced in the “slow” biopolitical death of lifeworlds and life force. Such subjects must bear out-­of-­scale (and out-­of-­time) risk to create access to future life opportunities as wealth is relocated “in the creative forces of human biological life rather than the fruits of the land.”11 If the material conditions of the present are in fact partially borrowed from the future, and only some futures have been mortgaged to support these conditions, including how that debt will be paid and who will pay it, we must consider how people imagine the future as an act of present political and material importance.

Vora.indd 147

16/01/2015 11:38:32 AM

This page intentionally left blank

acknowledgments

Scholarly work entails an ongoing reciprocity that exceeds quantification, and thus my work is beholden to many who have read, written, and thought together with me in the past decade. The sense of problem and project that eventually took shape in this book arose when I was at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the History of Consciousness program, during a unique time when interdisciplinarity and antidisciplinarity were possible for their own often counterinstitutionalizing ends. During that time, I benefitted from scholar and activist friends whose company and conversation in Santa Cruz and thereafter have continued to inform and inspire me: Rashad Shabazz, Sean Burns, Soma De Bourbon, Greg Caldwell, Kris Weller, Anita Starosta, Matt Tierney, Felice Blake, Paula Ioanide, Greg Youmans, Eric Stanley, Nick Mitchell, Roya Rastegar, Cindy Bello, Mari Spira, Krista Lynes, Alexis Shotwell, Rebecca Schein, and Scout Calvert. Seminars with Nancy Chen, Angela Davis, Anjali Arondekar, Theresa de Lauretis, Jim Clifford, and Neferti Tadiar, and a Gayatri Spivak reading group with Gina Dent and Krista Lynes, provided scaffolding for my dissertation research. I thank Nisheeth Vora and David Camp, who donated time and attention to the process of copyediting the dissertation, and some of that work remains in this text. I continue to be grateful for the patience and attention my committee members offered in encouraging me to pursue my sense of problem rather than submitting it to existing modes of inquiry. Neferti Tadiar’s work continues to serve as a singular model of the kind of scholarship to which I aspire, in its refusal to compromise on an ethics 149

Vora.indd 149

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM

150 Acknowledgments

of research and practice despite the pressure to abide by norms of legibility in existing fields and their investment in given geopolitical formations. Her practice of “feminist hope” offers an alternative for the seemingly more pragmatic and reasonable capitulations always at hand. Donna Haraway has remained a model for how to engage seriously with ideas of all kinds and for intellectual openness and engagement in the classroom by teaching the work of her students and refusing to submit her expectations for intellectual reach to the pragmatic norms or expectations of institutions and disciplinary formations. Jim Clifford exemplifies a model of academic inquiry and writing that embodies his theoretical position that the crafting of language is an essential part of the production of knowledge itself. I benefitted from the generosity of many people in India between 2006 and 2008 while I conducted research there. From Bangalore, I thank the many necessarily anonymous people who shared their experiences working in information technology. Arjun Raina shared his unpublished monologue and generously engaged my writing and analysis of his work. I thank Tejaswini Niranjana for her hospitality when I arrived in Bangalore as a guest of the Center for the Study of Culture and Society and also Zainab Bawa and Nishant Shah for their friendship and conversation. My research trip in 2008 was facilitated by all of the former surrogates and women in the process of surrogacy who shared their experiences but must remain anonymous in this book, and the staff and doctors at the “Manushi” clinic as well as the commissioning parents passing through the clinic who took time to talk and kept in touch after leaving India. Ramesh Bhakta, whom I met thanks to Matt Rahaim, was an excellent host who helped me immensely. A University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship supported my research on gestational surrogacy in India and gave me time to draft this manuscript. I thank Kim Adkinson and Sheila O’Rourke for their commitment to sustaining that program. Essential to this process was the mentorship of Aihwa Ong, whose work on the cultural and political impact of transnationally mobile communities remains a foundation for a generation of scholarship. My writing was supported by the conviviality and commentary of a writing group with Kim TallBear, Neda Atanasoski, and Elly Teman. I was lucky to

Vora.indd 150

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM

Acknowledgments 151

meet Fouzieyha Towghi at Berkeley, who became a friend and collaborator, through the Center for Race and Gender. Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parreñas organized a conference in 2007 and, later, an anthology, Intimate Labors, and their comments as editors and interlocutors helped me develop portions of chapter 2 included in that anthology. Eileen Boris also supported my research by including me in her UCHRI “Working at Living: The Social Relations of Precarity” project. Two Hellman junior faculty research fellowships in 2010 and 2012, and course relief in 2010 from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Faculty Career Development Program, facilitated the timely completion of this manuscript. Lisa Lowe gave chapter 1 clarity through her careful and thoughtful feedback on portions published under the same title in the South Atlantic Quarterly. As special issue editors, Melinda Cooper and Terry Woronov offered detailed commentary that informed and greatly improved the development of that chapter. Julietta Hua’s shrewd suggestions for restructuring and cutting down the chapters of the manuscript, an extra­ ordinary talent in academia, were invaluable. My colleagues in Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies at UCSD are remarkable for sharing a sense of intellectual and political communitas, and I particularly thank those who have given comments on draft components of this book, including Curtis Marez, Yen Espiritu, Roshanak Kheshti, Fatima El-­Tayeb, Kirstie Dorr, and Sara Kaplan. Martha Lampland and Cathy Gere in the Science Studies Program offered support and feedback on a presentation of research informing chapter 4, and Lilly Irani offered astute comments on chapter 3. I have greatly enjoyed and benefited from conversation with UCSD graduate students who have engaged my work in reading groups, including Malathi Iyengar, Ashvin Kini, Vineeta Singh, and Sal Zarate. Lisa Lowe, as a reader for the University of Minnesota Press, provided the highest caliber of constructive feedback and endorsement of the project, offering valuable strategies for highlighting the roles of method in the book, and giving the kind of constructive comments only possible with a truly engaged and expert review. Grace Hong’s suggestions for revision were equally central to the final form that the over­arching argument of this project has taken. At the University of Minnesota Press, I thank my editors Richard Morrison and Jason Weidemann

Vora.indd 151

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM

152 Acknowledgments

for their support, and series editors Grace Hong and Roderick Ferguson for their commitment to this project through including it in the Difference Incorporated series, which, because of the luminance of its editorship and previous authors, is an honor indeed. When I imagine my ideal audience, the readers have the critical acumen, engagement, and political commitment to scholarship and ideas that these friends and colleagues practice. Neda Atanasoski was my primary interlocutor as I wrote and revised this manuscript several times over the last six years, and her bright and sympathetic intellect and careful readings have pushed and clarified my thinking. Her friendship and our mutuality in thinking together help me imagine and bring into being the future non-­possessive, property-­free academy toward which we work. Nathan Camp similarly read multiple drafts of this work over many years, and his careful editorial eye, his commitment to the art of communication and language, and his unfailing work to get inside the logic of an argument to make it stronger have markedly improved my writing. Living lives separated by geographical distance and national boundaries necessitates the imagination of belonging and connection when there is little by way of artifacts or physical presence. In this spirit I thank my grandparents, among whom Ann Stromberg Snell lives on as an inspiration. Nisheeth, Chris­ tine, Julie, Sonja, and Alex have been my lifelong support despite separation. Nathan, Naruna, and Kavi continue to be my co-­conspirators in imagining future worlds.

Vora.indd 152

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM

Notes

Introduction 1. Reports of problems with kidney transplants in several journals had led to the discovery by members of the international medical community of the surprisingly large number of Indians who had been selling their kidneys for transplant for more than a decade. The authors of the JAMA study concluded that although debt was the primary reason most people decided to sell a kidney, payments for kidneys did not help the poor overcome poverty or get out of debt acquired primarily to pay for food, household expenses, and rent; in fact, family income declined by one-­third when a family member sold a kidney because of the seller’s weakened physical condition and inability to work. The article argues for the right of everyone to make informed decisions about their bodies. Madhav Goyal, R. L. Mehta, L. J. Schneiderman, and A. R. Sehgal, “Economic and Health Consequences of Selling a Kidney in India,” Journal of the American Medical Association 288, no. 13 (2002): 1589–­93. 2. This discourse was anticipated by the Bellagio task force, “a small international group of transplant surgeons, organ procurement specialists, social scientists, and human rights activists” who convened in 1995 to address the “urgent need for new international ethical standards for human transplant surgery in light of reports of abuses against the bodies of some of the most socially disadvantaged members of society.” Nancy Scheper-­Hughes, “The Global Traffic in Human Organs,” Current Anthropology 41, no. 2 (2000): 191. Human rights have become the political and ethical terrain for arbitrating concerns perceived as global since the end of the Cold War and therefore provide the language with which to communicate the depth of an emerging social and ethical problem to a wide audience. See Julietta Hua, Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Neda Atanasoski, Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deploy­ ment of Diversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 153

