Smiling in the Post-Fordist “Affective” Economy

Abstract

This article examines the event of smiling in the context of post-Fordist capitalism. With the growing significance of service workers in the contemporary Western economy, many businesses today are putting more emphasis on their training processes and the discipline of their workers to act more affectively towards their customers. One of the techniques that the service sector is promoting is smiling. Smiling generates affective atmospheres and engenders an affective bond between interacting bodies. Inflecting the bodies of service workers and transforming them into “affective workers,” service providers are able to achieve a great degree of control over their customers. One example of this is a railway operator in Japan, which has employed a device called the “Smile Scan.” This technology measures workers’ “smile degree” and attempts to make their smile more “natural” and augment its affective efficacy. Drawing on this technology, this article argues that transit workers modify their smile in order to animate the corporeal capacities of the customers in a way that dissipates particular undesirable affective flows of energy and permits more positive affects to take hold of their bodies. Through the generation of “affective smiling,” transit workers are able to exert disciplinary power over passengers and to transform their bodies. However, in contrast to the substantial amount of academic work that has analysed the current post-Fordist economy with reference to the biopolitics of exclusion, this article takes up the notion of productive disciplinary power to explicate the enabling function that this “technology of self” potentially brings forth. As such, I highlight the dynamism of affective energy, which is capable of re-forming and connecting our bodies to shape a collective.