Kaima Negishi

PhD Candidate, Sociology ANU,

Larry Saha Room, Haydon-Allen #2175

This paper will look at how the ‘affective’ gesture of smiling has been deployed to modulate passengers’ feelings, emotions and affects in Japanese railway stations today. In late-capitalist economies, a growing number of corporations have adopted various affective techniques to engineer and cultivate spaces of comfort and security, allowing customers to feel at ease and to revitalise not only their strained bodies, but also their will to be integrated back into the regime of control. Pivoting around Hardt and Negri’s notion of ‘affective labour’, this paper aims to situate the intensifying production of these feeling-spaces as one of the emerging techniques of control in late capitalist-economies and examines some of its key implications.