Vora.indd 153

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM

154

Notes to Introduction

3. Kalindi Vora, “Others’ Organs: South Asian Domestic Labor and the Kidney Trade,” Postmodern Culture 19, no. 1 (2008), http://muse.jhu.edu/. 4. Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock, “Animation and Cessation: The Remaking of Life and Death,” in Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences, ed. Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 2003), 8. 5. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: New Press, 1999). 6. E.g., Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Global­ ization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002); Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Trans­ nationality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents. 7. Such as Lawrence Cohen’s work on the selling of human kidneys in India, Munira Ismail’s study of domestic labor migration from Sri Lanka, and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas’s work on domestic labor in the Philippines. Cohen, “The Other Kidney: Biopolitics beyond Recognition,” Body and Society 7, nos. 2/3 (2001): 9–­29; Cohen, “Where It Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Trans­ plantation,” Zygon 38, no. 3 (2003): 663–­88; Ismail, “Maids in Space: Gendered Domestic Labor from Sri Lanka to the Middle East,” in Gender, Migration, and Domestic Service, ed. Janet Momsen, 223–­36 (London: Routledge, 1999); Salazar Parreñas, “Migrant Philipina Domestic Labor and the International Division of Reproductive Labor,” Gender and Society 14, no. 4 (2000): 560–­80. 8. Rosa Luxembourg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964). 9. Piya Chatterjee, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). 10. Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). 11. See Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Sara Clarke Kaplan, “Love and Violence/Maternity and Death: Black Feminism and the Politics of Reading (Un)representability,” Black Women, Gender, and Families 1, no. 1 (2007): 94–­124; Grace Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Vora.indd 154

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM



Notes to Introduction

155

12. Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 13. Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007); Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Become Technologies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 14. Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital; Sarah Franklin and Margaret Locke, “Animation and Cessation: The Remaking of Life and Death,” in Franklin and Lock, Remaking Life and Death, 3–­22; Landecker, Culturing Life. 15. Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-­First Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 67. 16. Strathern as cited by Stefan Helmreich, “Blue Green Capital, Biotechnological Circulation, and an Oceanic Imaginary: A Critique of Biopolitical Economy,” Biosocieties 2, no. 3 (2007): 288; Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge, 1992). 17. Gayatri Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value,” in The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Spivak, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald M. MacLean (New York: Routledge, 1996), 119. 18. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4. 19. Asma Barlas, Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism: The Colonial Leg­ acy in South Asia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), 54–­56. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. Leela Fernandes notes that British control limited the full-­fledged industrialization that would have produced an industrial middle class (managerial and supervising staff), and instead the emergence of the middle class was in the service and literary classes, whose employability depended on formal edu­ cation and English language. Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Pol­ itics in an Era of Economic Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 22. Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 23. T. B. Macauley, “Minute on Education (1835),” http://www.columbia.edu/ itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html. 24. Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class. 25. Ibid., 21. 26. As two important examples, Ann Laura Stoler’s work on the Dutch in Indonesia tracks the entanglements of hierarchies organizing intimacy between subjects marked by gendered racial difference, such as those between Javanese nursemaids and their Dutch infant charges or between domestic servants and

Vora.indd 155

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM

156

Notes to Introduction

employers, or the organizing of sexual relations between colonizer and colonized categorically different than those within marriage relations reserved for unions within the same racial group. McClintock’s work on British imperial practices of disciplining gender and sexuality through discourses of degeneration, perversion, and hygiene, among other tropes, marks the entanglement of governmentality and gendered and racialized subject as they are formed through both bodily and figurative intimate encounters between self and other. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 27. Chatterjee, A Time for Tea. 28. Lakshmidhar Mishra, Human Bondage: Tracing Its Roots in India (New Delhi: Sage, 2011). 29. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991); Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Atlantic Press, 2005); Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 30. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 31. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2000). 32. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 33. Kale, Fragments of Empire. 34. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Econ­ omy,” Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990): 1–­24. 35. Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 53. 36. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 11. 37. Kaushik Sunder Rajan, “Experimental Values: Indian Clinical Trials and Surplus Health,” New Left Review, May–­June 2007, 83. 38. Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neolib­ eral Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 25. 39. Masao Miyoshi, “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-­State,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (1993): 728. 40. Kamala Kempadoo, “Continuities and Change: Five Centuries of Prostitution in the Caribbean,” in Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Carib­ bean, ed. Kamala Kempadoo (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), cited by

Vora.indd 156

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM



Notes to Introduction

157

Catherine Waldby and Melinda Cooper, “The Biopolitics of Reproduction,” Aus­ tralian Feminist Studies 23, no. 55 (2008): 57–­73. 41. Donna Haraway, ModestWitness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_ OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 25. 42. Waldby and Cooper, “Biopolitics of Reproduction”; see also Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014). 43. Catherine Waldby and Melinda Cooper, “From Reproductive Work to Regenerative Labour: The Female Body and the Stem Cell Industries,” Feminist Theory 11, no. 1 (2010): 3–­22. 44. Waldby and Cooper, “Biopolitics of Reproduction,” 64, 67. 45. Waldby and Cooper, “From Reproductive Work to Regenerative Labour.” 46. Waldby and Cooper argue that the Lockean definition of property as the result of the addition of intentional labor to natural resources has been written into legal protections around human tissues, and therefore it is imperative to understand the role of women in the production of reproductive tissues as work or labor. They explain that this definition of property also connects human tissues to land in the gaze of European colonizers. Both are understood through “Res Nullius, unimproved matter belonging to no one (and hence able to be taken) and Terra Nullius, the legal doctrine that permitted populated territory to be seized . . . on the grounds that indigenous peoples passively inhabited [it].” Ibid., 67. 47. Associated Press, “Giving Birth the Latest Job Outsourced to India,” http:// www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22441355/ns/health-­pregnancy/t/giving-­birth-­latest -­job-­outsourced-­india/#.UCWUcZjUn-­0; Judith Warner, “Outsourced Wombs,” New York Times, January 3, 2008, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/ 03/outsourced-­wombs/. 48. Stefan Helmreich, “Species of Biocapital,” Science as Culture 17, no. 4 (2008): 475. 49. Spivak, “Scattered Speculations,” 119, 132. 50. Avery Gordon, preface to An Anthropology of Marxism, by Cedric Robinson (Hampshire, U.K.: Ashgate Press, 2001), xviii. 51. In Capital, Karl Marx argues that by laboring in capitalist production, the worker is made abstract. He becomes the producer of a certain number of units of abstract labor, where abstract labor is defined as the averaged labor of a society overall. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 128. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno argue that the first violence of (capitalist) abstraction is in forgetting the specificity of bodies, and the specificity of the context of those bodies. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007).

Vora.indd 157

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM

158

Notes to Introduction

52. On the materiality of signification and the violence of abstraction in capitalist processes, see Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 163. 53. Spivak, “Scattered Speculations,” 119. 54. James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Stanford, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986); Margaret Wolfe, A Thrice Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibil­ ity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Linda Tuhiwai-­Smith, Decolo­ nizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books, 1999). 55. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 11. 56. Ibid., 204. 57. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 14. 58. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, The Anthropology of Globaliza­ tion: A Reader (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), 8. 59. Ibid. 60. Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, Fantasy Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004). 61. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 11. 62. Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 20. 63. Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson, Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 16. 64. Gayatri Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 241. 65. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xvii. 1. Limits of Labor 1. For more on biological labor, see Catherine Waldby and Melinda Cooper, “The Biopolitics of Reproduction,” Australian Feminist Studies 23, no. 55 (2008). For their conception of “clinical labor,” see Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioecon­ omy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014). For a discussion of affective labor, see Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” boundary 2 26, no. 2 (1999): 95–­96.

Vora.indd 158

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM



Notes to Chapter 1

159

2. Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 206. 3. Kale, Fragments of Empire, 7. 4. Lowe, “Intimacies of Four Continents,” 174. 5. Ibid., 194. 6. Ibid., 195. 7. Kale, Fragments of Empire, 4. 8. Ibid. 9. In his study of human indenture and slavery in India, Lakshmidhar Mishra defines forced labor as that which “deprives a person of the choice of alternative of work/avocation, compels him to adopt one particular course of action which is usually abhorrent to him.” Mishra, Human Bondage, 43. 10. Lawrence Cohen coined the term bioavailability to describe the intersection of poverty and advances in biotechnology that makes the bodies and body parts of impoverished Indian kidney sellers available for the market rather than those of others. This term also describes the emerging women in working-­class and lower-­middle-­class India as gestational surrogates. Cohen, “Operability, Bioavailability, and Exception,” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics and Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, 79–­90 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005). 11. Queer theorists in particular have challenged the idea of reproductivity by troubling the meaning of care work as simply reproducing what was already there, arguing instead that new forms of life and family life are produced that do not line up with the imperatives of the heteropatriarchal household economy. See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); José E. Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Brancho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs),” Theater Journal 52, no. 1 (2000): 67–­79; Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs 31, no. 3 (2006): 675–­88. 12. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Third World Books, 1986). 13. Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor, and Capital, trans. Hilary Creek, ed. Jim Fleming (New York: Autonomedia, 1989), 9–­13. 14. Ibid., 9–­10. 15. Ibid., 110. 16. For example, under chattel slavery in the United States, women’s repro­ ductive labor was not invested into a household nor a “replacement worker” and

