Moises Ramirez
Flaneur-Workers: Cognitive Mechanics and Spatial (Non)Resemblances
The rising demand for, from out of both convenience or necessity, door-to-door service has established a new social regime to emerge from out of the flows of exchange. Amongst alternative forms of service industry workers, delivery workers - specifically the food-delivery worker- must take on the streets and leave their desires on mute. Welcome the flaneur-worker.
Circumventing throughout various hills, stairs, flatlands, and elevators globally the flaneur-worker operates beneath the icon of different software applications that algorithmically regulate the flow of each work-session. Dislocated from actual membership from the restaurant, the apartment or home, and the streets themselves, the flaneur-worker’s autonomy rests in a state of anticipation as a potential labour node in a network of desire and command.
In this presentation, I will investigate the cognitive mechanics on how societies have come to rely or insist on this type of service worker, as well as how the workers themselves are able to commit to redundant tasks circulating through congested flow of urban signal and signs. To facilitate this task, I will also compare the encounter between analyst and analysand and the role in which the unconscious floats in the spatial (non)resemblance to the psychoanalyst’s office contrasted to the streets. Both being sites of generative encounter through redundancy.