Performing the professional in the living room as a shared workscape

Working from home resulted in the resemiotisation of the living room in the sense that a mosaic of different -scapes emerged according to the activity performed at a given point in time. For example, in excerpts (1) and (2), the spatial repertoire of the living room meshes with that of the workspace through the use of laptops. Excerpts (1) and (2) refer to Anna and her husband, Claude, who are both employed in different telecommunications companies and have been working from home (30 m²) in France since the beginning of the pandemic. In her reflexive interview (see excerpt (1)), Anna describes how part of the living room loses its original and expected use to turn into their workspaces. The media they use to perform their work, two company laptops, have occupied the former common desk in the living room (see left photo in excerpt (2)) but since the desk is not big enough for both laptops, she has set up her workspace at the dining table, which she calls “the table we had been eating”, as shown in excerpt (1).

1. (1) Anna, photo elicitation interview (emphasis added)

   So the table we had been eating became my desk and the old desk where before we were crammed together became Claude's office.

Shared resources (“the table we had been eating”, “the old desk where before we were crammed together”) were redistributed (“became”) to address individual needs (“my desk”, “Claude's office”). The first person plural pronoun “we”, used to express the common space, is replaced by singular first person possessives (“my”, “Claude's”), indexing new boundaries in the living room and creating new compartmentalised and individualised spaces. The resemiotisation of objects and spaces is reflected here in Anna's lexical choices, as the “table” turns into a “desk” and the “desk” turns into an “office”. It should be noted that in Greek the word γραφείο is used for both ‘desk’ and ‘office’; here, the different meanings attributed by Anna to γραφείο are contextually inferred. A table is an object of general use with multiple special uses; one of them is eating. Here, the general use object (“table”) is resemiotised as an object of special use (“desk”) because the space has been transformed into a ‘room’ of specific use, a named transient workspace (“office”) emplaced in the living room.

Before the pandemic, work occasionally took place at home in chroniques, that is, in segments of working time fissuring homelife in a Foucauldian sense. In her interview, Anna recognises an uncomfortable place where they “were crammed together” (“old desk”), since working was not a systematic activity integrated into the homescape. The verb “crammed” indexes the material dimensions of the homescape. The house's size and layout became more visible during the pandemic, since an already confined space for two people had now to become a separate workspace, Claude's office. As a result, the living room became a place to perform professional activities, having to accommodate additional uses and working needs within the same 30 m² (both Claude's office and Anna's table~desk). The repeated use of the verb “became” signifies the process of transformation taking place due to the reterritorialisation of individual workspaces in the living room and thus the emergence of a heterotopic workscape within the home.

Anna and Claude, although now working at ‘individual’ desks, perform a ‘shared’ workscape. This workscape, as shown in the multimodal display of excerpt (2), is diverse and is diffused discontinuously in the LL of the living room. As depicted in the photos, various agents participate in shaping the LL: (a) human agents, such as Anna filming, Claude working, the baby sleeping, (b) non-human animate agents, such as the cat sleeping, the plant by the window, (c) inanimate material entities, such as toys, ornaments, lambs, special equipment, and (d) im-/material entities, such as natural or artificial light and sounds including speech.

1. (2) Anna, video narrative

   this is the living room [turning the camera]; the baby in the middle [middle photo] as décor; there [left photo] Xiaomi is housed and here [right photo] Samsung is housed ((ironically))

A hybrid LL emerges through the integration of the work and home LL. More specifically, kitchen equipment is placed in the cupboards over the desk where Claude is working (excerpt (2), left photo), while elements and practices fitting to a living room are still present, for example, guitar, sofa, decorative paintings, cat sleeping on the couch, baby's matt and toys on the coffee table (middle photo). Accordingly, next to the dining table~Anna's workspace, where her laptop is placed (right photo), there is also the baby's cot where the baby rests while the parents are working. The accumulation of multiple spaces with disrupted boundaries and the heterogeneous emplacement of resources that are in and out of place at the same time results in a trans-diverse living room~workscape.

