Now before I begin, let's not be silly. I'm not saying that charity organisations are necessarily bad or doing a lousy job in alleviating suffering. However, I wonder if much attention in cultural studies has been given to the rise of "charity muggers" (or "chuggers"), that annoying breed of human spam that gets all up in your grill when you're travelling from point A to B.
We've all been confronted by the feeling of impending doom when these persistent and overly-exuberant folk cross our path, armed with their clipboards and coloured vests or jackets and yelling something about your day and dying baby seals.
Channelling Michel de Certeau, one can observe several tactics commonly used by people to counter the marketing strategies of chuggers:
1. Don't make eye contact - to acknowledge their existence is to bring them into being
2. Pretend to play on the phone - whether talking or texting, finding an alibi is key
3. Say "not interested" - whether it's helping starving children, saving the whales or fighting for human rights, people who would usually care a lot suddenly assume the persona of the silent majority
So what do people think about chuggers? What characterises their strategies? Have chuggers been studied as an intensified and visible form of affective labour, exploiting otherwise likable people to use their likability in this way? What are the racial and gender politics of chugging? How do you avoid being mugged for good causes?
I've always struggled with how to feel about charity muggers-
ReplyDeleteI could feel anger, as they're hassling me for trying to walk down a street.
I could feel pity, as I would hate to be doing long shifts in the blazing sun that more or less consist of being relentlessly rejected.
I could feel inspired that there are organisations and individuals caring so hard about stuff that's probably important.
But mostly I resent that they're making me feel things at all. Seriously. One woman gave me this whole monologue complete with over-done fake tears and put her hand on my arm over and over to try and make me feel things with her and I'm like I LIKED WHAT YOU WERE LOBBYING FOR UNTIL YOU MADE ME HATE YOU BY TOUCHING MY ARM YOU ARE A STRANGER WHAT ARE YOU DOING.
But today when I walked past charity muggers, along with the anger and the pity and the inspiration and the resentment, I felt just a little bit happy. Because of the phrase 'human spam'. Thank you for that!
I also have to express my gratitude for the coining of a highly appropriate name for these people- Human Spam.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first started noticing them around, as an older teen, I was quickly and easily sucked in. Of course I cared about X,Y and Z! And who would want to seem like they didn't, especially in public! So I stopped every time they wanted to pitch their charity.
By the time I started Uni I couldn't care less how hard hearted I seemed. Now, I avoid them at all costs.
I have grown ever more resentful of this way of collecting for charity. The cycle of guilt and possibly shame that passers-by suddenly have to contend with is the most frustrating aspect. I can see that, in principle, there's little difference in the way ads on tv or letters you are mailed vs chuggers asking you to contribute to different causes pull on your heart strings to help you 'dig deep'.
The difference is in your ability to make a choice. It's easy when you watch an ad or read a letter. You weigh up your options, think about if the charity is a worthy or ethical one, then you donate, or you don't.
The presence of a chugger makes it difficult to make this choice exactly because of their affective labour. Yes, I want to help people but I also want to help them in the best way I can. Simply signing up to have funds directly debited to a random charity does not necessarily assure me that will happen.
There is a great bit in Lauren Berlant's introduction to her edited collection on compassion where she talks about the training we receive in aversion as the other side of our training in compassion. So compassion and coldness are not opposite, but are both part of how we learn to live in situations of inequality and structural injustice. Chuggers inevitably metonymise (or stand in for) our responsibility for keeping unjust and unequal systems going (often our responsibility is as part of a very large network). This messes with our training and asks us to make a new settlement about when to be cold and when to be compassionate (and what forms either of those responses might take). That is not a pleasant experience.
ReplyDeleteBut to explain *how* they mess with our training, I think we have to look somewhere slightly different than Berlant. In geographies of consumption scholarship (especially the work of Ian Cook et al) there is discussion of everyday ethical thresholds. We have these everyday thresholds for responsibility around our lives as consumers beyond which we do not allow our connections to others via consumption to matter ethically for us. So we navigate the everyday by bracketing out many of our relationships with others as they are mediated by our consumption and the commodities we buy. It's how we manage to be part of a really complex system, too - we can't know everything. But the point is we also allow ourselves not to want to know everything at certain points. These thresholds are often spatial (and the spatial ones, obviously, are of particular interest to geographers). So as food moves into domestic space, consumers transform it through cooking and other practices of consumption, and at the same time they turn their backs on whatever wider ethical or environmental significances those products might have. By instituting such thresholds, we make a bargain with the system (which is also what Berlant is arguing we do when we settle on the right mix of compassion and coldness). But certain things that happen can cause rupturing of those thresholds, too - usually when they're experienced as impinging on the 'settled' spaces made up by the observance of those thresholds.
So I reckon chuggers - arguably, in a similar way to beggars - actually disrupt some everyday ethical thresholds, because they always work as signs of our broader responsibilities in maintaining what we all know to be a basically unjust set of social relationships. And they don't just function as signs, they are metonyms that approach us within spaces that we have already settled as being below a threshold for ethical concern. They are usually in 'in-between' spaces in the everyday where we aren't prepared to be asked to strike a new bargain with the system.