Vora.indd 159

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM

160

Notes to Chapter 1

in fact was redirected from her survival toward accumulation sometimes to the point of fatality. Ibid., 234. 17. Angela Davis explains how this changed the evaluation of women slaves as genderless “labor-­units” to labor-­units and potential “breeders.” Pregnant and breast-­feeding mothers were not accorded any special recognition of their condition, as they were not recognized as mothers or even as women by slave owners and those with allied interests. Roberts shows how the centrality of black women’s reproduction meant that reproduction and maternity were materially tied to their role as objects of economic interest of slave owners. Under slavery, black women’s reproductive lives were prefigured as part of sustaining the system of slavery, because their children “belonged to the slave owner from the moment of their conception.” For this reason, black women’s decisions about reproduction were subject to social regulation rather than their own free will. Davis, Women, Race, Class (New York: Vintage Press, 1983), 6; Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Press, 1998), 23. 18. Davis, Women, Race, Class, 7. 19. Grace Hong charts the dependence of the possessive individual in the United States as a protected white, middle-­class subject upon the dispossession of racialized and gendered others that both valorizes that subject in an ideological sense but also allows for the material subsidizing of that class of subjects through property forcibly removed under settler colonialism, enslavement, internment, and the underpaid, waged domestic labor of women of color, including immigrant women of color, in support of what is held up as the middle-­class lifestyle. Hong, Ruptures of American Capital, 36. 20. Janet Jakobsen, “Perverse Justice,” GLQ 18, no. 1 (2012): 25. 21. Ibid. 22. See Kalindi Vora, “Medicine, Markets, and the Pregnant Body: Indian Com­ mercial Surrogacy and Reproductive Labor in a Transnational Frame,” Scholar and Feminist Online 9, nos. 1–­2 (2010), http://barnard.edu/sfonline/reprotech/vora _01.htm. 23. The feminization of domestic labor through what Maria Mies calls “housewifization,” a process that extended from the late Middle Ages through the Enlightenment in Europe and coincided with the witch pogroms, also naturalized women’s work within the household so that it could be treated in the same way as natural resources and colonial labor—­as a free good to be exploited in a one-­way relationship. Identifying the work of the housewife as organized for ongoing primitive accumulation, Mies claims that it continues to be the secret of modern capitalist expansion. Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, x. Claudia von Werlhof argues that the process of breaking up trade unions and “flexibilizing” labor locates many male workers outside the protection of labor laws,

Vora.indd 160

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM



Notes to Chapter 2

161

which positions their labor much like that of women’s domestic labor. Von Werlhof, “The Proletarian Is Dead: Long Live the Housewife?” in Women: The Last Colony, ed. Maria Mies, Veronika Bennholdt-­Thomsen, and Claudia von Werlhof, 254–­64 (London: Zed Books, 1988). 24. See Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Cit­ izenship in Postcolonial India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). 25. Sama: Resource Group for Women’s Health, Birthing a Market: A Study on Commercial Surrogacy (New Delhi: Sama, 2012), http://www.samawomenshealth .org/downloads/Birthing%20A%20Market.pdf. 26. Amrita Pande, “Commercial Surrogacy in India: Manufacturing a Perfect Mother-­Worker,” Feminist Studies 35, no. 4 (2010): 969–­92. 27. Barbara Katz Rothman, Recreating Motherhood (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 28. A. Aneesh, “Spectres of Global Communication,” Frakcija 11, nos. 43–­44 (2007): 26–­33. 29. Ibid. 30. Excerpted from ethnographic interviews conducted by the author in Gujarat, India, January–­February 2008. 31. Aneesh, “Spectres of Global Communication.” 32. Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation, 217. 33. All identifying names have been changed. 34. The draft Assisted Reproductive Technologies Bill (2010), http://icmr.nic .in/guide/ART%20REGULATION%20Draft%20Bill1.pdf. 35. A. Aneesh, Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 18. 36. Vora, “Medicine, Markets, and the Pregnant Body.” 37. Surrogates have little power to pursue breach of contract by commissioning parents or the clinic, and anecdotal evidence from news reports and the documentary film Made in India suggests that surrogates often do not receive the full fee they have been promised. Made in India: A Film about Surrogacy, directed by Rebecca Haimowitz and Vaishali Sinha (2010). 38. Ann Anagnost, “Scenes of Misrecognition: Maternal Citizenship in the Age of Transnational Adoption,” positions 8, no. 2 (2000): 389–­421. 39. Richard C. Lewontin, “The Dream of the Human Genome,” New York Review of Books, May 28, 1992, cited in Haraway, ModestWitness@Second_Millennium, 145. 2. Call Center Agents 1. Steve Lohr, “Hello India? I Need Help with My Math,” New York Times, October 31, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/business/worldbusiness/ 31butler.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

Vora.indd 161

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM

162

Notes to Chapter 2

2. Aneesh, “Spectres of Global Communication”; Donald J. Winiecki, “Subjects, Subjectivity, and Subjectification in Call Center Work,” Journal of Contem­ porary Ethnography 36, no. 4 (2007); Phil Taylor, Gareth Mulvey, Jeff Hyman, and Peter Bain, “Work Organization, Control, and the Experience of Work in Call Centers,” Work, Employment, and Society 16, no. 1 (2002): 133–­50; Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in India’s Call Center Industry (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010). 3. For an example of an anthropological study using ethnographic and fictive narratives together to collect social facts, see Akhil Gupta, “Narratives of Corruption: Anthropological and Fictive Accounts of the Indian State,” Ethnography 6, no. 1 (2005): 5–­34. 4. Business process outsourcing refers to all firms that do work for foreign companies on a contract basis. Call centers are a specific part of this sector dealing with telephone business processes, including customer help lines, billing and sales, and technical support. 5. Aneesh, “Spectres of Global Communication.” 6. E-­mail correspondence with the author, May 10, 2013. 7. Arjun Raina, A Terrible Beauty Is Born (unpublished monologue, copyright Arjun Raina), 15. 8. Hardt and Negri describe the sphere of immaterial labor, including affect, as a realm that is being incorporated into capitalist systems but is not yet fully incorporated. Because this realm represents resources that can be used to produce social life, they view it as a sort of global commons, under enclosure but still available for alternate uses and ends. I argue that problems of access and outlawed needs often preclude the sharing in common of these resources. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). 9. Patel, Working the Night Shift. 10. Winifred Poster, “Saying ‘Good Morning’ in the Middle of the Night: The Reversal of Work Time in Globalized ICT Service Work,” Research in the Sociology of Work 17 (2007): 102. 11. Aneesh, “Spectres of Global Communication”; Winiecki, “Subjects, Subjectivity, and Subjectification in Call Center Work”; Taylor et al., “Work Organization, Control, and the Experience of Work in Call Centers”; Patel, Working the Night Shift. 12. Experimental Chair on the Production of Subjectivity, “Call Center: The Art of Virtual Control,” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 7, no. 1 (2007): 133–­38. 13. Ibid. 14. Michael Hardt refers to these as the two faces of immaterial labor, one face “producing an immaterial good such as service, knowledge, or communication,”

Vora.indd 162

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM



Notes to Chapter 2

163

the other face being its “affective face.” Hardt, “Affective Labor,” boundary 2 26, no. 2 (1999): 95–­96. 15. Surplus in this formulation is not the same as extra or excess. Here it denotes needs filled by this work in the immediate vicinity that have been made “outlawed needs,” as Rosemary Hennessy calls them. Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2000). This process of outlawing needs means that it is economically not feasible to fill the outlawed need, because of structural constraints and the cheapening of labor. For example, in the introduction to Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), editors Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild describe a “care deficit” in the economies sending domestic workers abroad. 16. Aneesh, “Spectres of Global Communication,” 8. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid.; Ben Addelman and Samira Mallal, Bombay Calling, videorecording (New York: Third World Newsreel, 2006). 19. Fortunati, Arcane of Reproduction, 10. 20. Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 23. 21. See, for examples, Aneesh, Virtual Migration; Rajan, Biocapital; Waldby and Mitchell, Tissue Economies. 22. Haraway, ModestWitness@Second_Millennium; Rajan, Biocapital. 23. The situation of social death as a result of unmet affective needs points to Spivak’s suggestion of “affectively necessary labor” in “Scattered Speculations.” 24. Ethnographic work on call centers indicates that work-­related social life involves drinking, smoking, and dating in a paradigm that is imagined as “Western.” The film Bombay Calling in particular indicates the fatigue and need for escape that dominate the after-­work bar scene among young call center agents. 25. Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure. 26. Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, The Marx-­Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Robert Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 75. 27. Ibid., 76. 28. Note that some distinguish this as two forms, the alienation of social relations and the alienation of species life. Ibid., 77. 29. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Children of Global Migration: Transnational Fami­ lies and Gendered Woes (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005). 30. Marx and Engels, Marx-­Engels Reader, 72. 31. Ibid., 101. 32. This claim is made in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004). Gayatri