If we isolated the middle photo of (2), we could recognise an instance of a ‘normal’ living room spatial repertoire, where a cat and a baby participate actively in homelife, while resting at home (sleeping on the sofa and on the cot). In this spatial context though (between the other photos), the baby and the cat invade the shared workscape as “décor”, in Anna's words; these two agents do not participate in the worklife happening there but serve as a heterotopic element of working at home. They become a transient, fluid boundary (“in the middle”) (a) between homelife and worklife (living room furniture, cat and baby as elements of the homescape that are reconstrued and resemiotised by working activity), and (b) between the two workspaces of competitor companies in telecommunications industry. In the first case, the cat and the baby as residents of the home may disrupt working activity at any moment. In the second case, Anna and Claude, as home-based employees, may disrupt each other's workspace sharing ideas and facts about working synchronously, leading to transpatial intersections of competing workspaces. In the case of tele-meetings, the soundscape of the living room becomes even more diverse in the online-offline nexus through the use of translingual practices (French, English, Greek). It brings together home-based conversations on issues of work (French) or family issues (Greek, French) and digitally mediated conversations with colleagues located elsewhere (French, English). In addition, the metaphor of the baby as “décor”, as a background to the competing workspaces, indexes the othering of the baby (representing it as out of place) and, more generally, the othering of the LL of the living room. This othering results both from and in the construction of a fluid boundary between the home- and work-scape which is constantly negotiated by potential non/participants.

Thus, we observe a process of mobility as human and non-human agents constantly and relationally move in and out of place as well as between the background and foreground, following the continuous re-negotiation of the boundaries of the spatial repertoire of the home. Therefore, the discursive construction of homescape elements, as entities of a background (décor), emerges as a constant process of ‘backgrounding’ depending on what activity is in the foreground each time. Consequently, different spatial scales dominate the hybrid LL in a trans- way, and are integrated into heterotopic chroniques.

A further discursive element revealing the heterotopia of the workscape in (2) appears in the use of the verb “is housed” to describe the emplacement of the two laptops in the living room as if it were the premises of the two companies. This wording indexes a sense of permanence; moreoever, a sense of discontent is expressed in Anna's extra-linguistic ironic tone concerning the integration of the two workscapes within the homescape. The metaphorical use of the verb “house” to refer to the workspace performed in the literal “house” (the physical 30 m² house) further points to this heterotopic condition. The enforced integration due to the infrastructural and institutional constraints of the pandemic biopolitics reveals the tension between -scapes and therefore the vulnerability of the transpatial repertoire of the living room.

Performing the political in the living room: Multiple political present(s)

In this section, we show how work turns into the contextual background for the activities taking place in the living room. We refer to two cases of performing the political in the living room: (a) politicising the living room, while working at home, as a homeland memoryscape (Blackwood & Macalister Reference Blackwood, Lanza, Macalister, Blackwood and Macalister2020), and (b) politicising the living room as a union's general assembly space.

The multiple fragmentation of the living room is evident in the case of George, who presents the appearance of layered and overlapping soundscapes. During the pandemic, George (credit risk manager) and his Greek roommate (data analyst) have been working from home for different multinational companies, using their dining table as a ‘shared’ office. While working, the two roommates would listen to Greek radio: a formerly out-of-work activity reterritorialised in the workspace as an emergent sociospatial practice enabled by the pandemic and working from home. In other words, they wouldn't have been able to listen, let alone share, Greek radio in the ‘normal’ pre-Covid-19 workspace. Since the two roommates work in English speaking corporations, their dining table accommodates two English speaking workspaces in the performing of the professional. However, listening to the radio merges the soundscapes of separate workspaces, integrating translocal translingual practices into a ‘shared’ common soundscape. The LL, dominated by Greek, constitutes part of the migratory trajectory and meshes different sociospatial performances and languages (professional: English, political: Greek).

Excerpt (3) is a transcription of a video-entry from George's diary, recording an experience of radio listening as a commemoration of the Greek anti-dictatorship struggle (memory day of 17th November 1973). In this instance, a well-known revolutionary song by the Greek artist M. Theodorakis plays in the background while they are working, triggering the memoryscape of the anti-dictatorship struggle. Thus, the current Greek sociopolitical newsfeed and the Greek language are territorialised in the spatial repertoire of George's home~workspace through the radio.

