A B S T R A C T G This article explores how the Explosive Ordnance Disposal(EOD) robot is represented to the mass media by the US military as a 'life-saving device'. Such descriptions of the EOD robot discursively organize it in relation to other objects and actors, endow them with values and capacities, and ultimately situate them in social action. Drawing from US newspaper articles and Department of Defense press releases, the article highlights how the robot descriptions create a sense of automation and agency on the part of the remotecontrolled devices that is actually beyond the technology. It is then argued that the IED-combating robot functions as a kind of fetish. Following Baudrillard, the fetish value of the robot stems not from a misunderstanding of its actual or 'real' capacities but rather its positive valuation according to a code of functionality that rests upon the risk-transfer labour of the robot. G This article argues that the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) robots currently being deployed by primarily US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan can be understood as a kind of fetish object. EOD robots are essentially remote control devices used to either disable or detonate improvised explosive devices (IEDs) at a distance. Though military robots are increasingly being developed with a wider range of sensor devices and 'weaponized', these robots are in no way autonomous devices. Nonetheless, much of the discourse addressing these
Recent changes in open plan office design are intended to facilitate flexible and collaborative work practices. Though promoted in terms of aesthetics and functionality, these changes in layout and furnishing communicate a great deal about how work and the workers that perform them are understood. Drawing upon the semiotics of framing and the chronotope, the open plan office is analyzed as a multimodal realization of neoliberal discourses on the flexibilization and deregulation of work. As such, the collaborative open plan office does more than represent or give expression to neoliberal ideologies, it normalizes and makes durable the work processes, identities and temporalities of neoliberalized labour.
This paper argues that a multimodal approach to critical discourse analysis makes visible how contemporary office design and furnishings prescribe gender performativities crucial to the labour of communicative capitalism (Dean 2005). Examining WWW-based promotional material produced by multinational contract furniture producers, a critical analysis is offered of the ways in which the open-plan office is represented as a wellspring of affective labour. First, attention is turned to detailing the kinds of social actors and their actions depicted in the representations of office work. Second, the kinds of interactional meanings produced in the videos are documented. Having established how these idealized representations of knowledge work highlight particular embodiments and actions, the paper then argues that the promotional materials are in fact constituting those ‘bodies that matter’ (Butler 1993) to communicative capitalism. Ultimately, these videos depict how the female knowledge worker must ‘cite’ a normative feminized affective worker so as to be recognized as a viable employee.
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