“I work at a tiny desk in my room and my mom brings food upstairs, just like I’m a student studying for exams!” Erina laughs, because she never was one of those students and instead spent her time hanging out in Shibuya. At twenty-five, she has moved back in with her parents. She freelances as a graphic designer and moving home is part of a strategy to build a client base, expand her portfolio, and concentrate her energies.  The comparison to a student preparing for grueling exams is apt, however: when she has a project, she puts in long, painstaking hours usually on boring, unimaginative, or ordinary aspects of mundane advertising, packaging design, or product promotion. She fits the definition of the cultural producer class, and the “precariat” with her small, uneven income and unsuccessful attempts to land a steady job at a design firm. But her work is hardly glamorous and feels far removed from the strata of global knowledge economy. Immaterial labor, sign of the futureless expanse of techno-capitalism and extractive incorporation of meaning and sense from the worker, is composed at one level of a social collectivity webbed into the temporal and imaginative space of information work. Communication in endless flow. But Erina is not situated within vaunted, global relays of image/text creation and transmission that one might track in an established ad agency, such as the labor of Americans working just a few miles away at the Tokyo offices of elite, Portland-based advertising company, Widen+Kennedy. They are busy producing billboards and videos for the launch of the new Nike SB (skateboarding) shoe campaign to be unleashed across Asia.

Erina is working in her childhood bedroom at a small desk. She spends “way too long figuring out what font to use and moving text blocks around on print mock-ups,” staring at a screen, sensing out what arrangement of words, images, and colors best suit the goals and needs of her employer. Her work is floats on the edge of larger units of production and represents a fragile and micro-scale where immaterial labor and information exchange is keenly felt, both in its minutiae and its absence. Erina seems to be the very model of Lazzarato’s description of the size and temporal rhythm of immaterial labor:

 Small and sometimes very small ‘productive units’ (often consisting of only one individual) are organized for specific ad hoc projects, and may exist only for the duration of those particular jobs. The cycle of production comes into operation only when it is required by the capitalist; once the job has been done, the cycle dissolves back into the networks and flows that make possible the reproduction and enrichment of its productive capacities. Precariousness, hyperexploitation, mobility, and hierarchy are the most obvious characteristics of metropolitan immaterial labor. Behind the label of the independent "self-employed" worker, what we actually find is an intellectual proletarian, but who is recognized as such only by the employers who exploit him or her. It is worth noting that in this kind of working existence it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish leisure time from work time. In a sense, life becomes inseparable from work. (Lazzarato 1996, 3)

“Anxiety is always next to me, it’s next to me right now…sometimes, riding the subway in the middle of the day, like a grandpa or grandma, not in the office, I’m like, ‘What the hell am I doing?’” With tight, exasperated laughter she waved her hands helplessly. Being out in the city already seemed deviant and unproductive, a far cry from her recent teenage years roaming Shibuya as a bad girl in loose socks, listening to hip hop. Yet struggling at her tiny desk she wasn’t getting anywhere either. She had been working for several weeks on another job for a pachinko parlor. She had drafted multiple versions of huge promotional banners intended to hang outside for a grand opening event after renovations. The job fell through when the owner decided he didn’t have enough money. All the time spent on the proposals for the garish signs evaporated. “I guess it was good practice.” Her voice fell in resignation. “I’m slow, and my computer is slow too, and can’t handle the jobs.” Too much and not enough. An excess of visual information encoded into her machine and a creeping anxiety always beside” her.

Within the space of a few months she’d had four interviews with design companies. She’d failed to even make a dent, it seemed. “Here, in Tokyo? It seems like everyone wants to be in graphic design!” The sense of competition was pervasive. But her own lack of knowledge of the intricacies of the fields seemed to be one her biggest impediments. She described fucking up an interview for a job while working a series of boring part-time data-entry jobs.

A production company was looking for an assistant and she’d eagerly researched the company and was impressed with the interactive design they’d produced for high-profile websites. She took her portfolio to the interview but “they didn’t say anything though, so I was like, ‘They didn’t like my work!’ and I felt so bad.

They said, “Maybe you misunderstood the difference between production and graphic designing?” and I was like, “Eh, what?!” They said production managing is almost totally different side of designing. They explained to me that production managing is connecting the client and the designer so they can communicate better and find a design solution. They wondered why I had come in…I just felt so ashamed! It was the biggest embarrassment of my life. But in the interview one guy just didn’t express any emotion. He was just flat. The other one looked exhausted. I was just so worried about him! When I was leaving, the third interviewer, a woman, said to me, “Don’t worry about it. Maybe because of our website, some people are confused about what we do.” She was so kind.

