Devastating Dreamjobs : Ambivalence, emotions, and creative labor in a post-socialist audiovisual industry
Abstract
Recent studies of creative labor have stirred up a discussion about the most appropriate theoretical framework for studying it: is creative labor a brute form of oppression? Or does it rather generate new and multiple subjectivities? Does creative labor subject the workers to a regime of self-discipline and governmentality? Or does it have purely positive features that cannot be reduced to com- pensatory mechanisms? Discussion of the accuracy of the different approaches still needs to be better grounded in empirical research. In particular, what is missing in the emergent work on creative labor is insight into non-Western creative workers' identities and working conditions.
This paper addresses both the good and bad aspects of creative labor in a post-socialist audio- visual industry. Based on twenty-four in-depth interviews with Czech television reporters and screenwriters, I aim to address the following questions: What kind of experiences do creative jobs in a post-socialist audiovisual industry offer their workers? What makes these workers' labor good and bad? How and to what extent are the good and bad aspects of creative labor narratively linked to the post-socialist context? The findings suggest that while screenwriters' and TV reporters' forms of precarity vary, their work is still marked both by a post-1989 sense of rupture in funding and professional ideologies and through continuity in modes of production.
In the audiovisual professionals' narratives, the post- socialist context appears as an idealization of the West and of liberalism, yet also features discontent about the state's deficiencies, great uncertainty, the fragmentization and instrumentalization of me- dia industries, a specific sense of humour, and also, provincialism. Importantly, I argue that both the types of audiovisual professionals perform extensive emotional labor which resides in the carefully measured immersion in (as well as detachment from) their work.
By illustrating that and how the audiovisual workers' professional identities are inherently ambivalent and by bringing in the concept of emotions, this paper seeks to further de-Westernize the research of creative labor and broad- en the debate on the good and bad work in creative industries.