Vora.indd 163

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM

164

Notes to Chapter 2

Spivak’s argument in “Can the Subaltern Speak,” among other scholarship, makes this assertion about use-­value. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–­313 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 33. Fortunati, Arcane of Reproduction, 110. 34. See the introduction for an explanation of Hong and Ferguson’s analytical term “strange affinities.” Hong and Ferguson, Strange Affinities, 16. 3. Information Technology Professionals 1. Daniel Pink, “The New Face of the Silicon Age,” Wired, February 2004; J. D. Heyman, “Is This Woman a Threat to the American Worker?” Newsweek, July 2004. 2. Names of people, places, and companies have been changed. 3. Interview, Bangalore, India, February 2006. 4. Xing Bao describes this as the “ethnicization” of the IT workforce through the H1-­B visa as the “Indian visa.” Bao, Global Body Shopping: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 8–­10. 5. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 26. 6. Inda and Rosaldo, Anthropology of Globalization, 5. 7. Inda and Rosaldo note, “Globalization suggests something more profound about the modern world than the simple fact of growing global interconnectedness. It implies a fundamental reordering of space and time.” Ibid. 8. Jairam Ramesh, “IT in India: Big Successes, Large Gaps to Be Filled,” The Business Standard, http://www.business-standard.com, September 30, 2007. 9. By late 2011, the Philippines had overtaken India in total number of call center employees. Rajini Vaidyanathan, “India Call Center Growth Stalls,” BBC News Mumbai, online edition, September 26, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ magazine-­15060641. See also Vinay Gidwani, “The Cultural Logic of Work: Explaining Labour Deployment and Piece-­R ate Contracts in Matar Taluka (Gujarat) India, Part I and Part II,” Journal of Development Studies 38, no. 2 (2000): 57–­108. 10. A. Aneesh equates the role of the transnational capitalist class in contemporary capitalism with the role of the bourgeoisie in Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Aneesh, Virtual Migration, 18. 11. Smitha Radhakrishnan, Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 42. 12. Aneesh, Virtual Migration, 58. 13. Ibid. 14. Bao, Global Body Shopping, 5.

Vora.indd 164

16/01/2015 11:38:33 AM



Notes to Chapter 3

165

15. A. Aneesh noted a similar lament among trained technology workers he interviewed, where the lack of access to cutting-­edge technologies is the primary loss associated with living and working in India over in the United States. Aneesh, Virtual Migration, 53. 16. Tiziana Terranova has discussed in depth how these “leisure” activities also provide “free labor” through generating text and content as well as attention for Internet-­based data production and circulation. Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 33–­58. 17. In her ethnographic account of Indian IT workers in Germany, Sareeta Amrute observes the stereotyping of Indians there too as good for “hard, fast, and cheap” programming coupled with a “suspicion that they were only capable of doing coding tasks that needed little creativity or initiative,” a stereotype that programmers actively resisted. Amrute, “Proprietary Freedoms in an IT Office: How Indian IT Workers Negotiate Code and Cultural Branding,” Social Anthropology 22, no. 1 (2014): 101–­17. 18. Lilly Irani finds a similar critique among software designers in her study of Delhi-­based design firms, who promote entrepreneurship as a way to escape the problem. Irani, “Designing Citizenship: From Studio to Civil Society,” chapter 5 in “Designing Citizens in Transnational India,” PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2013. 19. Radhakrishnan has recently noted that IT jobs have since become coveted middle-­class jobs in comparison to call center positions. Radhakrishnan, Appro­ priately Indian, 43. 20. Carol Upadhya, “The Global Indian Software Labor Force: IT Professionals in Europe,” in Working Paper Series 2005–­2006, no. 1 (Bangalore: National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus, 2006). 21. Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 116–­18. 22. Ibid., 15. 23. Though open-­source code has become ubiquitous in for-­profit ventures since the early 2000s, at the time the open-­source movement represented substantial promise for programmers in places like Bangalore. For many programmers, it continues to remain connected to values of open access and freedom of information and to represent an alternate ethics for understanding the usefulness and benefit of coding practices despite the widespread corporate adoption of open source code in their products. 24. Haraway, ModestWitness@Second_Millennium, 25. 25. Waldby and Mitchell, Tissue Economies, 91. 26. Coleman, Coding Freedom, 116–­18. 27. Ibid., 94.

Vora.indd 165

16/01/2015 11:38:34 AM

166

Notes to Chapter 3

28. Ibid. 29. Sunder Rajan, Biocapital. 30. Ibid., 241. 31. Ibid., 242. 32. Rajan, ibid., relates the details of this process as part of India’s attempts to move to a “culture of innovation” that imitates Silicon Valley in his ethnography of a small start-­up genetics e-­learning firm in India. 33. Bao, Body Shopping, 5. 34. See also Leopoldina Fortunati’s study of family relations in Italian business practices in Fortunati, Arcane. 35. Sujit John and Shilpa Phadnis, “Startups Rise and Shine in Bangalore,” Times of India, September 5, 2013, http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ 2013-­09-­05/software-­services/41800721_1_startup-­genome-­venture-­capital-­fund ing-­entrepreneurial-­culture. 36. Aneesh, Virtual Migration, 62. 37. Aneesh, “Spectres of Global Communication”; Addelman et al., Bombay Calling. 38. “The flexibility of a system based on just-­in-­time labor relies in large part on the immense flexibility demanded from workers themselves, entailing a shift of responsibility from the system to the worker. . . . A worker must also be flexible enough to keep learning skills, especially in the realm of software, where a plethora of technologies—­Weblogic, JavaBeans, MQ series, C++, Visual Basic, DB2, IMS, and Oracle—­seem to emerge constantly.” Aneesh, “Spectres of Global Communication,” 46. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 61. 41. Aneesh, Virtual Migration, 16–­17. 42. Ibid. 43. Sunder Rajan, Biocapital, 34. 44. Aneesh, Virtual Migration, 8. 45. Ibid. 46. Hari Kunzru, Transmission (New York: Plume, 2004), 11. 47. Tadiar, Things Fall Away, 20. 48. Coleman, Coding Freedom, 63. 49. Kavita Philip argues that the designation of “hacking” as a rebellious but ultimately valuable activity versus “piracy,” a criminalized activity, is a racialized designation that also imparts a distinction between permissible subjects of creative or innovative coding and subjects for whom this type of property law–­ defying coding is criminal. Philip, “What Is a Technological Author? The Pirate Function and Intellectual Property,” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 2 (2005): 199–­218.

Vora.indd 166

16/01/2015 11:38:34 AM



Notes to Chapter 4

167

50. Jonathan Beller, “Third Cinema in a Global Frame: Curacha, Yahoo!, and Manila by Night,” positions east asia cultures critique 9, no. 2 (2001): 336. 51. Tadiar, Fantasy Production, 6. 52. Kunzru, Transmission, 120. 53. Ibid., 47. 54. Ibid., 148. 55. Ibid., 254. 56. Ibid., 20. 57. Ibid. 58. Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value,” 171. 59. Chito S. Rono, Curacha, Ang Babaing Walang Pahinga (Curacha: A woman without rest), video (Philippines: Regal Films, 1998). 60. Beller, “Third Cinema in a Global Frame,” 338. 61. Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure. 62. In her work on the everyday practices of Italian business families, Sylvia Yanagisako attends to the ways that the nonspectacular and nongeneralizable aspects of bourgeois life allow one to identify how “people’s sentiments, identities, and social agency are not dictated by culture but are formed through everyday practices that are themselves culturally produced.” Yanagisako, Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Transnational Gestational Surrogacy 1. All names and identifying information about persons, places, and institutions have been changed to preserve anonymity. 2. Sama’s 2012 report on surrogacy clinics in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, India, found parallel practices in the seventeen clinics in Punjab and twelve clinics in Delhi for which they collected data. Sama, Birthing a Market. 3. See the introduction of this book for a discussion of these prefigurations. 4. There are two important examples, as discussed in note 26 in the Introduction. Ann Laura Stoler’s work on the Dutch in Indonesia tracks the entanglements of hierarchies organizing intimacy between subjects marked by gendered racial difference, such as those between Javanese nursemaids and their Dutch infant charges, or between domestic servants and employers, or the organizing of sexual relations between colonizer and colonized categorically different than those within the marriage relation reserved for unions within the same racial group. Anne McClintock’s work on British imperial practices of disciplining gender and sexuality through discourses of degeneration, perversion and hygiene, among other tropes, marks the entanglement of governmentality and gendered and racialized subject formation as they are formed through both bodily and figurative intimate encounters between self and other. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge; McClintock, Imperial Leather.

