The Home as Noise in the Signal of the Workplace
A home is a culturally-constructed and experienced place. Like the home, the lab is less physically-bounded and more a description of social relations. However, the home across cultures has often been made meaningful through its distinction or separation from other public or more work-related places and forms of sociality, constructed as a contrast between the “intimacy” of the home and the “impersonality” of everywhere else (Gullestad 1991: 488), for example. In this case, the home is not merely an apartment or a house, or even a kitchen table, from which scientists began to work, although they do, of course, explicitly confront the physical space and its advantages and limitations when working from home. Like Tacchi, Inge Daniels argues that, “the lived experience of intimate atmospheres is shaped within the dynamic interplay between the involvement in, and detachment from, sociality” (Daniels 2014: 54). The modulating of presence across places seems at first to be an enacting, in sound, of this dynamic interplay. Yet, in the modes of telepresence necessitated by emerging technological work routines, related to the pandemic or not, intimate atmospheres become subjected to the needs of workplace identities and tasks.
Telepresence, as I have discussed, is already a necessary component of scientific professionalization just as it is increasingly part of modern work more generally. In these forms, the ordinary sounds of the home can become noise in the signal of the ever-present workplace. To work from home, or other spaces of intimacy and privacy, requires an erasure of the surrounding sonic residue. This often requires a physical transformation of intimate spaces, which are regulated according to the demands of work. At home, telepresent sounds, notifications and other connectivity alerts or, in this paper’s example, audio from online meetings, have the potential to transform the home into an obstacle. The PI of the laboratory described the intermittent repositionings he made around his apartment over the past year in an attempt to find the right location, table, and setup (a better Wi-Fi signal, an efficient use of the shared space of the living room) from which to log into meetings. One postdoc attempted, over the course of several meetings I attended, to attach his laptop to his television set, but gave up when he failed to get the audio to work properly. The scientists and others I know have repurposed coffee tables, bedrooms, and alcoves, in an effort to create a livable workspace at home, often driven by the ever-present need to join meetings in a private, quiet, and uninterrupted space, and away from present family members. In my case, when my daughter comes home from school each day and finds me at the kitchen table in front of my laptop, she is always careful to ask, “Are you in class?” before she turns on the TV. The use of the home as a work space then takes priority over the desired uses and needs of the family. As I have discussed, the flattened fidelity of online meetings, in particular, technologically de-prioritizes physical soundscapes, and sound in the home is muffled or muted. As the ambience of the home is adapted to telepresent work, the “home” takes on an auxiliary status, undermining previous lived experiences of the home as a respite from the outside world. As Gullestad has argued, a home “plays an important part in the constant negotiation of social boundaries and social identities,” and even resistance to the “total socioeconomic order” (Gullestad 1991: 490, 492). The ability then to bring in or exclude the social world through the manipulation of sonic elements, along with possibilities for resistance to economically-incentivized forms of sociality and productivity, are also being muted.
In the case of scientists working in the lab with transmission electron microscopy, Mody describes the “bodily habitus” they develop through their awareness of the potential for their positioning, speaking, and walking to create disruptive vibrations (Mody 2005: 179). The bioscientists I work with are learning to manage states of awareness in the telepresent lab, in and out of the home, and this moment of increased telework finds them gradually conditioned: managing online sound such as dealing with audio feedback, or reshaping the organization of their home, becomes just another daily work task. But what makes all of this specific or relevant to bioscience? When I asked the PI for his general thoughts on working from home, he told me: “I understand the appeal (perhaps, the temptation) and comfort of WFH [working from home], but it is not a good work style for me, nor in my opinion generally for scientists. I need to get my hands dirty alongside my team members.” After all, science is a “material labor process” (Lefèvre 2005: 194), and as in other forms of work, scientists are expected to be passionate about their endeavors (Donzelot 1991). Scientists are particularly precarious laborers, although less attention has been paid to their role as workers. They exist in a continual space of uncertainty. Competition for research funds, publications, and novel discovery are an ever-driving institutional force with unpredictable outcomes that structure their (working) lives. They are expected to stay relevant and to be constantly moving into new trends in order to align with emerging discipline interests and attract funding, essentially, to be granted permission to keep working. The expectation that scientists are, by nature, passionate about and devoted to their research already demands they readily eclipse the Fordist boundaries between work and home. The increasing demand for scientists to stay ever-present, telepresent-ly, reinforces the entrepreneurial nature of their labor.
Defining sound in online meetings as intentional (vocalized descriptions of data) or unintentional (crows) of course delineates what should count as signal and what should be eliminated as noise. In the same way a recording of a musical performance or a lossless compression file might attempt to suppress environmental acoustics that have worked their way into the performance itself, signal and noise are grounded in a value-laden idealization of intent and what is getting in the way of intent: a curved sound-reflecting wall or an echo, for example. Although, as Feld argues, “all sound worlds are actually or potentially transportable and hearable in all others” (Feld 2000: 174), not all sounds are vested with the same value. And although individuals may, as Tacchi describes, “work on their sociality” by bringing in or keeping out the outside world through modulations of radio sound (Tacchi 1998: 36), this act is always guided by cultural and social logics. Relegating the intimacy and privacy of the home to a secondary status and restructuring that lived space around the demands of work is a material enactment of a “pursuit of [...] happiness within a logic which knows only one motive: to increase profit and productivity” (Donzelot 1991: 251). In other words, neoliberal logics of self-realization in work, for which individuals take on additional demands for self-actualized and self-motivated productivity, increasingly define the intentional from the unintentional, the “wanted” from “unwanted” sound (Mody 2005: 176). The call of a crow outside, at home, is not innately noise. It is only through the redefinition of the home as primarily a place to work that what was experienced from the breakfast nook as part of the ambience of daily life (perhaps a reminder that it is trash day) becomes a noisy barrier. Yet, identifying the changing sounds of the home as inevitable, as merely happening to us, falls in line with the way we might let work encroach on our daily lives as a matter of course. In that way, we mark ourselves as social beings in particular ways – as professionals and laborers first. This is a politics of presentation, an acceptance of, or a succumbing to, the power of neoliberal incentives to experience our work status as our default state. It is in framing ourselves as priority workers in this space – elevating our external work-related social relationships while curtailing other possibilities for, and forms of, intimacy and even resistance to such economic imperatives – that the sonic paradigms of the home are transformed. For scientists, however, this may hardly feel like a choice.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank all the members of the laboratory where I am conducting my research, in particular, the continued generosity and assistance of the Principal Investigator. This research is supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science’s Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 20K01188.