Affect, Authority, Antagonism: The New Culture of Customer Service

Affect, Authority, Antagonism: The New Culture of Customer Service

A talk by Professor Diane Negra

Friday, March 24 at 6:00 pm
Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th Floor
In-person event
RSVP Required

The contemporary consumer economy is marked by a transfer of work from corporations to customers, technology platforms with high failure rates, deep devotion to byzantine bureaucratic procedures and the conspicuous, constant valuing of high-status customers over low-status ones.  Current affective culture is thus notable for the conversion of customer service encounters to transactions routinely characterized by frustration, impotence, and fury.  In this project I consider how what I call the "antagonistic interface" arises as a function of the way early twenty first century Americans so often identify with the interests of capital and technology, examining it as a site of lived experience and a subject of media depiction.

Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin.  A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she is the author, editor or co-editor of thirteen books including Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity, The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness and Imagining "We" in the Age of "I:" Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture.  She serves as Chair of the Irish Fulbright Commission.

Free and open to the public. RSVP required.