Vora.indd 167

16/01/2015 11:38:34 AM

168

Notes to Chapter 4

5. Kamala Kempadoo has argued that labor that was devalued through patriarchy and gender during the colonial period has been harnessed to continue to produce profit for others through World Bank and IMF structural reforms, making these reforms also neocolonial. Kempadoo, “Continuities and Change,” 66. 6. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 15; Arnold, “Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 392. 7. Prakash, Another Reason, 127. 8. Kalindi Vora, “Indian Transnational Surrogacy and the Commodification of Vital Energy,” Subjectivities 28, no. 1 (2009): 266–­78; Vora, “Potential, Risk, and Return in Transnational Indian Gestational Surrogacy,” Current Anthropology 54, Suppl. 7 (2013): S97–­106. 9. Sama’s study found that few surrogates were informed about practices of C-­section and embryo transfer, whereas most were aware of the fact that their own oocyte was not used. As in Manushi, in clinics in Delhi and Punjab, selective information that served the goals of ensuring the relinquishing of the infant by the surrogate was shared, but in general, there was a lack of explanation about the range of medical processes, from the extensive medical interventions needed to assist in embryo transfer to possible complications to delivery and postpartum practices like the inhibiting of breast milk production. Sama, Birthing a Market, 70ff. 10. Bettyann Kevles, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Cen­ tury (Reading, Mass.: Addison-­Wesley, 1998); Rayna Rapp, Testing Women, Test­ ing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 1999); Carole Stabile, “Shooting the Mother: Fetal Photography and the Politics of Disappearance,” in The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Sci­ ence, ed. P. A. Treichler, L. Cartwright, and C. Penley, 171–­97 (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medi­ cine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 11. Leslie Sharpe, “The Commodification of the Body and Its Parts,” Annual Review of Anthropology 29 (2000): 287–­328. 12. Amrita Pande, “‘It May Be Her Eggs, but It’s My Blood’: Surrogates and Everyday Forms of Kinship in India,” Qualitative Sociology 32, no. 4 (2009): 379–­ 97. Sama’s study also found that women surrogates insisted on a relation to the infant through gestation over and above genetics. Sama, Birthing a Market. 13. Sama’s report found that in clinics in Delhi and Punjab, not only was the husband’s consent required but decisions about the body of the woman acting as surrogate were often referred to the husband, or the “patients,” who are actually the commissioning parents. This meant that her consent and even her opinion on decisions were often completely disregarded. Ibid., 66.

Vora.indd 168

16/01/2015 11:38:34 AM



Notes to Chapter 4

169

14. This sentiment was also found in clinics in Punjab included in the report by Sama. Ibid. 15. The demographic referred to as the Indian middle class is deemed such because of their habits of consumption that replicate those of the middle class/ bourgeois in other countries. Statistically, however, they occupy an elite status in terms of income standing in India, where they represent a shift in understanding “from political to socio-­economic” elites. Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class, xxi. 16. Some of these risks are detailed and discussed in Kalindi Vora, “Experimental Sociality and Gestational Surrogacy in the Indian ART Clinic,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 79, no. 1 (2014): 1–­21. 17. The sexual organization of the heteropatriarchal family is co-­constituted with the work of gendered labor, both of which humanize workers for continued production, providing a source of unmarked accumulation in itself, so that Indian gestational surrogacy is part of a sexual mode of production that relies on the privatization of the labor of gestation and childbirth. Kalindi Vora, “Limits of Labor,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 4 (2012): 681–­700. 18. Some prominent examples include Morgan, Laboring Women; Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Brooklyn, NY: South End Press, 2005); Kimberly TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belong­ ing and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 19. In the context of U.S. histories of conquest, racial slavery, and immigration, the reproductive work of women has served not only to perpetuate families in the predominantly white middle class but also to perpetuate a discourse of white middle-­class families as needing more care than working-­class families and other families of color. Here, as in the justification for the low cost of all labor in the Global South, a naturalized “lifestyle difference” validates excess care within the homes of some women, whereas in others, care becomes dispensable. As has been elaborated elsewhere in this book, affective and biological labor can serve not just to reproduce capital, property, and the conditions under which capital and property continue to exist but also to contribute to the unquantifiable ability of the consuming class to thrive in a way that presents a continuation and increase of present opportunities into an unforeseeable future, and to make the consumer feel “more human.” The legal structures for other “sending” countries are equally interesting, but the centrality of the status of women under racialized slavery in the United States to their exploitation, and the particular way this inflects primitive accumulation, is instructive for thinking about how commercial gestational surrogacy in India can be a continuation of a particular U.S. history while being simultaneously part of other histories. 20. Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure.

Vora.indd 169

16/01/2015 11:38:34 AM

170

Notes to Chapter 4

21. Eggs for IVF come from either the commissioning mother or the clinic’s bank of eggs from local donors. 22. Viviana Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). 23. E.g., Helena Ragone, Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2004); Deborah Spar, The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business Press, 2006); Susan Markens, Surrogate Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Elly Teman, Birth­ ing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 24. Teman, Birthing a Mother, 9–­14. 25. Vora, “Experimental Sociality and Gestational Surrogacy in the Indian ART Clinic.” 26. Other clinics mandate no contact between gestational surrogates and commissioning parents, making the Manushi policy seem rather flexible. See Sheela Saravanan, European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies conference proceedings, Bonn, Germany, July 2010. 27. This is, of course, subject to the same caveats as microlending—­the surrogate’s statements of choice are not always equivalent to her will, and the guarantee that the usage of fees will be her decision does not equal a guarantee that her statement of decision represents her free choice. 28. Citing estimates that 50 to 90 percent of all microcredit goes into funding consumption—­getting food or paying medical costs—­Moodie points out that men are often the ones to use the loans because of the “deeply entrenched system of gender inequality and kinship obligation” that is the context for women borrowers. Furthermore, the loans do not create entrepreneurial subjects, because to survive, the poor have already become experts at business logic on a small scale. Megan Moodie, “Microfinance and the Gender of Risk,” Signs 38, no. 2 (2013): 279–­302. 29. Waldby and Mitchell, Tissue Economies, 180. 30. Vora, “Potential, Risk and Return in Transnational Indian Gestational Surrogacy.” 31. Pande, “It May Be Her Eggs.” 32. Sheela Saravanan, European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies conference proceedings, Bonn, Germany, July 2010; Sheela Saravanan, “An Ethnomethodological Approach to Examine Exploitation in the Context of Capacity, Trust, and Experience of Commercial Surrogacy in India,” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 8, no. 10 (2013): 1–­12; Sama, Birthing a Market. 33. Pande also notes that in her study, surrogates challenged masculinized hierarchies of kinship where male seed is determinate by insisting on the importance

Vora.indd 170

16/01/2015 11:38:34 AM



Notes to Chapter 4

171

of blood ties through gestation and the tie created through the work of delivering the infant, pointing instead to the multivocality of kinship. Pande, “It May Be Her Eggs,” 386. 34. Its translation from Bengali to English by Gayatri Spivak is published in her collection of essays titled In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), alongside her own essay analyzing the story, and so any discussion of “Stanadayini” must acknowledge the context of Spivak’s reading, which accompanies the version of the story to which most U.S. English–­speaking readers have access. In India, the publication of Spivak’s translation circulates as part of a collection of three of Devi’s stories in translation by Spivak and is titled Breast Stories (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1997). It also includes two commentaries on the stories that debate the role of authorship and reader of the texts, one by Spivak and one by Devi. The story in English is therefore prefigured by this debate as it circulates in English in both India and the United States. 35. Devi and Spivak, “Stanadayini,” in Breast Stories, 74. 36. Ibid., 67. 37. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman’s Text from the Third World,” in In Other Worlds, 241. 38. Ibid., 249. 39. Ibid., 251. 40. Ibid., 260. 41. Marx and Engels, Marx-­Engels Reader, 72. 42. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s study of airline attendants provides a good illustration of this process. Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 43. Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” in Marx and Engels, Marx-­Engels Reader, 87; Tadiar, Fantasy Production, 131. 44. However, this assumption or “common sense” would be the result of a certain fetishization of care and nurture as “objects.” 45. Cooper, Life as Surplus, 13. 46. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe affective labor as “biopolitical production, in that it directly produces social relationships and forms of life.” The argument for affective commodities as a form of biocapital, rather than a result of biopower, emphasizes the economic interest capitalism has in human life and how this itself becomes a structure organizing what needs are outlawed for whom and where. Specifically, the selling of commodified affect becomes a means of subsistence in addition to producing social life. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 110. 47. Karl Marx’s labor theory of value in Capital Vol. 1 explains that the value of labor as a commodity is the underlying labor-­power of the human worker, its vitality and ability to self-­renew.

