Re-building Value and Skill: Networked Affect and Women’s Immaterial Labor in Digital

Fabricultures

@cyberdivalivesl@the_spinning_professor

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http://www.tumblr.com/blog/cyberdivaliveRadhika Gajjala, Berks2014

Global/Digital Visibility of Spinners and Knitters

• Craft economies built through online networking practices.

• 2005 to present

• Podcasts, Blogs, Etsy, Ravelry, Twitter, Instagram, game worlds

Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014

• Janet Greenless writes about the Lowell Mill girls and the role of women ages 15 to 30 in that particular textile industry’s transition to factory system.

Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014

• Encounters with spaces of individualization leading to voicing on the Internet result in a variety of negotiations in relation to cultural oppression and liberation as their is a transition from one kind of community based hierarchy to multiple other communities with differing (and often invisible) hierarchies. Entering new spaces generally requires a process of negotiating multiple contexts through a kaleidoscope of lenses as (re) coding self and surroundings happens in various ways.

• Hierarchies are constructed through the process of shifting into new cultures surface when those who have and those who have not the socio-cultural-economic, and techno capital required to produce and consume information and/or products in that space become re-positioned through the temporalities of such spacial arrangements and tools for mobility.

Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014

What is the use-value of technologies that do not emphasize speed?

The labor of (hand) spinning yarn – what is it – productive or reproductive? Material or Immaterial? Affective or Material? Is it commodity or process?

Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014

• Domestic labor and production

• When a technological shift occurs in modes of production, under what conditions does it give women more control over their bodies and value for their labor and when does it take control away from women?

Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014

What use are the skills associated with such technologies? Are they not excessive? What is one to do with excess that cannot be mobilized as surplus value?

Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014

• Delink the context of production where spinning yarn is a part of textile production and we see a fetishization of yarn. Yarn and the pre-machine tools themselves seem to have become fetishized –postmodern products marketed as pure pleasure and indulgence (note phrases such as “yarn-porn” and “spindle-porn”). Yet these must co-exist with learning the skills, the revealing of process

Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014

Viewed in this way, what use has the work of spinning in the current global economy?

• “Non-material use-values are those goods produced within the housework process which have no material basis: affection, sexuality, companionship, ‘love,’ and the like. These goods satisfy the individual’s non-material needs, which are as important for his/her reproduction as is a grilled steak or an ironed shirt...they are use-values for value...But surely the differences between individuals’ consumption of non‐material use values have a far more concrete basis.” ‐(Fortunati, 1995, 74-75)

Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014

Geek grrlsmeet DIY

Radhika Gajjala, CP 2014

The “squee factor” and other fun stuff.

Value is produced through networked forms of affect, shared skills, visual aesthetics and tactile understanding of materiality.

Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014

• Digitality as portrayed in a Western-centric celebration leads to an erasure of colonial intervention and shaping of such technological environments.

Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014

• What does the aspiration for a level playing field look like in practice? In relation to physical land based space

Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014

Ponduru to DIY As I continue to examine craft networks and craft communities (there is a difference) – I examine the diverse range of spinners worldwide and how their location shapes their practice. Thus a Ponduru spinner of Khadi from South India and the DIY spinner who learns this practice are joined in networks of skill and empathy .

Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014

Yet

Culturally - when the former transforms into the latter based in the supposed potential and possibility of the internet-worked marketing – she is likely to be de-hinged from the physical community and national/historic brand of Khadi – travelling skill – and erasure of body and land based practice.

Ecologically - she loses connection with the land that produces the particular kind of cotton needed for the yarn she must spin in order that her spinning forms the basis for the weaving of Ponduru Khadi.

The land is given over to other sorts of production. Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014

http://prezi.com/zo5ofeyekpjy/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014