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. In art’s claims through the deconstruction of those a recently translated text, Arvatov foregrounds mechanisms that establish and maintain “the artistic” the status of things as central to the communist 8 as different from other social practices.’ transformation of everyday life. The project of the dissolution of art into life – ‘If the significance of the human relation to the expressed variously in surrealism, the situationists, Thing has not been understood, or has been only Above: dadaism, constructivism, productivism, futurism, partially understood as a relation to the means of The Communist Imaginary General Strike conceptual and performance art – has drawn life production, this is because until now Marxists have Having drawn from accounts of Soviet Piece, Feb. into art’s orbit but also bound art closely to the known only the bourgeois world of things.’16 productivism the twin problematic of an 8, 1969, Lee potential transformation of general social life. Arvatov insists that the polarities which insufficient critique of the value-form and the Lozano. The analogy with communism is that communism organise bourgeois life, i.e. labour in opposition tendency of artists to police productive output argues for the generalisation of creativity through to everyday life, consumption in opposition to in industry, John Roberts attempts to retrieve a the overcoming of the social domination of production, would be completely dissolved under ‘communist imaginary’ within relational aesthetics abstract labour and the value-form, which will also communist social relations. Instead of being and socially engaged practices.21 This can be mean a dissolution of the boundary between a freed of materiality, proletarian culture will be juxtaposed with Stewart Martin’s attempt to reified creativity and a rarefied uselessness – art – ‘imbued with the deepest sense of Things’.17 formulate an ‘artistic communism’ by revisiting the and the production of use-values – work. He goes on to imagine a state in which objects aesthetic content of Marx’s vision of communism The disjunction, on the other hand, comes from become ‘comrades’ or ‘co-workers’, where humans contra the ‘artistic capitalism’ enacted by these the tradition of critical Marxist aesthetics, which have an immediate and sensuous relationship to ‘relational practices’. argues that it is precisely the other way around – the material which constitutes their world. The Despite noting the separation within the art must maintain its difference from capitalist life agency formerly attributed to objects as bearers of ‘relational’ turn of liberatory social activity from in order to exert a critical purchase on it. It is the value, ‘a relation between persons – expressed as a critique of labour and its aestheticisation of degree to which the separation between art and a relation between things’,18 was to be abolished politics, Roberts sees in this ‘genre’ a valuable life, between art and work, is viewed as a problem and the thing become ‘functional and active’ in a ‘holding operation’ which ‘keeps open the ideal which can be overcome in the here and now or different sense.19 horizon of egalitarianism, equality and free the symptom of a problem which can only be Arvatov’s prefiguration of a ‘communist object’ exchange.’22 On the other hand, as described overcome with the destruction of the value-form and new materialist social relations sits uneasily by Martin, relational aesthetics stands as an and the re-founding of social relations on other with art and labour’s instrumentalisation under epiphenomenon of the current phase of real terms that marks the difference between these Bolshevism. Drawing upon the insights of Walter subsumption within capitalism.23 two traditions. Fundamentally, they are premised Benjamin on collecting, we can speculate that it is ‘The dissolution of art into life not only presents new upon a variant understanding of art’s role in only things liberated from use which cease to be 9 content for commodification, but a new form of it in so capitalist subsumption. Would art disappear in commodities. The socialist object is not just one far as art or culture has become a key medium through communism or would everything become art? The that’s been taken out of commodity exchange and which commodification has been extended to what same question can be asked about work – would put to good use in a new society; if it was really previously seemed beyond the economy.’24 communism entail a generalisation or the abolition socialist, it would never be put to use as we know of work? After 500 years of capitalism, are we any it.20 Martin therefore recognises relational longer in a position to distinguish capitalist forms aesthetics as a form of ‘capitalist productivism’ from their unadulterated contents, i.e. work and while Roberts’ commitment to a ‘labour theory of capitalist work, art and commodity art, life and culture’ causes him to perceive a general limit in Left: capitalist life, even use-value and exchange-value? contemporary art’s inability to imagine a space VIS-À-VIS (1918), for artists’ collaboration with workers. This is Francis Picabia anomalous with regards to earlier criticisms of Artists on the Assembly Line productivist interventions into the factory and ‘The figure of the avant-garde artist and that of the that it elides the very question of the indistinction factory worker, both ghostly and interdependent, are between artistic and alienated labour. Having two poles of modern alienation... they confront us as failed in the ‘factory’, radical art must shift its figures calling for an equal degree of wariness.’10 attention to ‘the social factory’. The spectre of the artist intervening directly One of the problems of recent accounts of the in production, has, like Rodchenko dressed in a relation between productive labour and artistic production suit fashioned by Varvara Stepanova, labour is a reliance upon post-autonomist accounts continued to haunt Left art historians and social- of the socialisation of work in advanced capitalism. critical artists alike. The artist going into industry Central to these accounts is Maurizio Lazzarato’s has always had an element of dressing up. Just concept of so-called ‘immaterial labour’ – the as communist intellectuals in Weimar Germany notion that all work was becoming increasingly competed, both in their lives and their works, to technologised, dependent upon and productive ‘look’ more proletarian, the most radical of Soviet of communication and co-operation rather than constructivist and productivist artists appear a finished product. A