1. (3) George, diary entry

The song in (3) was written in 1968, during the Greek junta (1967–1974), when the composer was a political prisoner in the headquarters of the State Security Agency. In the lyrics, he describes the torture he and other prisoners were suffering in the agency's headquarters (hence the metaphorical title of the song ‘The slaughterhouse’) and their revolutionary spirit (‘in our hearts the feast begins’). Accordingly, ‘Tak-tak’, the cryptic sound signal (‘this mute language’), refers to the prisoners tapping on the wall between their cells to notify each other that they are well (‘I preserve well’) and staying faithful to the anti-dictatorship struggle (‘I hold on strong’). That is, the song reflects the experience of the prison heterotopia and indexes the vulnerabilities produced by the Junta biopolitics in ‘The slaughterhouse’ as well as the resistance of the prisoners (‘in our hearts the feast begins’, ‘I hold on strong/I preserve well’). This is cryptically communicated and shared through the sound of tapping on the wall. Hence, the song drags a specific past experience into the political present. As an element of the memoryscape, it becomes an ‘audio monument’, a substitute for the material monument of the anti-dictatorship struggle in the physical space of Athens (the central building of National Technical University of Athens).

George, before migrating to the Netherlands, used to participate in the annual commemorative demonstrations held on the 17th of November in Athens’ city center. However, as a migrant in Utrecht, his embodied presence in demonstrations has been disrupted. This deterritorialisation of demonstrative and commemorative practices emerges as a facet of vulnerability due to the migratory experience. Given the migration-generated physical limitations (geographical distance) that prevent George's participation in the embodied performance of the memoryscape in Athens, the song/audio-monument becomes construed as the medium to create a heterochrony of resistance. It emerges as a sociospatial anchor to translocally perform the political in a migrant pandemic-affected homescape.

By listening to “revolutionary songs” on that specific day (“due to the day”), George and his roommate perform the memoryscape of anti-dictatorship struggle in a heterotopic place, namely, in the living room, while tele-working under the biopolitical constraints of mobility. This migratory pandemic-specific commemorative practice transforms the practice of listening to the political radio into a trans-lingual-spatial heterochronic experience. The radio mediates a chronique of commemoration and the transpatial repertoire of the living room accumulates multiple political ‘presents’ and ‘pasts’, as heterochronies.

In excerpt (4), George gets involved synchronously in the commemorations as they are performed in Athens through instant messaging (IM). The online-offline nexus transcends the physical limitations of the living room, enabling a more interactive—although distant—participation in the commemoration. Unlike previous distant engagement with political activity in Greece, this instance of communication is more complex, since the Greek context is regulated by pandemic biopolitics, which violate the right to assembly. More specifically, the commemoration rally was prohibited by a police decree, the excuse being the pandemic (see for example Becatoros Reference Becatoros2020). This vulnerability in resistance (Butler Reference Butler, Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay2016) created a heterotopic rally, disrupting the norms of demonstrating and commemorating in Greece.

While the rally was going on, George was texting with some friends who tried to reach the center of Athens in order to participate in the commemoration rally. Because of the prohibition, the protesters tried to avoid communicating their plans and their whereabouts through digital media. But this meant that George, who was unaware of these precautions and of the disrupted commemorative practices, could not easily follow up with them. He, thus, experienced confusion in trying to understand the situation in Athens, while having to work at the same time.

1. (4) George, instant messaging

Excerpt (4) is part of his IM communication with a demonstrator in Athens, who is heading towards the center of the city, taking precautions to avoid police control. George uses a yes/no negative question, “you haven't gone eventually?”, that reflects his doubt that she will reach the locus of the demonstration, due to the constraints of biopolitical control. Rosa initially gives an incomplete and vague answer (“I'm going”), using an elliptical sentence without a place qualifier to show that she is on the move while avoiding explicitly naming her destination in written form. George, puzzled by her answer, emphatically (“Ooooh wheeere?”) poses a wh-question, extending the word ‘where’ through deviant/vernacular orthography (Shortis Reference Shortis, Ramos and Gea-Valor2007). She then gives a shibboleth reply (“to the gyno”) that further confuses George who states his confusion explicitly (“I am so confused”). Even when he is encouraged by Rosa to read between the lines (“don't be naïve”), he is still unable to make sense of the non-literal, purposefully cryptic answer repeating the same wh-question (“where are you pal?”). Consequently, Rosa again provides a spatially vague answer (“where we have talked about”), indexing a previous conversation conducted in a safe mode, while she expresses her indignation multimodally using an emoji (‘smoke from the nose’). Rosa's frustrated answer resolves the miscommunication and George finally understands the message and expresses his concern (‘heart’ emoji, “take care”) regarding the tension between the police and the demonstrators in the forbidden rally. This instance of miscommunication reveals the vulnerability experienced by George, as an out of place political subject who has difficulty in actually understanding the implications of biopolitical measures (e.g. acute police surveillance and suppression), and the disruptions to pre-pandemic ways of demonstrating (e.g. invention of fraud excuses to move around, such as a visit to a gynaecologist). His persistence though to ‘follow’ the route of his demonstrator-friend can be construed as an act of resisting the constraints of telecommemorating that throw him out-of-place. Politicising the living room, thus, involves an in-and-out-of-place transition of his political subjectivity in the online-offline nexus.

