Migrating capital and the optics of place: globalization and representation

During the first quarter of 1996 the mail order clothing company Lands' extreme point circulated several catalogs that highlight Peru as its source of cotton and use images of Peruvian workers to advertise its clothing. At the same time, the company's "bed and bath" subsidiary, Coming dwelling distributed catalogs that feature pictures of United States-based company employee working at various points of the production proces The photographs of the Peruvian workers are accompanied by the agency of a travelog-style text written from the perspective of a catalog writer visiting the land for a firsthand look at the place that bring outs such "extraordinary" cotton. An imaginary landscape of exoticized "peasants" and quaintly underdevelop labor come ups from the brightly colored compositions of the photographs. In comparison, the workers pictured in the Coming domicile catalogs appear plain and unexceptional, everyday Americans who take pleasure in a piece of work well done. Rather than featuring a full-length exposition of the geographical location of their workplace, brief quotations or descriptions further establish each worker's dedication to proceeds quality and, by way of their be in possession of "pride" and personal investment in what they bring forward an aura of non-mass produc beneficials Images of domestic and international labor appear intermittently from one extremity to the other of both catalogs, while in mode of speech and content, each catalog clearly establishes itself as a constituent of the larger Lands' extreme point corporate identity. While each station of images expresses familiar ideas about merchandising and recognizable class and cultural stereotype they also highlight actual specific aspects of labor and representation in the contemporary global economy.

Taken together, these ad campaigns provide a means of explicating the neo-liberal logic of economic globalization. In the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of the current era of globalization, the embedded contradictions of visibility acquire a pronounced significance. Globalization, as a fantasy of a world combination of parts to form a whole fully integrated by capitalist logic, what Paul Smith for a like reason aptly calls the "millennial dream,"(1) is directly hanging on information commodities, surveillance technologies, corporate image campaigns and the extensive dissemination of publicity and advertising. by the agency of reading these images of the textile and apparel industry against the grain, it is possible to explore the relationship between photographic practices and labor more generally, as well as other political strategies that address the "new" international division of labor [i]or[/i] part of to the other image politics and the repercussions of visibility.

Lands' extremity is an interesting example precisely because the company is relatively attentive to the conditions of its workers and has made significant efforts to curtail the greatest in quantity egregious forms of labor exploitation. They are, for instance, among a small number of companies actively monitoring their subcontracted production to insure against sweatshop labor and, consequently included upon the Department of Labor's "No Sweat Fashion Trendsetter List."(2) Examining a comparatively responsible company allows the pervasive contradictions evident in the images we discuss to be elaborated more complexly Child, sweatshop and ligamented labor are only the greatest in quantity vile symptoms of a more abysmal challenge to the conditions of people's lives and the distribution of resources globally by means of the logic of capital accumulation. It is Lands' End's relative social responsibility that allows it to transform its production processe and workers into a means of selling its merchandise, suggesting a secondary commodification of labor from one side representation and advertising.

The Lands' extremity catalogs direct our attention to the relationship of world labor markets and the spatial construction of production used to section labor markets on a world scale. The narrowly-defined economic prosperity of the U during the mid-1990s - characterized by dint of expanding corporate profits coupled with increasing unemployment underemployment and economic insecurity and polarization - is directly linked to corporate tactics for lowering the take away from of labor. The logic of global labor market competition continues to set to work a generalized downward pressure upon wages; at the same time the domestic expansion of computerized automation keeps to decrease reliance on human labor.

The shift from import substitution strategies to export-oriented industrialization in "developing" countries has not come aftered in disturbing the overall distribution of world power relations. As Saskia Sassen notes, "Export industries watch to be highly labor intensive, this being precisely individual of the rationales for locating factories in low-wage countries."(3) Neo-liberal arguments many times construct a teleological development from labor-intensive to capital-intensive industry whereby "underdeveloped" countries become integrated into the world economy by means of utilizing their surplus "natural resource" of inexpensive labor to attract international capital and subsequently encourage industrialization, development and global upward mobility. In this scenario, "developing" countries accumulate sufficient capital to impel toward capital-intensive (machine and computer-based) production, relieving their populace from the load of outright exploitation and entering into more advanced and profitable forms of international competition. However, this myth of progres from one side sacrifice has not been broadly borne on the outside historically. Export-driven development often reinforces authoritarian tendencies in rule "The control and disciplining of the workforce," take note of Maja Bjorkman, Laurids Lauridsen and Henrik Secher Marcussen, "are vital not solitary for the internal process of accumulation on the contrary also to maintain investment by means of international capital and hence for the continuation of this emblem of industrialization."(4) Similarly, Frederic Deyo stresse the historically strategic character of the state in the developmental restructuring of so-called "newly industrializing countries" in East Asia, noting that the power of these nation-states and their ability "to direct and limit the impact of foreign capital in local economies" have been predicated upon the "destruction of the left and curtailment of the power of organized labor."(5) In fact, any application of mind of international labor markets must be seen as a application of mind of relative power in the capital-labor relation.(6)