common move is to bridge ultimately to be participating in a dress rehearsal two concepts of autonomy – that of art’s autonomy for a putative revolutionary role curtailed by in capitalism which was developed by Theodor Stalinism.11 One irony here is that those artists Adorno, and the autonomy of the working class as who completely dissolved themselves into the developed by the ‘workerist’ communism of 1970s figure of the worker are for that reason unrecorded Italy. Significantly, many commentators overlook 56 | variant 41 | SPrin G 2011 the fact that immediately after its formulation eschewing equivalence and disrupting orders of Lazzarato quickly abandoned the term and its measure. Art as a special commodity rebels against problems: its commodity status by seeking a transvaluation of all values. ‘But the concept of immaterial labour was filled with ambiguities. Shortly after writing those articles I ‘Great 20th-century avant-garde art – and poetry in decided to abandon the idea and haven’t used it since. particular – from Celan to Brecht and Montale, has One of the ambiguities it created had to do with the demonstrated the crisis of experiential units of measure. concept of immateriality. Distinguishing between ... This emphasis on immoderation, disproportion and the material and the immaterial was a theoretical the crisis in units of measure is to be credited greatly complication we were never able to resolve.’25 to avant-garde art and this is also where it edges up to In the early 21st century, claims for the communism.’31 hegemony of a class of immaterial labourers could Arguably the movement towards Right: be disputed by pointing out the drive of capital financialisation created a dynamic where art Crisis in the towards absolute surplus extraction in the Global and capital showed parallel tendencies to Credit System south. After the 2008 financial crisis, the dramatic escape from engagement with labour and into (2008), video shake out of overinflated values and optimism the self-reflexive abstraction of value. As gold stills, a four-part about the agency of this new class brought to new became paper and then electronic signs, money drama, Melanie light the relation between the material and the increasingly became autonomous from productive Gilligan. immaterial. Furthermore, viewing contemporary labour. The movement of self-expanding www.crisisinthe labour through the lens of immaterial labour value, appearing as money making money on creditsystem. tended to reproduce rather than disassemble financial markets, dissolves all prior values and org.uk the dominant division of mental and manual relationships into abstract wealth. Similarly in art, labour in capitalism. Art can then be seen as the expansion of its claims upon material previously fetishisation of this division, which is refined alien to it tends towards the hollowing out of and generalised in the ‘creativisation’ of ‘post- this material’s substance. One notable aspect Fordist’ work, as well as in adding value to de- of dematerialisation in art is its proximity to industrialised locales. deindustrialisation. The early stages of the period According to Stewart Martin in his 2008 essay of advanced financialisation or ‘neoliberalism’ ‘The Pedagogy of Human Capital’, terms such as saw a re-engagement with industrial materials ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘self-valorisation’ both and (vacant) industrial spaces by artists. Another operate with a problematic concept of autonomy. is the tendency towards abstract thought and Autonomy can be said to have been thoroughly linguistic claims with the integration systems and internalised by capital in its attempts to collapse new technologies. In this sense, the conditions set the subjectivity of living labour as its own and by the movements of finance provide the material through its moves to ideologically and actually and conceptual parameters for art. Art operates in commodify previously non-capitalised areas of life. these conditions but also upon them to transform The move to aesthetics is then seen as a way of their terms.32 Both speculative commodities, art is dissolving the autonomy/heteronomy distinction, backed by the credibility of the artist and money reliant ultimately on domination (even and by the credibility of the state. As such, like credit especially when it’s the ‘self-legislating’ kind), notes, art is a gamble on the future which will not through the agency of play and the invention of necessarily pay off: ‘Artworks draw credit from ‘forms-of-life’ resistant to an autonomy thinkable a praxis that has yet to begin and no one knows only through capital’s laws.26 This harmonious whether anything backs their letters of credit.’33 prospect does presuppose a rupture with existing Yet art is engaged in an endless testing of forms of ‘capitalist life’. This rupture has been its own condition which anticipates negations explored historically in specific ‘avant-garde’ art of the determinations of the value form from practices, left communist movements, and in the inside, rather than beyond, its tensions. And if recent period through specific experiments in art the complicity between money and art has led that perform and perforate the certainties of art, to unseemly games with both, the strain of this finance and work.27 Viewed thus, we can outline relationship has also ushered in forms of critical other relationships that bind artworks to the reflexivity. Some recent artworks which enact this political economy of their times. are Melanie Gilligan’s four-part video, Crisis in the Credit System; Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ The Last Days of Jack Shepard, which connects the Financialisation: 2008 financial crisis to the South Sea Bubble; Hito Form Follows Finance Steyerl’s In Free Fall (2010), or Goldin & Senneby’s Theodor Adorno conceives of ‘aesthetic forces multi-author distributed filmic, literary and of production’ which inescapably imprint the performance project, Looking For Headless. 