his lecture was part of the New Museum’s presentation of “On False Tears and Outsourcing,” an iteration of Spooner’s long-term project of the same name, which was initiated at Vleeshal Markt, Middelburg, the Netherlands, in 2015. A starting point for the project was Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 novel Madame Bovary, in which Emma Bovary’s lover signs his farewell letter to her with a false tear, a drop of water. Spooner takes this passage and builds on its fiction to examine expanded definitions of outsourcing today. Considering the production of affect, the contradictions faced by hired bodies, and the dynamics of using or being used as a human resource, “On False Tears and Outsourcing” staged situations in which a heightened demand for communication drove the delegation of personal investment to ready-made languages, gestures, and protocols.