Empowerment as an affective-discursive technology in contemporary capitalism: insights from a play

ABSTRACT

Over recent years, an increasing body of research in social and cultural studies has investigated the contemporary processes of social change from the point of view of affective capitalism. In this article, we take under scrutiny one of its technologies, namely, empowerment, by which we mean a state characterised by feelings of strength, ability and power that enable agency. More specifically, we investigate the way empowerment is presented in a cultural product, a play that tells a story about personnel training in a factory, shown in a city theatre in Finland. By linking recent theorisation of affective capitalism with an investigation of the intertextual and interdiscursive relations of the play, we analyse how the factory workers’ pursuit for good life through empowerment recycles and exploits the affective-discursive elements of sexual and spiritual awakening. In conclusion, we discuss the play as a reflection of and on contemporary social processes. By presenting empowerment as a technology employed to interpellate in particular female subjects, the play contributes to the critique of neoliberalism as a gendered project, with women as its ideal subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective capitalism
• empowerment
• gender
• intertextuality
• interdiscursivity
• multimodality
• theatre

Acknowledgements

We thank Sirkku Peltola (script), Iiro Rantala (music), Heikki Salo (song texts), Fiikka Forsman (directing), Sonja Packalén (choreography) as well as all the actors, Hilkka Hyttinen and Jyväskylä City Theatre for making this research project possible. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and help with the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Riikka Nissi is senior lecturer in workplace communication at the University of Vaasa, Finland. Her research interests include institutional and professional interaction and discourse. Previously, she has conducted research on religious and organisational settings. Currently, she is studying organisational training and development, consultancy work and new specialist professions in contemporary economies. She has published, among others, in Text & Talk, Journal of Pragmatics, Language & Communication and Discourse Studies. School of Marketing and Communication, University of Vaasa, PO Box 700, 65101 Vaasa, Finland.

Kati Dlaske is senior lecturer in German Language and Culture at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests include contemporary processes of societal change, especially in relation to the neoliberalisation of societies. Her methodological interests include combining Foucauldian notions of power and governmentality with discourse analytical and ethnographic approaches. Tying in to these interests, her current research investigates entrepreneurship-training programmes offered for migrants in selected EU countries. She has published, among others, in Discourse & Communication, CADAAD Journal, Gender & Language and Language in Society.

Notes

1 All the Bible verses are from the New International Version.

2 In fact, as the scene continues, the consultant next moves to other factory workers and makes them fall on the floor with his hand.

3 The S2’s open class repair initiator mitä ‘what’ (line 6) as a response to the assessment is probably used to display ‘hard of hearing’ and thus the category of ‘old’ in the context of the play (see also line 22).