She and Erina had a short conversation and she explained her position and the role of the company in larger design projects. “Even though I fucked up the interview, I learned something!” Erina’s laughter was still edged with the embarrassment of self-confession but also relief at the generous, brief connection she’d made with the other woman. It seemed a small consolation—this fleeting moment where the interviewer shared a few fragments of crucial knowledge and added more detail to a landscape of media and creative work that was so difficult to discern and navigate.

Even though she'd researched the company’s mission and history, she blushed as she explained how thoroughly she’d misinterpreted their work. “I read everything on the site and before the interview I remembered which pieces I liked, which ones I would mention, how I would talk about their own designs—and then I just fucked up!” She describes a botched decoding of the company’s website—she’d totally misinterpreted the job. She’d wanted the job, any job where she wasn’t just sitting in front a computer in a sterile office preparing Excel spreadsheets. It wasn’t the machine that was the problem she insisted—she likes computers. It was the things she was making on the machine—she’d been trained to use sophisticated graphics software and the computer was a means for her to work intensely and creatively even if it meant being isolated occasionally. Instead, it was trapping and rerouting her energies into dead circuits, part-time, in temporary increments.

Erina’s failure to decode the company’s website for a job requiring the ability to translate business strategy, branding goals, image tone, and aesthetic shading illustrates the complex interior assemblages of meaning-production as capitalist imperative, even to the point of drawing in unintended subjects for interviews. This miscommunication as event represents Erina’s failure-as-becoming. She encountered the limits of her own ability to decode the surface where potential work might lie, pulled into its proximity by mistake which then resulted in a different kind of affective, emotionally restorative contact with the generous interviewer. The feeling of embarrassment persisted. Erina shook her head again, smiling painfully as she relived the experience. The awkward residue was shaped through the post-interview conversation.

It might easy to dismiss the kindness of the interviewer as simple courtesy. I am interested, however, in the affective transaction that occurred, one very different than the ones Akemi is paid for in the hostess club. The very fact that Erina’s story ends not with her humiliation but in an unexpected moment of warm interaction and information exchange reveals an affective alertness coupled with action on the part of the female interviewer. All three of the company employees showed physical signs of fatigue and one was emotionally flat. They appear almost as cautionary victims of the very work they are hiring for. Yet post-interview, outside the confines of the official social formula a different kind of relation between the employed and the one miserably left outside occurs. I do not want to read this as pure redemption. Certainly the company might still benefit in some small way from their employee’s affective display and the connection she made despite Erina’s failure.  Simply keeping the affective sense bright is clearly a significant aspect of a job entailing translating needs, specifications, approval, and demands between corporate clients and designers. But a kind of attentive drift of affiliation remained in Erina’s retelling of the entire event. Despite her embarrassment, she left the interview with an unexpected sense of connection and the blunt pain of her mistake softened.

Relations of labor are produced in these zones of contact and communication, especially where the orderly transfer is broken or rerouted intentionally into other affective circuits. Lazzarato describes inseparability between life and work. The space between the failed interview and the “outside” conversation elides this blurring of work and non-work while at the same time constituting a kind of affective drift in which the subjectivities given shape through work relations move out of earshot, taking on other possible connections between the women. It is exactly this social drift Erina chooses as she looks for more freelance work. She recently did the title design for a magazine project without any expectation of payment. She was working to make connections, exchanging her labor for future possibilities. The “gift” of the design was part of becoming friends with the editor and reflected her attitude towards the demands of immaterialized sociality. “I don’t like shobaiteki (businesslike) ways of talking…like needing to develop “ningen-kankei” (human relations). I just want to make friends first. That is more important to me.”

In contrast to the networks created through school contacts, corporate socializing, and industry connections, she desires more specific terms of interaction where hierarchy and disposability are not the primary organizing terms. Instead, she gifts her own labor and seeks out friendships as means for knowledge exchange and a more sustainable self. “But not thinking business-like is a big risk…I don’t know about my future…Sometimes I have to switch my mind to a ‘Japanese mind’” she says, and become self-effacing. It's a difficult sensation, to disappear into the prescribed social channels while still manifesting herself as a creative person with definite concepts and ideas.  “Showing kenson (humility) requires a different kind of tone”—one that is difficult to calibrate to different demands, against the embarrassment of misread signals, jobs that fall through, desires to be on her own and financially autonomous. Her life is full of ever-present failures in which she sees the future ghost of herself as she rides the train in the middle of the day, recognizing her own off-time youthful presence as out-of-place, more like a retired persons, already out of the workforce, dreams diffusing with age. She struggles to create affective texture around her laboring persona—an image-voice with a strong creative sensibility—but with the precise amount of kenson.  Her recurring struggle is how to protect and even nurture relationships in the face of their vulnerability to capitalist energies. “My friend,” she tell me, “is not just a connection.”

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