Sareeta Amrute

The cognitariat, writes Bifo Berardi, is “the social corporeality of cognitive labor”. If the Indian IT worker symbolizes the cognitive laborer in its most diagrammatic form, then how is this labor embodied and made ‘socially corporeal’? I have collected a series of image-objects that frame cognitive labor as an inheritance, a capability that makes workers fit for coding, for spending long hours spent in the abstract manipulation of symbols. In a series of investigation around the imaginary of the body of Indian IT workers, I propose to think through how the capacity for cognitive labor is imagined as an inherited property of Indiannesss, described simultaneously as a racial, cultural and socio-economic property. Race and work have a long history; the making of the English working class depended on the racialization of the Irish as (E.P. Thompson), just as the nimble fingers of young Chinese, Vietnamese, and Malaysian women provide the justification for low-wage electronics manufacturing in Asia (Ong).  But for these cognitive workers, perhaps another, more mercurial relationship between race and labor is at work: is the Indian IT worker truly more suited to cognitive work, or does he (these images always seem to be of a he) figure as the uncanny echoes of a universal futurity? Is he then, the ultimate flexible worker that we all are destined to become? Or perhaps the Indian IT worker as cognitive worker figures as savvy simulacra-artist, performing an inheritance that is not really there.

These image-objects form an archive taken from the pages of German newspapers, Indian-American online comic strips, and British websites. How do they, when assembled together, present an unsettling idea of cognitive work as both inherited and acquirable? As something that belongs to the Indian as an inheritance but at the same time, can seem oxymoronic given the weight of Oriental knowledge about India? Are we in the presence of a new stereotype, or is the very idea of a simple racialized identity for the Indian IT worker no long stable because of a much more general unsettling of inheritance and identity as it moves across a terrain marked by ‘whatever work’ rather than taxonomy, control rather than discipline?



The first image object is from the BBC website homepage on May 2, 2011. Heading up an article on cyberspace matchmaking among Indians is a picture of a raja using a laptop. He is perhaps using it to find a match for his daughter, peeking into the frame from behind a curtain. He is surrounded by his servants, set to cooling him and his machine with fans. It is the incongruousness of old culture and new technology that is on display here, a motif in some ways directed by the British colonial enterprise that continues to know India through its princely trappings and opulent ways of life.

The second image is an Indo-American cartoon strip by Sandeep Sood. It recognizes the new stereotype of the Indian techie, influenced by the Indian successes in Silicon Valley and the intense media scrutiny around migrant IT labor and outsourcing. When the father-in-law sees an Indian, he can only see a techie. Is this an improvement over other stereotypes? Is it acceptable to be misread as a techie when one might be mislabeled a terrorist?

The third image-object is from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 15, 2000. The plumber says to the businessman, “you look forward to the Indian experts, I’ll look forward to the widow-burnings,” as if to question what the real inheritance of Indian IT workers is, cognitive labor or barbarism?

Read alongside one another, these images—and others I have collected—do not demonstrate a simple pattern linking inheritance, Indianness, and cognitive labor. What can we make of an inheritance that is both flexible and racialized?

Many of the images in this book are enigmatic, the index in the back giving few clues as to what we’re seeing.  In all, the idea of man as a tool-making animal comes through.  Here, the accompanying aphorism reads: necessity is the mother of invention.

In the 1970s, IBM commissioned Henri Cartier-Bresson to take some photos of human interacting with technology.  The photos became a traveling exhibition called ‘Man and Machine’.  I haven’t had time to find out more details about the exhibit, but it seems to have traveled throughout the world to be used as a way to convince people in India and elsewhere to buy IBM machines.

This and the next few posts will features images from the exhibition book I recently found in the library (thanks Evergreen)!

Here in Seattle, the local tech union is called Wash Tech.  They are part of the CWA (Communications Workers of America) and have, according to their website, led the fight against offshoring and outsourcing.  They regularly take Microsoft and other large companies to task for employing ‘permatemps’–contractors denigrated to “yellow badge” status–without adequate benefits and pay raises.  Contractors, for instance, were excluded from reaping the benefits of the recent pay raises announced by the company.

What does unionization look like in other places?  Are there opportunities, given the transnational character of the IT industry, for cross-border unions?  I recently read two brief accounts of union-making and missed opportunities.  Paula Chakravartty reports that H1B workers, rather than opposing unionization, believe that bodyshops should be regulated.  Right now, these 3rd party contractors essentially operate at the edges of legality, controlling workers’ wages, capacity to enter and leave the U.S. and other countries, and their visa status.  She suggests unions have misrecognized opportunities for alliances with these workers.  Such efforts “could lead to union-funded help-lines for temporary migrant workers or coordinated efforts between unions and South Asian and Asian community groups, which would jointly provide cultural, as well as legal,resources for workers facing either exploitation by employers or harassment or insecurity over their civil and human rights as “non-immigrants” (Chakravartty 2005:20).

Shehzad Nadeem, looking at union organization in Indian IT industries, argues that an atmosphere of generalized insecurity in which the fear that jobs will go elsewhere prevails combines with IT and call center workers’ perception of themselves as professional staff rather than ‘laborers’ (naukar/mazdoor).  This translates into resistance to unionization even while workplace abuses are widely recognized in call centers and across the IT industries.  Indian unions have responded by forming coalitions with workers and companies organized not around rights but around professionalization itself, offering further education classes and language training (Nadeem 2011).

It is indeed difficult to imagine coalitions built across this congeries of interests and attitudes.  And importantly, none of these cases incorporate the large swathes of service workers and informal sector workers whose labor supports the industry and goes largely unrecognized.  This is not a new problem, but it is one that perhaps lends itself to a different kind of politics, one based on acknowledging differences across regions rather than ironing them out into a single union platform or class-position.  Call center workers, H1B visa holders, and others, after all, share an interest in improving the quality of the work they do every day.  What would a transnational union look like that focused on the kind of jobs available and ways to make them more enjoyable and more challenging, and more open to creative appropriations?

The tendency of commentators on the Indian IT industry has often been to categorize Indian programmers as either cybercoolies or cyberstars.  The first term evokes indentured labor.  It’s mainly used to underscore uneven working conditions and to think through the practices of exploitation that may exist for coders subject to migration regimes and the exploitative practices of bodyshops–it describes those who supposedly own nothing but their own labor.   The second term, the cyberstar, describes the opposite, IT workers who are at the forefront of new economic and technological developments, bounding ahead of US-workers and driving bleeding-edge change in the globalization of work.  The cyberstars are those who move freely around the world at will.  No doubt, examples can be found of both types of Indian programmer.  But what if these terms were not so much descriptive as performative, setting the terms for the debate on Indian IT and on globalization, immigration, and labor?  By staying within these terms, we might be missing the messiness and possibilities of Indian IT lives.

I want to explore in my research some of what gives these lives meaning beyond the slogans; after all, most Indian IT workers are neither cbercoolies nor cyberstars.