10,000 artwork. cents by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima uses the digital labour management of Amazon’s ‘...the artist works as social agent, indifferent to society’s Mechanical Turk to create a replica $100 bill.34 own consciousness. He embodies the social forces of Throughout art’s development in advanced production without necessarily being bound by the capitalism, tension with commodification has also censorship dictated by the relations of production.’28 been preformative in other ways, for instance by Art manifests the existing forces of production, gravitating towards uselessness and negation. The but can deviate from their determinations through critique of commodification reaches an apotheosis the ‘indeterminacy’ native to the discrete agency with art’s confrontation with contemporary of art (Kant). In his book Symbolic Economies, finance, for in finance art’s negation of use has Jean-Joseph Goux relates Marx’s schema of been mirrored, refracted and become abstract the development of a general equivalent to the domination. If, in art we find the outline of an invention of forms of representation; of art, emancipatory practice to come then it is important literature and language.29 He contends that modes to bear in mind that this remains a model and not of signification and capitalist systems of exchange an object, but to its existence as a form of exchange, a a programme; it is ‘a model of emancipated labour, develop in parallel. tool of circulation, a temporary pitstop on the endless not the model through which the emancipation of Goux describes the tendency within capitalist 30 racetrack of money.’ labour will be accomplished.’35 exchange towards abstraction and the tendency to Francis Picabia’s work, Vis a Vis, 1918, bearing ‘dematerialisation’ in art as two sides of a general the phrase ‘The measure – that which disfigures’, crisis of representation punctuated by historically points to the centrality of the measure to capital’s What is There in Uselessness locatable crises in the value form (1919, 1929 and expansion and equilibrium. Capitalist exchange is to Cause You Distress? 1971). Each crisis marks a limit to the existing the mediation of all production through a general ‘If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in system’s ability to represent real world goods or universal equivalent – money/gold. Money is it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore through money, and in each case resolution of therefore the measure which disfigures all by creates no value.’36 the crisis is by way of an expansion, or further quantifying all. The ‘emergency’ suspension of In art from the 1960s onwards, though abstraction, of the money-form. Put crudely, the the gold standard by Britain, Germany and the tendentially earlier, some might say from drives towards abstraction in both art and money US during the Second World War coincided with Duchamp, developed late capitalist modernity are entwined. a crisis of representation in art that resulted in offered some exits for practitioners who saw Drawing on Goux’s theory, George Baker has the readymade and ‘automatic’ forms which bring the division of labour between art work and argued that Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp’s artistic representation and economic exchange regular work as a political issue. One can ‘refuse development of the readymade was a response into an uncomfortable collusion. work’ within art, rejecting the making of art to the proliferating commodities of the early Art is both an innovator in forms of objects and socialisation as an atomised elite twentieth century: representation – extending the limit of what subjectivity by exiting the art world and art can be represented – and, at times, its undoing – ‘[…] the readymade responded not to the commodity as practices and becoming invisible or imperceptible variant 41 | SPrin G 2011 | 57 in its terms. There was also the rehearsal of work were also conscious of the incursions into the in the art domain, from proletarian stylistics abode of production by the autonomous sphere of to managerial protocols, marking the shift to finance experienced as a second order of remote the so-called ‘post-industrial’ in the West. Also, command.44 there was the problematising of the distinction The plan was developed on company time and of art work from domestic labour. Conceptual in the context of sit-ins and demonstrations to art itself was premised on an expansion of art’s contest the top-down restructuring. This meant competence via the dissolution of its borders. that the ‘creativity’ of labour was matched by, and The strategy of disappearance was enacted, by, in fact conditioned by, the negativity of labour among many others, Lee Lozano who withdrew expressed by stopping or slowing-down production. from art socality, art making and art institutions, The Lucas Corporate Plan posed the problem Charlotte Posensenske who went into social of the emancipation of labour as a struggle over activism, or Lygia Clark who went into tactile the content of work and the use-values it produces. therapeutic interventions (all of whose work Yet this approach strategically included both a has since then of course been re-capitalised by rejection of and a compromise with the market.45 critics, curators and collectors). The industrial/ post-industrial shift was reflected in the work of Tehching Hsieh and Robert Morris, for instance; What’s The Use? and the problematising of artwork/housework was Because all capitalist commodities are products Left: for executing state or corporate goals. Such an seen in the oeuvres of Mierle Laderman Ukeles of abstract labour, the dimension of use-value Looking for outcome is already evident in the history of the and Mary Kelly, who followed the premises of supposedly unrelated to social form is subsumed Headless (2007-), contortions APG went through in trying to ‘sell de-materialisation, feminism and psychoanalysis. in this homogeneity and abstraction insofar as ongoing project, situations’ to UK culture bureaucracies in the Seth Siegelaub’s career as a curator, lawyer use-value is part of the commodity. Use-value Goldin+Senneby. 1970s, as they alternately embrace and back and artist in one would be exemplary of the bears the same relation to exchange-value as goldinsenneby. off from the entrepreneurial and employment classic conceptualist act of expanding art’s concrete labour does to abstract labour; it is its com potential of the ‘placements’. They assert that they competences by blurring its borders. The opposite (particular, individual), but subsumed aim to ‘provide a service to Art, not a service to paradoxical identification with extra-artistic into the general form of value which hollows out artists’, while the notion of the Incidental Person labour while rejecting artistic labour entered particularity. is itself predicated on a loss of self-evidence another phase with artists such as Gustav Moishe Postone identifies ‘labour’ as a capitalist of what Art is or even its right to exist, 46 Metzger (leader of an art strike and category and thus a reified one. This is relevant as Adorno put it. The IP is a ‘de- proponent of auto-destructive art) also to the de-socialised or idealised positioning materialised’ artist.41 The very a pre-eminent operator of the of use-value, and ultimately testifies that the art absence of instrumental benefit ‘creative-destructive’ vector into life versus critical autonomy paradox for in the long ‘time-base’ impact at the time, and the Artist art cannot be resolved within the form of value of the presence of the IP in Placement Group.37 so long as the social form of their production is organisations was framed The Artist Placement determined by value. The form of social labour by APG as economically Group (APG), operating in capitalism is nowhere the same thing as productive in the visionary in the UK and Europe concrete labour, or even the ahistorical ‘metabolic sense today’s business from 1966-1989, interaction with nature’: climate needs. By the initiated ‘placements’ early 1980s, the concept ‘“Labour” by its very nature is unfree, unhuman, unsocial of artists in firms and of ‘human capital’ had activity, determined by private property and creating organisations, creating begun to circulate in private property. Hence the abolition of private property a forerunner to artist policy circles, and APG’s will become a reality only when it is conceived as the residencies. The main proposals started to make abolition of “labour” (an abolition which, of course, has difference with the artist more sense; importantly, become possible only as a result of labour itself, that is residency as it exists now ‘human capital’ was taken in to say, has become possible as a result of the material was that the artist was re- the most diffuse of senses as well, activity of society and which should on no account defined as an Incidental Person contrary to the accounting fictions be conceived as the replacement of one category by (IP), a kind of de-skilled and 47 that characterised the later ‘creative another).’ disinterested agent whose insertion economy’ paradigm. Until recently, communist theory posed the into ‘alien’ organisational sites promised no A few implications arise here. One is the IP’s problem of production as one of separating use- specific outcome. The earlier-cited repudiation repudiation of the Productivist legacy of sending value from exchange-value, yet these insights of art, whether it was negative, e.g. withdrawal artists into the factories and improving the labour suggest that destruction of the capital-labour from art, or positive, e.g. expansion of art’s remit, process: the IP brief was totally undetermined relationship must also bracket off and destroy use- here took a further turn. The IP bracketed both – APG took artistic alienation from productive value as a constitutive category presupposed by ‘art’ and ‘work’ in the emergent concept of the life seriously. Yet this challenge to use-value and value. The principle that labour cannot serve as a ‘professional’ as a neutral and unmarked social useful labour was beholden to a vision of artistic ground for emancipation is a perspective common being. neutrality which can be seen as readily morphing to left communist theory like the Frankfurt School, For the early 19th century Utopian socialist, into the non-specialised but omni-adaptable German ‘wertkritik’ (value-critique) and the ideas the Comte de Saint-Simon, politics was a ‘science ‘creative’ of today. The negativity of non-specialism around ‘communisation’ circulating today. of production’ and the role of artists was itself has to harbour a moment of refusal or open itself a political role bound up with the multivalent up to be colonised by whatever capitalist forms of aspects of art, use and poiesis.’38 Here we can see Don’t worry, mate, it’s only art, life are in the air at the time. And there has been prefigured the deployment of artists in industry as a lot written, by Benjamin Buchloh and others, it’s not worth it, promoted and practised by APG. The significance about the ‘aesthetic of administration’ really or: the Labour of the Negative of this Saint-Simonian precursor is not only that translating into the artist adopting the position of ‘It is the sphere of the enchanted gesture, in which the from a certain perspective APG reproduce the role the manager or bureaucrat, rather than worker, artist’s special personality gives to the rest of humanity of the artist as part of a problematic managerial thus reinforcing the division between mental and the example, in the form of spectacle, of those forms- vanguard of a new system. Saint-Simon’s manual labour. of-life that they are forbidden to assume. … Art is given ‘prosperity’ is not productive in the capitalist A retort to APG’s attempts to expose commodity a monopoly on the how of acts. The setting-up of an sense but emancipates workers from work to production to the transformative non-instrumental autonomous sphere wherein the how of every gesture pursue ‘enjoyments’. ends of aesthetic pursuit can be derived from the is endlessly weighed, analysed, subjected to know- Traditionally, capitalist modernity has excluded self-activity of workers at one of the companies how, has not ceased to shore up the prohibition on any art from instrumentality because it was seen as they targeted for placements: Lucas Aerospace. mention of the how of existence in the rest of alienated an exception, a free creative practice which was While APG were unsuccessfully approaching social relations.’48 pursued for different ends than other business or management at the company, the Lucas Aerospace professional activity, and untainted by politics.39 Increasingly, artistic labour apes forms of Combine Shop Steward’s Committee was But this can also of course be re-framed as placing service work in its performance of affect and countering management-imposed restructuring art in service of a ‘higher’ instrumentality, the forms of social provision, whilst capital (at least with their own alternative corporate plan. The one of displacing and reconciling bourgeois in the West) appears to be going through an anti- plan proposed the reorganisation of the company contradictions. The Adornian complex of art as productivist, if not outright destructive turn. around the production of ‘socially useful products the absolute commodity captures this sharply, if Current attempts to bind more closely to the and human centred technologies’ developed by the hermetically. The concept of the Incidental Person market sectors not organised according to the workers themselves.42 Setting out to address ‘the then could be read as a subversive affirmation of law of value – art, but also education – testify to exponential change in the organic composition this: putting purposeless purpose to work. capital’s problems of valorisation. This is a crisis