1. Re-building Value and Skill:
Networked Affect and Women’s
Immaterial Labor in Digital
Fabricultures
@cyberdivalivesl
@the_spinning_professor
Facebook: Cyberdivalive Creations
Tumblr:
http://www.tumblr.com/blog/cyberdivali
veRadhika Gajjala, Berks2014
2. 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
3. • 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
4. • 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
5. 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
6. • 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
7. 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
8. • 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
9. 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
11. 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
12. • Digitality as portrayed in a Western-centric
celebration leads to an erasure of colonial
intervention and shaping of such technological
environments.
Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014
13. • What does the aspiration for a level playing
field look like in practice? In relation to
physical land based space
Radhika Gajjala, Berks2014
14. 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
15. 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
In most societies around the world – at least according to recorded history – the spinning of yarn was done mostly by women and in the house prior to the systematic mechanization of the process. How was the work done by these “spinsters” valued? Was it considered reproductive work or productive work? Can spinning ever be equated with non-material work (valued or not)?
There is much attention paid to the production of yarn in writings about productivity, labor, and industry. As Federici (2010) has noted, even Marx was meticulous in noting the role of yarn and its production in relation to paid and surplus labor. She notes this in the context of bemoaning the lack of attention paid to value-ing reproductive labor by Marx and his contemporaries.
“The production of workers is by means of commodities. Nothing is said about women, domestic labor, sexuality and procreation” (Federici, 2010).
Is the activity of spinning yarn “domestic labor” in this sense? Possibly, but is it “reproductive” or “productive?”
“....he [Marx] did not ask what transformations the raw materials implicated in the reproduction of labor-power must undergo in order for their value to be transferred into their products (as he did in the case of other commodities)” (Federici, 2010).
Does the activity of spinning yarn contribute to “transformations [of] the raw materials implicated in the reproduction of labor- power”? If so – how so?
