I’m Sorry You Feel That Way: Affect, Authority and Antagonism in the Cultures of Customer Service

The School of Media and Communication is delighted to invite you to a Guest Lecture by Professor Diane Negra, University College Dublin

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 talk 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. I seek to understand customer rage as misdirected without de-legitimating it, particularly given that the role of customer is a key feature of citizenship.

I suggest that the prevaricating tactics, dehumanizing and deceptive practices and technical control exercised by large corporations in increasingly oligopolistic commercial environments significantly inform broadly felt experiences of alienation, anger, and dispossession in the US.  Accordingly, I explore a set of affective responses to current political and economic conditions that are being channelled through forms of hyper-rationalized customer service.  Amidst the complex sociality of commerce and its increasingly combative micro relations, I also examine the proliferation of command-based corporate structures and performed affects, arguing that antagonistic tone is partly set by new vocabularies and speech styles.  Accordingly, this analysis of the downstream social effects of technologization and profit concentration considers developments such as corporate gaslighting in which corporations present their own compulsory practices and policies as elected consumer choices.

Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she has served or will serve as Guest Professor at Brown University, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Reims and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is the author, editor or co-editor of ten books including What a Girl Wants?: The Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (2008), The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture (2006)and Extreme Weather and Global Media (with Julia Leyda, 2015). Her work in media, gender and cultural studies has been widely influential and recognized with a range of research awards and fellowships, including an award from the Government of Japan that led to a lecture tour in that country. She serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Television and New Media.