of capital and the resultant growth of massive APG’s ‘non-technical non-solution’ exposed of the very reproduction of the capital-labour structural unemployment’ directly, the Shop them to accusations of having social-democratic relationship and thus of the social division of Steward’s Committee practically rejected the illusions, fetishising management, and the naivete labour that holds art and labour as separate division of manual and intellectual work, forming of an explicitly non-antagonistic research-based realms. a ‘unique combine of workers within Lucas approach.40 Whereas APG’s placements were The tendency towards uselessness and between high level technologists and shop floor guided by a characteristically obtuse notion of negation propelled by the real subsumption semi-skilled.’43 Wary not-only of the traditional ‘use’, artists are inserted into social contexts under abstract labour and the commodity-form command structure of management, Lucas workers now precisely because they are deemed useful of all those expanses of social experience which 58 | variant 41 | SPrin G 2011 or as exception that proves the law of capitalist social relations,53 and it has less relation to the negativity of labour-power than to the negativity of the ever-mutating form of value. Contra to the thesis that the dissolution of the borders between art and productive labour (or art and politics) heralds emancipation, this may be read instead as an index of the real subsumption of generic human capacities into the self-valorisation process of a capital which is no longer sure about where value comes from or how to capture it; a process as self-referential and totalising as the expanded field of art. In looking at this relation, we must remain vigilant about turning critical categories into positive ones. The history of socialist politics as well as the ideologies of capitalist futurism and the divagations of socially concerned art offer no shortage of examples of doing the opposite. However, artworks do not simply pass through a moment which bypasses use value, but that cannot be subsumed under exchange value: they also connect with a form of activity which presages non-objective relations between subjects, activity which dismantles ‘the subject as congealed technology’.54 ‘[art] is the outcome of an activity that is not a free act of consciousness but is nonetheless an activity, and not merely a thing in itself that cannot appear Above: used to provide capital with a dialectical contrast has a problematic relationship to the commodity to consciousness. The productivity of genius hereby Shapolski et al. and a ‘standing reserve’ can also be seen in the not only at the level of the artwork, but at the exposes an activity in which consciousness and non- Manhattan Real alienation from labour which simultaneously level of labour. If the problem of measure comes consciousness relate to each other as alternative Estate Holdings, makes itself felt in art, in work and in radical up here, it also comes up in the relationship to modes of an absolute activity that is their common a Real-Time politics. Returning to Symbolic Economies and temporality. Guattari and Lazzarato, among others, foundation.’55 Social System, as its schemas of resonance in abstraction, it may have contended that the political importance of May 1, 1971 be ventured that a common tendency of all of art in capital is not its symptomatic distance Once art starts to ‘model the shift to the (detail), Hans progressive social movements at the time Goux was from abstract labour, but its capacity to interrupt service-based economy’ it becomes strictly Haacke. writing (1969) was a rejection of labour, even in or displace the capitalist time – whether speaking impossible to distinguish art from non- the labour movements, who fought hard to wrench homogeneous and empty or fractal and just- art. In its articulation with the consolidation of more money and more life, not more work, from in-time – which structures that labour and the artistic subjectivity, but also in its epigones in capitalists and the State. Jean-François Lyotard ‘multiplication of the “enterprise” form within the creativity of finance and the self-invention was writing his famous ‘evil’ book, Libidinal the social body’.50 Art can introduce an ‘order of of human capital, we’re back to the autonomy- Economy several years later, arguing that alienated difference’ into this experience of rationalised heteronomy nexus. Art is the apotheosis of labour is a source of self-destructive jouissance time, ‘a window of meaninglessness in order to exchange-value and the total eclipse of use-value and can never be affirmed as a productive praxis produce a new meaning’.51 So art is capable of in the Modernist artwork, but if ‘form follows once freed of its value-form integuments. This exposing the problem of measure, whether applied finance’ with the centrality of abstract wealth to accords with the ‘communisation’ position – to labour or a temporality which ultimately social relationships, then it can be argued that art labour, and the class politics emerge as a hated comes down to labour-time under the form of that attempts to repeat labour, services and other situation enforced by capital which has nothing to value. Further, art stands between a conscious extra-artistic practices within its institutional do with emancipation. One also hears sometimes process and an unconscious one, closely tied to the sphere is not just recapitulating all those practices’ that neoliberalism won because people did not development of individuality and difference, from submission to exchange-value in their desire to want to be workers any longer, but they didn’t which it is possible to outline a generalisation of become useful, but use-values’ own equivocal and realise that not being workers meant getting rid art different to that which we live through today. submissive relationship to exchange-value as the of capitalism. The ongoing reproduction of the reality of capitalist existence. In this sense, current social relations of capital, with the politics of its art is tied to the ‘non-reproduction’ of the class class relations shattered, meant that competitive Conclusion relation between capital and labour, and also the individualism becomes the only credible form of The problem of the historic avant-garde, especially loss of distinction between art and labour under human autonomy – and the community of capital the Soviet example of Productivism, is also the the rule of abstract value in the specific social the only credible form of the human community. problem of communism – does work need to be forms which it