Vora.indd 171

16/01/2015 11:38:34 AM

172

Notes to Chapter 4

48. Spivak, “Scattered Speculations.” 49. Parreñas, Children of Global Migration. 50. Ann Anagnost, “Scenes of Misrecognition: Maternal Citizenship in the Age of Transnational Adoption,” positions 8, no. 2 (2000): 389–­421. 51. For ethnographic examples of requests by surrogates for additional payments and the responses of commissioning parents, see Kalindi Vora, “Indian Transnational Surrogacy,” and Rebecca Haimowitz and Vaishali Sinha, dir., Made in India: A Film about Surrogacy (2010). Epilogue 1. Joel Johnson, “1 Million Workers. 90 Million Phones. 17 Suicides. Who Is to Blame?” Wired, February 28, 2011, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ ff_joelinchina/all/1. 2. Harry Bradford, “Chinese Labor Camp Worker Sends Plea for Help Hidden in Cheap Halloween Decorations,” Huffington Post, December 27, 2012, http: //www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/27/chinese-­labor-­camp-­worker_n_23702 16.html. 3. Occasionally, a dramatic and catastrophic incident forces tacit acknowledgment by corporate entities that their business operations are ending lives. Though fires and other workplace incidents had long been taking the lives of Bangladeshi garment workers, the death of more than eleven hundred workers in the Rana Plaza factory collapse in April 2013 led U.S. and European retailers to formalize factory inspection standards for hundreds of factories in the country. 4. Neda Atanasoski, Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 5. According to Grace Hong, “if the fundamental characteristic of capitalism is circulation, rather than production, and if contemporary capitalism has increasingly been organized around finance capital acting in and of itself, rather than anchored by production, today’s populations are not only surplus labor but are also merely surplus: existentially surplus. In other words, currently, certain populations are not necessary to capital as potential sources of labor, but instead are useful for their intrinsic lack of value.” Hong, “Existential Surplus: Women of Color Feminism and the New Crisis of Capitalism,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18 (2012): 92. 6. Johnson, “1 Million Workers.” 7. Emily Martin traces the demand to use technology to make bodies productive, noting the historical “horror” at lack of productivity among capitalist subjects in the Global North, citing “the factory, the failed business, the idle machine,” as self-­apparent wrongs justifying intervention and change. Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 45.

Vora.indd 172

16/01/2015 11:38:34 AM



Notes to Epilogue

173

8. Roy Scranton, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” New York Times, November 10, 2013. 9. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). 10. For example, see Steven Lee Myers and Nicolas Kulish, “Growing Clamor about Inequalities of Global Climate Change,” New York Times, November 16, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/world/growing-­clamor-­about-­inequi ties-­of-­climate-­crisis.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 11. Foucault, Order of Things.

Vora.indd 173

16/01/2015 11:38:34 AM

This page intentionally left blank

index

accumulation: accumulation of vital energy as a form of biocapital, 12–13, 71; and artificial surplus, 51, 138; basic mechanism of capitalist accumulation, 51; continuities between old and new forms of capitalist accumulation, 5; effects of accumulation via extraction on individual lives, 18, 24, 44, 96, 108; and generation of always new necessities, 58; and living labor, 19; maternity and the family as sites of exploitation and the accumulation of value, 136; not captured by conventional explanations, 3, 30, 41–42; and outsourcing, 4, 6, 81, 84; patterns of extraction and accumulation rooted in colonialism, 9, 13, 21, 25, 26, 29, 116; potential for disrupting established patterns of extraction and accumulation, 143; primitive accumulation, 5, 34, 54; and reproduction in chattel slavery, 159–60; reproduction/ reproductivity as central to, 3, 4, 7, 106; via transmission of vital energy

from areas of life depletion to areas of life enrichment, 3–4, 13, 19, 44, 115–16, 138, 144; unmarked accumulation, 26. See also alienation; artificial surplus; vital energy; vitality affective commodities: as carriers of value drained from the person who produces them, 52–53, 56, 59–60; as a form of biocapital, 22, 52, 59, 136, 139, 144, 171; and gendering of labor scaled up through globalization, 13; imbalance in the exchange of, 44, 138; nature of social relations embedded in, 45; such as personal­ ized attention, 51; and surrogacy, 112, 136–38. See also affectively neces­sary labor; alienation; call centers; commodification; gesta­ tional surrogacy; gray economies of affect affective labor, 13, 36, 41, 60, 133, 138; and data form of call center agent, 46; and resistance, 64; structures of, 55–56; use value of, 138. See also affective commodities; affectively necessary labor 175

Vora.indd 175

16/01/2015 11:38:34 AM

176 Index

affectively necessary labor (Spivak), 8. See also affective commodities; feminized labor; gendered labor; gray economies of affect alienation: affective and biological alienation, 35–36, 41, 133, 135; alienated vital energy, 134; alienation as contrary to the “good life” in Marx, 134; of commercial care work as spilling out and infecting noncommercial, filial relations, 131, 135; and commercial mothering work, 108, 134–35; as loneliness, 35–36, 55–60, 65, 69, 102, 132–33; Marx on the alienation of the worker from the product of labor, 133; multiple forms and levels of, in call center work, 43–66; social, 29, 35, 65, 132, 163; three types of, described by Marx, 59; unique valences of, within transnational commercial gestational surrogacy, 132, 140. See also accumulation; artificial surplus; “cheapness” of Indian labor; commodification; false surplus in the production of affect; Marx, Karl; outlawed needs; vital energy; vitality Anagnost, Ann, 40 Aneesh, A., 35, 46, 53, 75, 86, 88, 89, 164, 165, 166 Arnold, David, 108 artificial surplus: of affective commodities, 22, 55, 138; of vital energy, 113–14. See also “cheapness” of Indian labor; false surplus in the production of affect; manufactured surplus assisted reproductive technologies (ART), 24, 145; ART clinics, 14, 16,

Vora.indd 176

36, 104–6, 128, 138, 167, 168, 169, 170; draft ART bills and rules, 28, 36, 105, 139. See also gestational surrogacy; Manushi fertility clinic autonomy: biological/affective labor and compromised sense of, 31; blurred line between autonomy and coercion, 28–29, 35–36; constraints/ restrictions on, 3, 5, 81, 142, 143; and the history of imperial labor in India, 39; setting-specific under­ stand­ings of, 42; understandings of autonomy that erase the labor of those who make a certain type of “autonomy” possible, 32. See also consent Bangalore: Bangalore butler, 43–44; as a city with multiple profiles, 72–73; and information technology, 16, 23, 68–75, 77–82, 84–91, 96–97, 100– 102, 136, 165; tension with the rest of Karnataka, 75; typical day of an IT professional in, 77–78 Beller, Jonathan, 92, 99 biocapital, 1, 7, 89, 113, 134; affective commodities as a form of, 22, 43, 52, 59, 136, 139, 144, 171; anthropological work on, 7; biocapitalist production and accumulation, 104, 107; and compulsion to sell the body’s longterm capacities, 54; dependence on reproductivity, 7, 9, 106; era of, 17; expanded realm of, 15; increasing role of, as an engine of the inter­ national market, 12; intersection of social and biological reproduction as part of transnational commercial surrogacy in India as illustrative of connections between colonial

16/01/2015 11:38:35 AM

Index 177

histories and contemporary biocapital, 114; roots in colonial labor allocation, 3–5; smuggled against the flow of value from Global South to Global North, 65; surrogate gestational mothers as both reproductive workers and biocapital (rather than just workers), 135; vital energy and, 12, 19–20, 22, 59, 65, 71, 139, 143. See also biopolitics; biopower biological labor, 13, 30, 104, 106, 139; subject of, 21, 138 biopolitics, 5–7, 142–44; affective labor as biopolitical production, 171; biopolitical death of lifeworlds and life force, 147; biopolitical econo­ mies of extrahuman life, 19; bio­ politi­cal territorialization, 43–44, colonial, 109; communication as a biopolitical form of transmitting and accumulating value, 102; and gestational surrogacy, 106–7, 113–14; ideas of how life can be protected from exploitation and biopolitical pressure, 134; microbiopolitics, 13; and reproductivity, 12. See also biocapital; biopower biopower, 5, 15, 171. See also biocapital; biopolitics Bollywood, 91, 93–94, 102 Bombay, 72. See also Mumbai Bombay Calling, 50–51 Boris, Eileen: and Rhacel Parreñas, 151 BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China), 11 call centers, 162; and British colonialism, 9, 10, 11, 29; and circulation of affective commodities, 13; ethnographic and fictive narratives about,

Vora.indd 177

43–65; and gestational surrogacy, 25–41, 136; and IT work, 69, 79–81, 86–87, 89, 96, 99–101; as putting pressure on and exceeding the category of labor, 22, 25–41; telephonebased telecommunications software for, 72 Capital (Marx), 30, 52, 157, 171. See also Marx, Karl capitalism: arbitrariness of meaning assigned to laboring subjects under capitalism, 15–16; biotechnologies and their products as marking a new period of, 7; and the category of labor, 21, 143; colonial/imperial, 25; contemporary global, 82, 86, 88–89, 138, 164; current lack of a horizon for, 142; and existential surplus, 172; Marx’s critique of capitalism’s alienation of humans, 59; no labor under capitalism is solely economic, 64; and raciali­ zation, 66; reproduction and, 2, 26, 31, 54; vital energy as what is circulated within capitalism, 146. See also alienation; Capital; colonial labor allocation; commodification caste, 8, 10, 11, 21, 104, 106, 134 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 18 chattel slavery. See slavery Chatterjee, Piya, 10 “cheapness” of Indian labor, 6, 16, 43–44, 50, 51–52, 58–59, 65, 69–70, 74–75, 78. See also artificial surplus; manufactured surplus; outlawed needs Chennai, 72, 74 class. See middle class; transnational capitalist class Clifford, James, 17