For George, following the flow of the Greek sociopolitical events creates a bridge that enables his remote entanglement with these events, as well as with the lives of his social circle in Greece. Hence, spatially remote events that happen in the homeland are reterritorialised in the transpatial repertoire of the home~workspace, transforming the living room to a heterotopic place. On the one hand, this transpatial repertoire meshes together the sociopolitical events that are happening concurrently in the two countries—countries that are handling the pandemic in diverse ways. On the other hand, it integrates the political past and present, since George is enabled to actively engage with political commemorative practices he used to perform before migrating in a trans- way, that is, at the intersection of home~work~memoryscapes.

The case of George, then, demonstrates how the living room became the space where political subjectivities were performed in relation to the sociopolitical past. In excerpt (5), by contrast, we see the political being performed in relation to the sociopolitical present and future. A public meeting of 6,500 participants comprises the main activity taking place in the living room. More specifically, in excerpt (5), Anna (see Performing the professional in the living room as a shared workscape) is located in the private/domestic environment of her living room while she participates in a virtual union meeting in order to exercise her union membership rights. The assembly was held because the multinational company she works for had—before the pandemic—announced 1,200 redundancies in its French branches. This explains why employees from different cities in France participated in the assembly. Her multimodal diary entry is comprised of a screenshot of her laptop interface, displaying a view of the general assembly digital room and of an accompanying narrative written in French and Greeklish, that is, transliteration of Greek with Latin characters.

1. (5) Anna, diary entry

Here we see Anna capitalising on her prior experiences from union assembly meetings in Greece as a student and an employee, referring to the impact of the (digital) medium in transforming the ‘usual’ performance of the general assembly (“in the time of coronavirus, assemblies are held like this”). She foregrounds the large number of the company's employees who are participating in the same assembly, (5,000; 1,500) despite working for the company in two different cities, a fact that would have otherwise been physically impossible. She also comments on how the affordances of the medium have disrupted the procedure of the assembly, since, on the one hand, the mute button (“the host mutes him”) enforces silencing in the case of interruptive interventions (“no one to speak over the other”). On the other hand, the digital solution/alternative enables the participation of more employees; there were “no difficulties with the quorum” as there had been in pre-pandemic gatherings. Through ‘typographic energy’ (Jane Reference Jane2015:66) (two laughing emojis) and the statement “I'm crying to laughter”, Anna makes explicit her sarcasm regarding the general assembly performance. In this way she questions the efficacy of such digital practices when performing a union assembly in the pandemic era.

Specifically, within this pandemic-specific digital solution, it is impossible for participants to interrupt one another because of the muting function (“the host mutes him”), and this leads to the silencing of disagreements and the limiting of polyphony. This aspect of tele-gathering can be recognised as the vulnerability that creates a heterotopia of the assembly in the living room. When realised online, the assembly is a form of resistance to the vulnerability imposed by pandemic biopolitics and the concomitant restriction of public gatherings. However, a new vulnerability appears in the digital LL due to the silencing practices enforced by a disembodied agent, who takes advantage of the techno-affordances (non-verbal clicks by the host) to control negotiation of disagreements. This is problematic given that disagreements are a core element of democratic decisions and collective action.

Further diversifying the spatial repertoire of the home, then, the manner assemblies held in the pandemic era changed the space from physical to digital, thereby leading to a blending of sociospatial activities in the online-offline nexus. The affordances of digital media transformed the living room into a hybrid space through the diffusion of the boundaries between the domestic-private and the political-public. On the whole, the transpatial repertoire of the home embodied heterotopic elements, namely offline-online sociospatial re/arrangements and the consequent vulnerabilities produced by biopolitical measures.