Representing robots as living labour in advertisements: the new discourse of worker–employer power relations

Abstract

This paper presents a critical multimodal analysis (CMDA) of the representation of robots and work in recent commercials. Commercials were selected that represented robots not as tools of industry but as workers. Robots are increasingly endowed with the ability to not only take on the work of human workers engaged in productive, material forms of labour but immaterial, affective forms of labour as well. Rather than being represented as dead capital, the robots instead function within the narratives as living labour and therefore capable of producing value. What is most notable in these commercials is how the demands and conditions of ‘employment’ for the robots echoes neoliberal transformations of work from individuated Fordist forms of production to post-Fordist team-based forms in which workers must increasingly participate in their own management and, therefore by extension, their own subordination.

Keywords:

• robots
• affect
• labour
• value
• post-Fordism
• CMDA

Notes

These actions are performed by the humanoid robot being viewed on a flatscreen by the ‘protagonist’ toy robot in the commercial.

Since the commercials are moving rather than being still images, it is a little more difficult to make definitive claims as to how these semiotic resources are being used since there can be considerable variety of the angles and framings of the shots that go into each commercial. Nevertheless, if one considers how the shots generally tend to be composed in each advertisement, it is possible to make broader claims about the constitution of interpersonal meanings between viewer and participants.