16/01/2015 11:38:35 AM

178 Index

Cold War, 153 colonialism: British colonialism in India, 4–5, 7, 8–11, 15, 21, 27, 34, 42, 43, 80, 108–9, 155, 156, 167; coloni­ zation of the body, 108–9; European territorial, 3, 6, 13, 100, 107; and heteropatriarchy, 5, 32–33; neolib­ eral reform as recolonization, 12 colonial labor allocation, 3–4, 15, 34, 80, 100. See also colonialism commodification: of affect in call center work, 43–66; of affect in transnational commercial gesta­ tional surrogacy, 136–37; of the body’s biological functions and parts, 31, 120; of subjects and humanity, 39; issues of, at the center of commercial surrogacy debates, 120; of life and vitality, 4; relation­ ship of, to forms of sociality within transnational commercial gesta­ tional surrogacy, 105; of the worker in Capital, 30 consent, 12, 13, 27–29, 110, 168. See also autonomy Cooper, Melinda, 136; and Catherine Waldby, 13; and Terry Woronov, 151 Davis, Angela, 32, 160 debt: as a motivating factor in transnational gestational surrogacy, 119, 124; social indebtedness in the context of surrogacy, 137, 147; in A Terrible Beauty Is Born, 46, 56, 63. See also microlending Delhi, 16, 33, 34–35, 45–46, 49, 57, 62–63, 65, 72, 86–87, 128, 165, 167, 168 Devi, Mahasweta. See Mahasweta Devi

Vora.indd 178

Ehrenreich, Barbara: and Arlie Hochschild, 163 ethnography: of call center work, 10, 44–45, 46, 50, 52, 57, 163; of gesta­ tional surrogacy, 10, 36, 103–42, 172; and globalization, 6; of IT work, 10, 69, 165, 166; juxtaposition of ethno­ graphic and fictive/aesthetic narra­ tives, 17–20, 22–23, 45, 52, 71, 91, 97, 131, 135; output of affective labor difficult to track ethnographically, 54; Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s ethno­ graphic work, 85, 89; as refined by feminist, poststructural, and native anthropological interventions, 16. See also juxtaposition false surplus in the production of affect, 51. See also outlawed needs fantasy: Bangalore IT professionals and the fantasy of a U.S.-style middle-class existence, 77; colonial fantasy and the Bangalore butler, 43; cosmopolitan fantasy of an interconnected world, 72–73; mainstream fantasy economies, 100–101; of middle-class life as transcending location, 102; as necessary to the production of an acceptable persona in transnational call center work, 35; of political potential within the open source code movement, 70; poor subjects in the Global South as unable to participate in the fantasy of end­ lessly renewable life, 125; of social relations within a shared cultural space in transnational call center work, 48; of the start-up, 85; as a structure of desire and imagination

16/01/2015 11:38:35 AM

Index 179

that also structures social and economic relations, 18, 101; as structuring the material lives and life decisions of programmers in Transmission, 90–96; U.S. middleclass fantasies, 125; as valorizing certain spaces over others, 71. See also imagination feminized labor: and “housewifiza­ tion,” 160; and India, 1, 11, 64; juxta­ position as a method of tracing, 20; as part of a racialized system of exploitation, 26; repro­ductive work as, 30. See also gendered labor Fortunati, Leopoldina, 31, 34, 112, 166 Foxconn, 141–43 Franklin, Sarah: and Margaret Lock, 3 free trade zones: and special economic zones, 6 futurity, 81, 89 gendered labor: call center work as, 35; and colonialism, 10; difficulty in determining the limits of, 19, 35, 113; gaining protections, 33; and the heteropatriarchal family, 26, 169; and India, 2; and the limitations of traditional understandings of the category of labor, 30; new forms of, 13; and structures of race, 26. See also feminized labor genetic essentialism, 40, 143 gestational surrogacy, 23–24; affect and the biological in transnational surrogacy and service work, 25–42; ethnography of surrogacy in con­ ver­sation with Mahasweta Devi’s “Stanadayini,” 103–40; as imposing temporariness, 87; as part of a

Vora.indd 179

sexual mode of production that relies on the privatization of gestation and childbirth, 169; in relation to British colonial manage­ ment of Indian labor, 9; sensational­ ized media coverage of, 14; as a service involving temporary use of the body, 2; as sharing commonali­ ties with forms of outsourced service and knowledge work, 3, 69, 101; and territorialization of subjects, 143–44 global division of labor, 11, 51, 65, 68, 101. See also colonial labor alloca­ tion; international division of labor globalization: and circulation of life energy, 20, 114, 134; and colonialism, 2, 11–12, 25, 31, 100, 114, 134; conjunctural nature of, 70; and distanciation, 17; and fantasy, 18, 91; and flexibilization of labor, 14–15; gendering of labor scaled up by, 13; of high-tech labor, 101; and India, 4, 8, 70, 114, 141; literature on, 6; neo­ liberal globalization, 21, 25, 141; and new technologies, 142–43; during the 1990s, 6, 10; and outsourcing, 6, 10, 13, 17, 114, 134; and reorganization of space and time, 70, 164; and restlessness/dissatisfaction, 70 Global North: conditions in the United States and India as exempli­ fying structural relationships between the Global North and Global South, 16; exhaustion of biological bodies and labors in India to extend “life” in, 13; forms of biocapital smuggled against the flow of value from Global South to Global North, 65; as including the

16/01/2015 11:38:35 AM

180 Index

middle and upper classes in hyperdeveloped spaces and the transnational capitalist class and growing middle class in India, 39; long-distance transmission of affective labor through unequal structures of exchange between Global North and Global South, 52; as structurally similar to former colonial metropoles, 12, 26, 116; subjects in the Global North as benefitting from constraints on economic opportunities for women in the Global South, 125 Global South: cities as hubs of trans­ national circulation, imagined and configured as part of an intercon­ nected world within cosmopolitan fantasy, 72; creation of artificial surplus for accumulation in hyper­ developed spaces, 138; critiques by feminists based in, 22, 26; forms of biocapital smuggled against the flow of value from Global South to Global North, 65; generation of surplus value in the United States dependent on outsourcing of reproductive work to the Global South, 23; and labors of care and service, 30; long-distance trans­ mission of affective labor through unequal structures of exchange between Global North and Global South, 52; mapping of new arenas of bodily and biological labor, 21; organ selling and sex work as ways in which subjects attempt to access global flows of wealth despite being outside their centers of consump­ tion, 6; relegated to reproductive

Vora.indd 180

work within contemporary struc­ tures of globalization, 12; reproduc­ tive work and women, 137; and unequal distribution of care on a world scale, 169 Gordon, Avery, 18 gray economies of affect, 19, 22, 60–64, 65 hacking: as a form of protest or resistance, 69, 91; hacking in fiction, 90–91, 100; open-source coding and “hacking around,” 82, 86; racialization of “hacking” and “piracy,” 166 Haraway, Donna, 154 Hardt, Michael: and Antonio Negri, 47, 171 Helmreich, Stefan, 7 Hennessy, Rosemary, 116, 163 heteropatriachal family/household, 13, 26, 32–33, 135, 139, 169 Hochschild, Arlie: and Barbara Ehrenreich, 163 H1-B visas, 68, 88, 164. See also visas Hong, Grace, 19, 32, 34, 65, 142, 160, 172 Hyderabad, 72, 74 imagination: and alienation in A Terrible Beauty Is Born, 55–61; and biotechnology, 7; and capitalism, 16; as central to the lives of trans­ national IT workers, 69, 71, 101; and desire, 16, 18, 21, 43, 53, 55, 93, 101, 144; economies of, 16, 21, 43; and fantasy, 18, 23, 71, 90, 94, 101, 144; of how life can be protected from exploitation and biopolitical pressure, 142; as a political space, 102, 104; productive power of, 71, 90, 93, 96; and representation, 18; role of,

16/01/2015 11:38:35 AM

Index 181

in helping to valorize some lives over others, 93, 94, 144; and social relations formed through outsourcing, 15, 17, 60; as structuring material lives, 23, 102; in Transmission, 69, 71, 90, 93–96, 102. See also fantasy immigration, 67, 93, 169 indenture, 7, 10, 27–28, 32, 34, 142, 159 Indian middle class (contemporary): as alienated from the majority of Indian society, 102; in Bangalore, 70, 74, 77, 80, 86, 101–2; and call center work, 43, 165; and capital savings, 86; and insecurity/instability/ temporariness, 70, 74, 80; lowermiddle-class women in India and surrogacy, 34, 159; as part of the global North, 39; composition of, 74, 169; relationship of power and exploitation between India’s upper middle classes and the rural poor, 114; and the United States, 102 international division of labor, 2, 6–7, 12, 21, 27, 30, 43–44, 67–69, 100–101. See also global division of labor intimacy: and alienation, 41, 104, 133; and call center work, 45; and economic exchange, 104, 119–22, 140; and imperialism, 155–56, 167 in vitro fertilization (IVF), 15, 37, 41; as expanding the number of commod­ ity forms of human life and human vital energy, 24; as explained to potential surrogates in the Manushi clinic, 111; medical risks to the sur­ rogate, 125; one U.S. client’s percep­ tions of, 121; origin of eggs for, 170 Jakobsen, Janet, 32 Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA), 1, 153

