COVID-19 has brought our lives to a standstill. For the first time in almost a century, the entire world has been forced to stay confined to their houses. The streets are deserted, offices are empty and playgrounds desolate. Needless to say, the ‘missing human’ has had a positive impact on the environment. But there is a flip side to this absence of humans from their designated occupational spaces – a blurred boundary between ‘public-private’, ‘work-leisure’, and ‘personal-professional’. ‘Work-from-home’ has become the new professional norm and indeed, it has meant a lot of different things for people across different professions whilst the struggle to balance opposing roles (or even role-sets) at one overlapping space (home) has had impacts that only long-term studies would reveal.
Despite the blurring of boundaries and the extraordinary situation of crisis, the underlying philosophy of ‘work’ in the contemporary modern capitalist state remains the same- productivity. Our labor-power and ability to make use of that labour-power determines our worth; no matter what profession we choose to be a part of – Researcher, Teacher, Engineer, Programmer, or even an Artist. There is a constant pressure to ‘create’ and ‘productively utilise’ the time that this lockdown pandemic has afforded to all to us. We are, after all, commodities seeking the attention of the market to be invested upon; saleability determines the value, and, in times like these, ‘inactivity’ can be as bad as invisibility.
Capitalism thrives on competition, and the need to prove one’s worth: I am more valuable than you or in terms of the current situation: I am more productive than you takes an obscure turn. Zygmunt Bauman[i] (2001) had written how a unique characteristic of neoliberalism involves putting the onus of being desirable to capital on the commodity/labour itself. Therefore, our task is to display ‘being productive’ (therefore, useful) even amid the rampant ‘inactivity’ and ‘complacency’. Simply doing our jobs from the comfort of our homes is not enough. Productivity has to be put out in a spectacular display, garnering attention from potential investors, superiors, and even competitors. In fact, productivity need not stay limited to only one’s actual vocation. Learning new skills, honing a few older talents, and juggling multiple tasks, all while ‘working-from-home’ are admirable (and enviable) forms of productivity to be ‘displayed’.
In an age where the number of ‘followers’, ‘shares’ and ‘re-tweets’ in one’s social media accounts acts as a form of social capital, creating spectacles of our activities or even becoming the spectacle in itself is not an alien trend. Spectacles have, in fact, been an important sociological aspect of post-industrial society. Guy Debord (1967), significantly influenced by Marxist philosophy, described spectacles as ‘both the outcome and goal of the dominant mode of production’ (p.13).[ii] Media celebrities – politicians, public figures – have all acted as cogs to the functioning of the larger machine. With the development of new media technologies and social media platforms, what we indeed have now is, what Douglas Kellner (2005) called, ‘technospectacles’.[iii] These have played a major role in shaping the trajectories of modern-day societies and cultures. What we believe to be important, real, admirable, and even aspirational is channelled to us through spectacles. In fact, spectacles are so well-embedded in our everyday lives now that we don’t even recognize the grandeur of their underlying message. Live-coverage of Saddam Hussein’s execution in 2006 or Donald Trump’s visit to India in 2020 are not simply ‘events’. They were spectacles delivered to us through our TV sets or mobile phones as a display of political power. Similarly, Instagram videos of our favourite movie-stars cleaning their houses or cooking food for their families are spectacles of ‘hope’ that we are expected to consume and get inspired from.
In response, we create a spectacle of how the lockdown has not succeeded in dampening our spirits. And why should it be able to? We are, after all, multi-taskers capable of handling our jobs, house-work, and much more even when the world might be falling apart! At least, that’s the story our Facebook posts and Instagram grids need to tell. We never know who might be on the other side of the screen observing and ‘judging’ us. The hyper-real world of social media has become the Goffmanian front-stage for our ‘locked-down’ lives. And we are constantly in the act of performing productivity by uploading the latest written articles, screenshots of zoom meetings attended, pictures of neatly arranged desks, beautifully plated dishes, and ‘post-workout glow’ photographs. The back-stage stories might be marred with several psycho-social pathologies – stress, anxiety, depression, and emotional pressure. But unfortunately, that’s a hugely neglected part of the entire work-from-home ethos.
As of now, it is too early to comment on how the newly constructed need of being ‘productive’ (as a means of being useful) while staying within one’s private space could impact a working professional’s social dynamics. Also, we can only speculate whether the aspirational productivity in this time of a global pandemic would be successfully appropriated by the neo-liberal market. Numerous self-development and hobby courses have sprung up in the past few weeks seeking to provide online classes to use one’s free time ‘productively’. But as sociologists, it is important to recognize the fact that the spectacle of ‘lockdown productivity’ is emerging as a visible social phenomenon, and, as far as the coronavirus crisis lasts, it is here to stay.
[i] Bauman, Zygmunt. (2001). The Individualized Society. Wiley.
[ii] Debord, Guy. (1967). The Society of the Spectacle. Bread and Circuses Publishing.
[iii] Kellner, Douglas. (2005). Media and Election. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 5(3), 298-308.
Sabiha Mazid is a Doctoral student at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.