Make Whichever You Find Work
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54 | variant 41 | SPrin G 2011 Make Whichever You Find Work Anthony Iles & Marina Vishmidt ‘Art’s double character as both autonomous and fait Value is the capitalist category par excellence social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its – the category and lens through which every autonomy.’ – Theodor Adorno thing, every object and all social relations are viewed. Value, with its twin poles of use-value and ‘If you take hold of a samovar by its stubby legs, you exchange-value, is the core of the real abstraction can use it to pound nails, but that is not its primary that mediates all social relations through the function.’ – Viktor Shklovsky commodity. ‘[...] there is no use-value other than in the form of Introduction value in capitalist society, if value and capital constitute The recent uptake of the post-autonomist a forceful, totalising form of socialisation that shapes immaterial labour thesis draws cultural every aspect of life.’3 practitioners closer to the critical self-recognition In a society organised by the abstraction of of their own labour (waged and otherwise) as value, that is, a society in which profit is the alienated, as well its formal commonality with imperative for co-operation and production, the other kinds of affective labour at large.1 Art chief product not the commodity but the class finds itself in a new relation with abstract value, relation between capital and labour: this is why whether it’s the typical forms of contemporary it makes more sense to speak of capitalism as a work or financial mechanisms. This applies social relation rather than an economic system. both to the structural re-composition of work by This social relation has been de-stabilised in the ‘creative’ and self-propelled forms of exploitation decades of the neoliberal turn, as de-valorisation as well as the inscription of art in social policy and debt replaced expansion in the financialised Right: The Last agendas tending to enhance market values. In economies of the West. Globally, the growth in Days of Jack an unprecedented way, art not only reflects but surplus populations greatly exceeds those earning Shepard (2009), revises the productive forces, shading into forces a living from the fabled spread of market relations video stills, Anja of ‘non-production’ and devalorisation in an to the overheated industries and real estate of Kirschner and era of debt-financed austerity. However, as art China and south-east Asia. Class, like labour, is 4 David Panos. expands to include more and more fields of social now experienced as an ‘external constraint’. kirschner-panos. action within its imaginative and institutional While it can be argued that by and large most info remit (political activity, work, education), the people have always related to capitalist work as paradox remains that the social effectiveness an external constraint rather than as a source of art is guaranteed by its separation from of pride or class belonging5, the implication is capitalist work. Thus, art’s estrangement from rather that work has increasingly been de-valued labour continues apace, but, at this historical of all political and economic salience. We only juncture, coincides with labour’s estrangement need refer to the numerous instances of factory from labour: labouring subjects who do not closures in recent years in which workers have Below: Zero identify with themselves as labour. On the one mobilised to demand bigger payouts and not Dollar (1978-84), hand all labour becomes in some sense aesthetic to keep their jobs: the terrain of struggle has Cildo Meireles self-creation, on the other, formerly unalienated shifted to reproduction. As described by Marx forms of activity are subsumed by capitalist social this overarching dynamic has been in play since Bottom: Ten relations on an unprecedented scale. All this poses the introduction of machinery within large scale Thousand the contradiction that, rather than heralding industry: ‘the machine does not free the worker Cents (2008), communism, the enactment of micro-utopian from the work, but rather deprives the work drawn by 10000 experiments in spaces overdetermined by existing itself of all content.’6 Similarly, through its own anonymous social relations dominated by abstract value logic of inexorable expansion, art has arrived at artists, custom comprises a measure of, not how close but, how far a period of disidentification with its terms and software, we are from the emergence of truly emancipatory categories. Art becomes the agent of hollowing out variable Size. practices. of all which is incorporated into it – participation Initiated by becomes instrumentalisation, representation Aaron Koblin becomes parody, autonomy becomes hard labour, & Takashi Class Relational politicisation becomes cynicism. Doubtless, art has Kawashima. ‘The social character of production does not prefigure been involved in this endgame since reflexivity tenthousand anything: it merely renders the basis of value became an integral part of the concept of what art cents.com 2 contradictory.’ was.7 Art as we know it in the present and recent past is in fact characterised by its role as a ‘vanishing mediator’, terminally driven to dis-affiliate with its own disciplinary boundaries and to collapse the distance with all which lies outside it. The ‘aesthetic regime’, as discussed by Jacques Rancière, is in fact nothing more than this but also real strategies situated in a social field of tendency to collapse distinctions, ‘non-art’ (labour, politics) increasingly devoid of hierarchy, representational orders content and ruled by contingency. and so forth, guaranteeing itself It is possible to draw a link between the critique a ‘weak’ autonomy by relentlessly of labour as a ground for human emancipation levelling the ossified categories (communism) in recent debates around the term of industrial modernity. However ‘communisation’ and the critique of labour found serviceable this might be as in critical aesthetics, from Schiller onwards, a formal sketch of the raison which proposed a genuinely human community d’etre of the 19th and 20th bonded together by play rather than production; century avant-garde, it stops collective determination as a work of art. The somewhat short of the specific rejection of work and the affirmation of direct de-naturing operations enacted social relations unmediated by the alienating by ‘contemporary’ art in an abstractions of money, state or labour is an historical era where dis-affiliation invariant across Romantic aesthetics and are also and estrangement is primarily reflected in the political theory emerging at that the affective and structural force time, such as Utopian socialism, continuing to of money, in relation to which art pervade the mature writings of Marx and having may offer a provocative realism, great currency across the Left spectrum up to the a ‘cultural confinement’ (Robert present. But the rejection of work is not simply Smithson) of broken allegories a constant in the attempts to re-envision social variant 41 | SPrin G 2011 | 55 relations on more emancipatory lines beyond the in art history.12 Another is that as radicals capitalist forms by which we know them; it is also increasingly fell foul of the disciplinary arm of the problematic at the root of art. Yet, there is a the Soviet state, many who had celebrated the contradictory dynamic of futility, absurdity and dissolution of art into industrial production met waste in the dominance of abstract work as well. their end worked to death.13 Concrete examples are easy to come by, whether Under the rationalising Taylorism of the New it’s (the perhaps apocryphal) digging ditches and Economic Plan (NEP), Soviet production after filling them in again in the works programmes of 1921 did not depart from, but rather aped value the Great Depression or the workfare and ‘work- production, albeit in dysfunctional form at first. readiness’ initiatives through which outsourced In this context an experimental concert held at employment services fulfil their government Baku in 1922 involving the foghorns of the Caspian targets in the neo-feudalism of the ‘Big Society’. Fleet, factory sirens, artillery, hydroplanes, and Times of capitalist crisis turn the usual reserve choirs can be interpreted as a kind of ‘cargo army of the unemployed into the biopolitical cult’, calling forth an imago of industrialisation.14 problem of ‘surplus populations’ which the state Progress was regression, seen in the light of the can no longer afford to support, a problem which spurious combo of capitalist methods of industrial elicits more regressive and insufficient responses production and anti-market forms of distribution, from the state every time it occurs. It may be themselves vitiated by the NEP. Likewise, the that in the shift to be currently observed from new model of artwork as embodying truth to a cod-progressive New Labour agenda of social production (faktura) did not go far enough, inclusion founded upon financialisation to a stopping short of a thorough critique of value and hardly-unexpected one based upon serfdom when pre-existing models of production. Instead, those the asset bubbles collapse, art could potentially artists who had celebrated creative intervention in again become a ‘progressive’ critic of the mode the factories effectively worked to discipline and of production and the barbarism of its social police workers in the work place and outside it.15 relations, tied as it is for its material and critical A proponent of ‘left’ productivism, Boris identity to those selfsame relations. Arvatov, made a contribution to this debate which was overlooked at the time and has been only recently recovered. His theoretical output A Kind of Disjunctive Synthesis attempts to close the enforced distinction between ‘The artist’s political engagement cannot consist production and consumption native to capital in expanding art into society, but only in reducing and reproduced intact in much Marxist theory.