has taken under financialisation – This situation registered quite early in the valorised or negated, and under what conditions? debt, precarity, innovation, rent-seeking, etc. Yet, stronghold of competitive creative individualism Besides Adorno, the history of philosophical this typology can also be seen more dialectically that can be said to have prototyped it – art – in line aesthetics since Schiller is permeated by a when the use-value embodied in work and the with the the tendencies explored in the preceding rejection of work, and this can be drawn up to uselessness embodied by artwork can no longer be discussion on financialisation and form. the last fifty years of post-avant-garde debates in practically or philosophically distinguished. Viktor The struggle over the wage and struggle against roughly this trajectory: art that refuses work – art Shklovsky’s samovar hammering a nail finds its waged work has not been entirely alien to artist that refuses the commodity – art that refuses the contemporary complement in a mannequin arm groups who have agitated around the issue of ‘artwork’ (Conceptual art, ‘service’ or ‘relational’ breaking the glass window of a Tunisian shopping artists’ fees or institutionalised in artists unions. practice, etc). Meanwhile, capital refuses work but centre. As a period in which culture has been put The strength of those collective formations is only by dissolving it in the ooze of universal (debt- to use every which way draws to a close and we by and large associated with the strength of the financed) commodification, which may include can expect job-creation schemes to rival gallery union movement and/or social democracy in art in its moments. Throughout the 20th century press releases in their fantastic non-solutions to their respective national bases (so Scandinavia a dialectic of into life versus art against capitalist advancing doom, art’s capacity to be not-identical and Canada have strong artists unions, while life has been played out. For this reasons, the and not-labour may appear anew in the ruins of its the attempts in the UK and the US have either negativity of capitalist value has to be recognised social synthesis, side by side with all those useful failed or never coalesced). Less official groups as well as the negativity of labour-power, lest things (education, social security, ‘jobs, growth, include the Carrot Workers Collective in London, we reify negativity as the simple absence of justice’...). or W.A.G.E. (Working Artists in the General productivity, anti-politics, and the charm of Economy) in NYC, who demand reimbursement futility. To avoid such an easy totalisation, the link Notes for ‘critical value’ in ‘capitalist value’. This latter from art to finance – to self-expanding value, to 1 Though there are others, the two primary accounts we recursivity and abstraction – has to be maintained. are referring to are: John Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art, is certainly a materialist critique of the non- ‘Enclave Theory’ and the Communist Imaginary’, Third reproduction artists are tasked with advancing Art’s relation to the value-form and role in Text 23:4, 2009, pp.353-367, and Stewart Martin, ‘Artistic for everyone – at least they should be paid for it. socialising value-relations emerges in the forming Communism – a sketch’, Third Text, 23: 4, p.482. Yet the barrier to this provocation, which is also of a speculative subjectivity suited to a speculative 2 Theorie Communiste, ‘Self-organisation is the first act of implicit to it, is, as Paolo Virno puts it, ‘Nowadays economy. the revolution ; it then becomes an obstacle which the artistic labour is turning into wage labour while revolution has to overcome’, http://libcom.org/library/ ‘Art is now the absolute freedom that seeks its end and self-organisation-is-the-first-act-of-the-revolution-it- the problem is, of course, how to liberate human its foundation in itself, and does not need, substantially, then-becomes-an-obstacle-which-the-revolution-has-to- activity in general from the form of wage labour.’49 any content, because it can only measure itself against overcome This question of liberating human activity is the vertigo caused by its own abyss. No longer is any 3 Endnotes, ‘Communisation and Value-form Theory’, in bracketed in the question of artistic labour, which, other content – except art itself – immediately for the Endnotes II, 2010, p.88. in its post-object phase, appears as labour which artist the substantiality of his consciousness, nor does it 4 See, for example, Theorie Communiste, ‘The Present cannot find value on the market. Thus it is, in inspire him with the necessity of representing it.’52 Moment’, http://libcom.org/library/present-moment- theorie-communiste Marx’s definition given earlier, ‘useless labour’, This is the generic creative subjectivity of and as such can only model liberated human 5 In his study of the interactions between a group of the artist, key to the Western liberal discourse workers and utopian socialists in 19th century France, activity for free. This shows that the art sphere since the Enlightenment, whether as civic model variant 41 | SPrin G 2011 | 59

Jacques Rancière describes the tensions between these which mimics that, but makes them directly ‘productive’ workers who simply did not wish to work, but rather of surplus value, with art which mimics that as an pursue any and every desire to do otherwise, and their emblem of this shift. See Stewart Martin, ‘Artistic patrician mentors who found and forged in them an Communism – a sketch’, Third Text, 23: 4 and the essay image of the dignity of labour. If in Rancière’s account ‘Absolute Art Meets Absolute Commodity’ in Radical the fault is with the middle-class leftists’ lack of vision Philosophy, 146 (November/December 2007). and innate reproduction of a class-relation, Theorie 24 Ibid., p.482. Communiste’s thought poses the question as a structural relation which only now, after the failure of the worker’s 25 ‘Conversation with Maurizio Lazzarato June 23, 2010 movement, can be overcome. See Jacques Rancière, – Public Editing Session #3’ in Exhausting Immaterial Nights of Labor, trans. John Drury, Philadelphia: Temple Labour in Performance, Joint issue of Le Journal des University Press,1989 and Theorie Communiste Op.Cit. Laboratoires and TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory (no. 17), October 2010. 6 Karl Marx, Capital Vol.1, Trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin, 1990, p.548. 26 Stewart Martin, ‘The Pedagogy of Human Capital’, Mute, 2: 8, and http://www.metamute.org/en/Pedagogy-of- 7 The reference point for this is usually located in Human-Capital G.F.W. Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, and is discussed at length by Rancière in several of his writings. See 27 A whole history might be written, which by focusing Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard on the labour of negation – the opposite pole to an Bosanquet, London: Penguin, 1993 [1886] or at http:// aesthetics of productivity – would bring to light strike www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/ works, spoof works, and artists who simply slip out index.htm. For the Rancière discussion, see Jacques of the ordered tradition of art history to exit artistic Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of production completely and deliver a practical critique 40 Critiques of APG from the Left claimed that the the Sensible, trans Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum, of both work and artwork. Critics of the Bolshevik placements served to legitimise corporations. The 2004 or Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven enthusiasm for scientific management included not APG response to that was that the systems of time Corcoran, London: Continuum, 2010, or Aesthetics and its only Russian Mensheviks and anarchists, but also key and measurement used by their critics on the Left and Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran, Cambridge: Polity, Marxist theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg and Amadeo the Right, as well as the designation Left and Right 2009. Bordiga. Artistic peers on the German left celebrated themselves, were inapplicable to a project that was the refusal of labour (strikes) and the critique of both trying to work with a different conception of time and 8 Stefan Germer, ‘Haacke, Broodthaers, Beuys’, October, the existing organisation of productive forces and work accounting altogether (the latter being the delta unit, n°45, 1989. p 54. itself (good examples are painter Gerd Arntz and writer or ‘unit of attention’. See Claire Bishop, ‘The Rate of 9 Stewart Martin, Op.Cit. Ret Marut/B Traven). Dada simultaneously mounted a Return’, Artforum, October, 2010. p.231-237; Peter Eeley, 10 Tiqqun, ‘A Problem of the Head’, Trans. Gabriel Levine critique of the division of labour, the art object and the ‘Context is Half the Work’, Freize, issue 111, November- in Opaque Presence, Eds. Andreas Broekman and commodity. December, 2007; Howard Slater, ‘The Art of Governance’, Knowbotic Research, Zurich: diaphanes, 2010, p.131. 28 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Trans. Robert Hullot- http://www.infopool.org.uk/APG.htm and John A. Walker, 11 John Willet, The New Sobriety: Art and Politics in the Kentor, London: Continuum, 2007, p.55. ‘The Individual and the Organisation’, http://www. Weimar Period 1919-1933, London: Thames & Hudson, 29 Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and artdesigncafe.com/Artist-Placement-Group-APG-John- 1987, pp.173-176. Freud, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990. Latham-Barbara-Steveni 12 This primarily is a question of art historical visibility, 30 George Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail, Cambridge 41 Slater, op.cit. but Simone Weil captures succinctly the more grisly MA: MIT Press, 2007, p.23. 42 Among the products developed were: a mobile cart for side of this equation in her text ‘The Mysticism of Work’ 31 Paulo Virno, ‘The Dismeasure of Art. An Interview Children with Spina Bifida, a light, simple, portable - ‘Manual labour. Time entering into the body. Through with Paolo Virno’, http://classic.skor.nl/article-4178-nl. life support system, an energy conserving system using work man turns himself into matter as Christ does html?lang=en gaseous hydrogen cells, designs for solar collecting through the Eucharist. Work is like death.’ Sian Miles equipment and low energy house components. (Ed.), Simone Weil: An Anthology, Virago, 1986, p.181. 32 In 1971 Nixon definitively unloosed the U.S. Dollar from the gold-standard. No longer was there anything but a 43 Mike Cooley, Architect or Bee?: the human / technology 13 Aleksei Gan, Gustav Klucis and many other theoretical limit to money (credit/debt) supply. We list relationship, London: The Hogarth Press, 1987 (Second constructivist pioneers died in labour camps between a few key examples of art directly engaging with the edition), p.65. the 1930s and 1940s. See Richard Andrews, Art into Life: new terms of exchange below. Hans Haacke, Shapolski 44 ‘[…] capital which has now become external to the Russian Constructivism: 1914-1932, New York: Rizzoli, et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social production process. There are hordes of accountants, 1990, p.232 and p.263. System, May 1, 1971. Haacke’s work draws attention to financial planners, monitors and other nonproductive 14 For more about the Baku Symphony see Pontus Hultén, the way a burgeoning speculative investment structures workers who are simply there to act as police people Poetry must be made by all! Transform the world!, social relations. Lee Lozano’s Real Money Piece, ‘Offer for external capital. This is part of the wider process in Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1969. T.J. Clark indicates to guests coffee, Diet Pepsi, bourbon, glass of half and which finance capital increasingly dominates industrial that the avant-garde exhortation to workers to take half, ice water, grass and money. Open jar of real money capital, a moribund stage in which the production of up their place at the factory work bench must be read and offer to guests like candy’. The ‘guests’ were all capital becomes more important than production itself.’ in the context of a near total collapse of the fledgling artists. Some took money, some borrowed money, some Ibid., p.134. industrial base in Soviet Russia during the post- did nothing. Lozano’s work poses the question of what 45 This approach is summed up by Lucas engineer Mike revolutionary years. T.J. Clark, ‘God Is Not Cast Down’ happens when the general equivalent’s special status is Cooley, ‘[…] we sought a mix of products which would be in Farewell to an Idea, New Haven and London: Yale denied – if money is treated as, instead of ideal mirror, profitable by the present criteria of the market economy University Press, 2001, pp.225-297. one of many objects; its mediating role denied things and ones which would not necessarily be profitable but 15 Artist Karl Ioganson lists among a number of outcomes become unequal – non-equivalent. Daniel Spoerri signs which would be socially useful.’ Mike Cooley, Op.Cit. he achieved during his placement at the Protatchik 10-deutschmark checks and marks them up by 100%, (second edition), p.119. and sells them as his artwork, ‘In exchanging art for factory ‘the raising of the productivity of labour by 46 See especially the chapter on abstract labour in money, we exchange one abstraction for another.’ Cildo 150 percent’. Op.Cit. John Roberts. p.531. Worker- Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Meireles, Money Tree, contrasts real value to symbolic poet Alexey Gastev became in the 1920s head of a Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge: value by presenting a pile of 100 Brazilian one cruzeiro Time League charged with improving efficiency by Cambridge University Press, p.199. monitoring lateness and time-wasting on shop-floors notes on a plinth. The piece was then offered for sale 47 Karl Marx, ‘Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s book: across Russia. John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form, at 20 times the real value of the notes. Robert Morris’s Das Nationale System der Politischen Oekonomie London: Verso, 2007, p.124. Film-maker Aleksandr 1969 Money, made the proposal that the Whitney I’ (1845) at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ Medvedkin was deployed on a ‘kino-train’ shooting, Museum invest $50,000 as a work of art – a performance works/1845/03/list.htm cutting and screening films around the Soviet Union piece in which capital does the performing. to educate workers on vital matters such as health and 33 Theodor Adorno, Op.Cit., p.110. 48 Tiqqun, op. cit., p.130 the necessity of meeting their production targets. See 34 This specific relationship between financialisation 49 Paulo Virno, ‘The Dismeasure of Art. An Interview Chris Marker’s filmLe Tombeau d’Alexandre / The Last and art is explored in detail in Melanie Gilligan. Notes with Paolo Virno’, http://classic.skor.nl/article-4178-nl. Bolshevik, 1992. on Art, Finance and the Un-Productive Forces, Glasgow: html?lang=en 16 Boris Arvatov, ‘Everyday Life and the Culture of the Transmission Gallery, 2008. The political fall out of the 50 Benjamin Noys, ‘The Grammar of Neoliberalism’, paper Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question)’, Trans. financial crisis and cultural responses are explored in a delivered at the ‘Accelerationism Workshop’, Goldsmiths Christina Kiaer, in October, Vol. 81 (Summer, 1997), special issue of Mute, ‘Living in a Bubble: Credit, Debt & College, 14 September 2010. p.121. Crisis’, Mute vol 2 #6, September 2007. 51 Lazzarato, op.cit. 17 Boris Arvatov, Ibid., p.121. 35 John Roberts, Intangibilities of Form, p.209. Two specific 52 Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. art practices that consciously take on the genre of 18 Isaak Illich Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Georgia Albert, Stanford University Press, Stanford, the ‘model’, whether it is modelling global chains of Trans. Miloš Samardžija & Freddy Perlman, Delhi: Aakar 1999, p.35. Press, 2008, p.34 (quoting Capital Vol.1 p.167). production or the transactions of ‘the economy’, are those of Mika Rottenberg and Michael Stevenson, 53 As John A. Walker writes, artists are ‘revered because 19 Boris Arvatov, Op.Cit., p.126. who undertake this through films and conceptual re- they appear to possess the secret of creativity and 20 We are indebted here to Nicholas Thoburn’s research presentation of objects, respectively. Here, ‘model’ therefore epitomise the condition of individual freedom, on the ‘communist object’ which brings Arvatov and is used in a narrower sense than in this passage, but spontaneity and fecundity which the ideology of Benjamin into dialogue. Though Thoburn’s examples are clarifies the relation of art to knowledge production Western democracy insists its citizens should aspire excellent prototypes one could question the existence which will be taken up below. to.’ (‘The Individual and the Organisation’, Op.Cit.) The existence of such a figure is predicated on the of communist objects before communist social relations 36 Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Trans. Ben Fowkes, London: ‘solidarity in existence, of art as separated sphere have taken hold. Nicholas Thoburn, Communist Objects Penguin, 1990, p.131. and the Values of Printed Matter, London: Objectile Press, from the rest of social activity, and the inauguration of 2010 reprinted from Social-Text 28 (2), Summer 2010. 37 Howard Slater points out that Metzger and Lozano’s work as the common lot of humanity.’ (Tiqqun, Op.Cit.) strike projects can seen as examples of working class This is perhaps only a restatement of Marx’s point 21 See John Roberts, ‘Productivism and Its Contradictions’, cultural forms making an entrance into the privileged that the assumptions of democracy, such as freedom, Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 5, September, 2009 and John field of art. ‘The Spoiled Ideals of Lost Situations: Some individualism, etc., can only really flourish in a market- Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art, ‘Enclave Theory’ and the Notes on Political Conceptual Art’, http://www.infopool. based society. Communist Imaginary’, Third Text 23:4, 2009, pp.353-367. org.uk/hs.htm 54 Theodor Adorno, Op.Cit., p.53. 22 John Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art, ‘Enclave Theory’ and 38 Ibid., p.12. the Communist Imaginary’, Third Text 23:4, 2009, pp.353- 55 Stewart Martin, ‘Artistic Communism – a sketch’, Third 367. 39 Diedrich Diedrichsen, ‘Audio Poverty’ at http://e-flux. Text, 23: 4, p.484-485. com/journal/view/143 23 ‘Real subsumption’ denotes the organisation of the work process, (Marx) and, tendentially, of social relations ‘There is nothing that bourgeois culture values outside the workplace (Negri, Hardt) as an indicator of more highly than the break with its own economic capital’s control of production. ‘Formal subsumption’ principles, provided that it is capable of valuing this refers to capital seizing hold of the results of work break economically. This has nonetheless led to great but not yet of the way work is organised. The two freedoms; in particular, it has given rise to the ethic of stages have been used in an historical register, but it a freedom as devoid as possible of anything that can is more accurate to speak of them as competing and be valued economically. While this ethic has always coexisting tendencies. Here, Martin’s discussion of real been ideologically contaminated, it was still extremely subsumption is referring to sense in which capital does productive – as the avant-gardes of the twentieth not just reify affect and sociality, and produces art century witnessed.’