Vora.indd 181

juxtaposition: in Akhil Gupta’s work, 162; juxtapositional reading practice, 18; juxtapositions in Transmission, 93, 97–98; as method, 20–21, 69, 91, 106, 108, 131, 135–36 Kale, Madhavi, 27, 28 Karnataka State, 72–75, 78 Kempadoo, Kamala, 12 Kunzru, Hari, 23, 69, 90, 98. See also Transmission labor: alienation of, 4, 12–13, 21, 25, 30, 41, 104, 106, 112, 138–39, 158, 169; care labor, 30; colonial labor allocation, 3–4, 15, 34, 80, 100; knowledge work/labor, 4, 23, 46, 48, 55, 67–101, 162; living labor, 18. See also affective labor; “cheapness” of Indian labor; feminized labor; international division of labor; labor theory of value; reproductive labor labor theory of value, 19, 116, 133, 171 law: British colonial, 8, 10; and coding/hacking, 81, 166; and flexibilized labor, 160; and gestational surrogacy globally, 38; and gestational surrogacy in India, 6, 14–15, 24, 28, 40, 103–4, 110, 113–15, 117, 120–21, 139; immigration and law in fiction, 92; intellectual property, 82–84 Lock, Margaret: and Sara Franklin, 3 Lowe, Lisa, 27, 151 Mahasweta Devi, 108, 131, 171. See also “Stanadayini” Malthus, Thomas, 9 manufactured surplus, 59, 138 Manushi fertility clinic, 36, 103–30, 133, 135–37, 170

16/01/2015 11:38:36 AM

182 Index

Marx, Karl: and alienation, 52, 59, 133– 34; and commodified knowledge production, 83; limits of traditional Marxist notions of labor, 25, 29–32, 106, 116, 113; and “living labor,” 19; on “loss of reality” and the impov­ erishment of the worker’s “inner world,” 62; role of the bourgeoisie, 164; and self-estrangement, 59; and surrogacy, 113–14; and vital energy as the true content of value carried by the commodity, 13, 22, 59, 171. See also Capital McClintock, Anne, 167n4 medicine: mainstream medicine and acknowledgment of the trans­ national organ trade, 1; medical discourse and British colonialism in India, 10, 107–9; medical discourse as mediating understandings of sur­ rogacy, 109–11, 115–16; privati­za­tion of, 114. See also genetic essentialism; gestational surrogacy; science Melamed, Jodi, 11 microfinance, 170. See also microlending microlending, 108, 123–25, 170 middle class: in colonial India, 8, 55, 114, 155; fantasies of middle-class lifestyles, 101–2, 125; and Indian independence, 8. See also Indian middle class; U.S. middle class Mies, Maria, 34, 36, 160 Mumbai, 72, 121, 164 neoliberalism, 6, 12, 21, 25, 39, 108, 124, 128, 136–38, 141–42 Nixon, Rob, 146 open source programming, 71, 77, 91, 100; and gray market creativity,

Vora.indd 182

81–86; Open Source Initiative, 86; open source movement, 70 organ trade, human, 1–3, 54, 58, 145, 153, 159 outlawed necessities. See outlawed needs outlawed needs, 58, 90, 100, 116, 162, 163 Pande, Amrita, 110, 128, 170 Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar, 59, 139, 154; and Eileen Boris, 151 Philip, Kavita, 166 political economy: colonial, 26; phenomena not explained or addressed by traditional political economy as a discipline, 51, 68 postcolonial studies, 5, 10 Prakash, Gyan, 8, 109 queer studies, 159 race, 65, 160; critical race studies, 5; and gender as structuring the conditions of outsourcing, 39–40, 42; and imperialism, 26–27, 156; and India, 9, 107; and the domestic sphere, 32. See also racialization racialization: and colonial govern­ ment­ality, 156, 167; as defined by Jodi Melamed, 11; and “flexibili­ zation,” 33; and global patterns of production and consumption, 9, 141, 143; hyperavailability of racial­ ized and gendered bodies, 29; and labor, 2–5, 10–11, 20–22, 25–26, 30, 39, 45, 66, 67–68, 107, 137, 142; racial­ ization of India, 26, 43, 45, 64; in U.S. history, 160, 169. See also race Radhakrishnan, Smitha, 74, 165

16/01/2015 11:38:36 AM

Index 183

Raina, Arjun, 22, 44–45, 150. See also Terrible Beauty Is Born, A representation: aesthetic vs. ethnographic, 45; as coproduced with necessity, surplus, labor, and laborers, 64; in Curacha, 99; living labor yielding histories not repre­ sented in the archive, 18; material effects of, 18; materialist analysis and, 65; representations of Indian labor, 15, 106; and researcher accountability, 17 reproductive labor: affective and biological labors as both productive and reproductive, 30–31, 137; and chattel slavery, 159; and colonial labor allocation, 21; as defined by Marx, 30; difficulty of demarcation, 19; dual nature of reproductive labor, 26, 31, 34, 112, 116; and the economy of outsourcing, 2, 4, 15; gendered allocation of, to Indian IT workers, 97, 100; international division of, 154; and mothering, 137; racialization and, 15–16, 130; reproductive labor as troubling the category of labor, 26, 30, 116. See also feminized labor; gendered labor resistance, 22, 69, 70, 91 risk: material security required for certain types of creative risk taking in software development, 85; medi­ cal and psychosocial risks to surro­ gates, 125–26, 169; and microlending, 124–25, 170; new kinds of risks to workers, 143; risk-averse attitude among Indian software engineers, 84–84; sense of risk vs. security, 71; small and low-risk investment of BPOs in their employees, 79; some

Vora.indd 183

individual and community futures become placed at risk for the gain of others, 144, 147; and temporariness, 86–90; and venturesomeness, 86 Rose, Nikolas, 7 Rosaldo, Renato: and Jonathan Inda, 70, 164 Sama: Resource Group for Women’s Health, 33, 128, 167, 168, 169 Saravanan, Sheela, 128 science, 3; as assigning meaning to the human body, 115, 145; biological sciences increasingly becoming information sciences, 54; discourse of invention in genetic science, 82; India as a rising leader in, 5; in Indian history, 8–9; and the manage­ ment of future risk, 89; science studies, 5, 19, 54. See also genetic essentialism; gestational surrogacy; medicine September 11, 2001, 47, 57 slavery, 7, 27–28, 32, 34, 62–63, 142, 159, 160, 169 slow violence, 146 Spivak, Gayatri, 8, 98, 131–33, 137, 171 “Stanadayini” (Devi), 108, 131–35 Stoler, Ann, 167n4 Strathern, Marilyn, 7–8 subaltern, 47, 106, 114, 132, 137 Sunder Rajan, Kaushik, 54, 85, 89 Tadiar, Neferti, 18, 91, 93, 128, 134 Teman, Elly, 120 temporality: of expectation, 139; experience of, 93; and flexibilization of labor, 86; of life in Bangalore, 70; of the market, 84; and Rob Nixon’s conception of “slow death,” 146; and

16/01/2015 11:38:36 AM

184 Index

politics, 144; and risk management in biocapital, 89; of transnational electronic capital, 55 Terrible Beauty Is Born, A (Raina), 23–24, 44–49, 55–65 Transmission (Kunzru), 23, 69, 71, 90–100 transnational capitalist class, 12, 37, 39, 73, 164 U.S. middle class: and children, 125; valorization of white life and middle-class property ownership at the expense of racialized others, 32, 115, 160, 169 visas: and temporariness, 76–77, 88–89; H1-B visas, 68, 88, 164; in Transmission, 92–93, 96 vital energy: accumulation of, 4, 9, 12, 18–19, 34, 71, 96, 115–16; and aliena­ tion, 59; as biocapital, 12, 22, 71; and call centers, 44, 51; and colon­ ial­ism, 3, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13; and feminist theories of reproductive labor, 19;

Vora.indd 184

juxtapo­sition as a method for tracing the circulation of, 18–19, 20; and Marx, 13, 22, 133; and needs/ outlawed needs, 145; and outsourc­ ing, 13, 15, 144; and structures of race and gender, 26, 32; and surro­ gacy, 24, 34, 39, 107, 113–16, 134. See also vitality vitality: and the bioeconomy, 7; and colonialism, 4, 107; and commercial mothering, 107–8, 113, 114, 134–38; and imagination, 102; and the international division of labor, 44; juxtaposition as a method for tracing, 20; and Marx, 13, 22, 134, 171; and representation, 18; vitality economies, 12–13, 107, 113. See also vital energy Waldby, Catherine: and Melinda Cooper, 13; and Robert Mitchell, 82–84, 89, 125, 157 Winiecki, Donald, 50 Zelizer, Viviana, 120

16/01/2015 11:38:36 AM

K A L I N D I V O R A is assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

Vora.indd 185

16/01/2015 11:38:36 AM