Living Labor: Marxism and Performance Studies Joshua Lubin-Levy* and Aliza Shvarts

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2016 Vol. 26, Nos. 2–3, 115–121, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2016.1269504 Living Labor: Marxism and Performance Studies Joshua Lubin-Levy* and Aliza Shvarts New York University, New York, N.Y., USA Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. – Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 11 To live and to labor are the twinned imperatives to which we are always already given. Together, they animate a rhythm of material production and reproduction that extends over time. This special issue of Women & Performance examines how thinking about life and labor between Marxism and Performance Studies can help us attend to the world at hand. Living Labor began as a conference hosted by the department of Performance Studies at New York University, which took place 11–13 April 2014. It featured over 70 presentations, film screenings, artist presentations, and keynote addresses by Fred Moten and Sianne Ngai. The provocation of this conference was to ask what formal criteria could be articulated between aesthetic analysis and political economy. That is, how does performance analysis bring together the living body and the working body? How do Marxist and Marxist-inspired philosophies articulate and reimagine labor, value, and revo- lutionary struggle, particularly in relation to the social, aesthetic, and political dimensions of performance and performativity? How are theories of difference – which cut across the divisions of race, gender, sexuality, and disability – differently animated by the many histories of anti-capitalist critique? The collected essays, short texts, and artworks that com- prise this special issue include versions of the papers presented at the conference as well as new contributions from cultural producers and theorists. They explore not only what Marxism and Performance Studies have in common, but also how these overlapping bodies of literature might act as provocations for one another, intellectual and otherwise. In our contemporary moment of post-Fordist capitalism, and particularly within the spheres of cultural production, life and labor have become increasingly indistinguishable. The capitalist mode of production goes beyond the organization of social life reaching into the very structure and regulation of the subject itself. While these conditions could be understood as an indication of the inescapability of capitalist social relations, they *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] © 2017 Women & Performance Project Inc. 116 J. Lubin-Levy and A. Shvarts also provide an imperative for renewed critical attention: they demand that we sharpen the tools with which we theorize the division between life and labor as well as the new configur- ations of their enmeshment. Such theorization will perhaps offer ways of being in the world that disrupt the production and circulation of value as well as the reproduction of ideolo- gized subjectivities. We return to Marx’s texts in order to unlock a sense of selfhood that is inextricably tied to the field of the social. It is our contention that anti-normative and anti-capitalist struggles must engage and contest the specific ideologies of subjectivity that are deeply embroiled in structures of patriarchy, heterosexuality, and white supremacy. To this end, our work is galvanized by scholarship that brings together critiques of capitalism with questions of subjecthood and difference – in particular, Cedric Robinson and Fred Moten’s formulations of the black radical tradition;2 Silvia Federici and Angela Mitropou- lous’s theorizations of reproductive labor;3 Angela Davis’s writing and activism around prison abolition and Premilla Nadasen’s on the history of welfare rights4; as well as José Esteban Muñoz’s and Sianne Ngai’s mobilizations of the aesthetic as a critical and poten- tially utopian site.5 We insist on the possibility of life in opposition to labor – that is, forms of life that resist the structuring axioms, ideologies, and infrastructures of capitalism. The collective project of Living Labor is to read between the lines of Marx’s own thinking, to illuminate the many ways difference is organized under the rule of capitalism towards exploitations and oppression, and, perhaps most significantly, to explore ways we might think difference differently. We write this introduction in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election – a moment that has crystallized a certain feeling among the Left of a world embroiled in crisis. Already, we have seen the hate speech that characterized the president-elect’s campaign reproduced in acts of vandalism, intimidation, and physical violence, some of which have taken place on the university campuses where we work. Each day, overtly fascistic discourse becomes more normalized – a xenophobic, racist, misogynist, homophobic, and ableist rebuke to the ethic of non-violence with which we write and teach. For some the proximity to hatred is new, while for others it is a national amplification of the violence that is already part of daily existence. We have only just begun to think about where we go from here: how to parse the 2016 election through the much longer histories of repression and exploitation tar- geting minoritarian subjects; how to compare the ascent of a fascistic regime in the United States to larger shifts in neoliberal global politics that have reshaped life on an ideological, cultural, and subjective level. We work with the knowledge that visible enactments of violence are haunted by instances of violence made invisible, ignored conditions of inequality, dispossession, and abuse – many of which compose the foundation on which nations like the United States have been built. For us, the editors of this special issue, Marxism is not simply a science of working-class revolution, nor is Performance Studies merely the wholesale embrace of performativity and postmodern critique. Rather these two fields offer a shared imperative of reimagining the ways in which we both theorize and practice the social. It is in this light that we hope this volume will be a resource as we collectively struggle to process, organize, and respond to the world in which we find ourselves. As modes of inquiry, Performance Studies and Marxism both offer ways of thinking through the imbrication of life and labor. Performance Studies is an interdisciplinary discourse in which questions of life and labor are central, surfacing in notions of action, endur- ance, repetition. It offers a hermeneutic challenge to semiotic formulations of meaning and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 117 value by asking not what things mean, but what they do. Similarly, Marxist theory attends to the capture and distribution of life: to the maintenance and reproduction of labor power, as well as to the processes of commodification and consumption that produce value for capital. In its many iterations, Marxist theory provides a methodology of thinking about materiality, temporality, and movement that revivifies an enduring question in Performance Studies: What can a body do? This question not only makes explicit the convergence between Marxist and performance theory, but also makes central critical traditions of black, feminist, and queer theory in which relationships between life, labor, and capitalism have never been incidental. The material experience and historical condition of race, gender, and sexuality is, in this sense, the premise that animates our Marxist considerations of what it means to live, labor, and perform. On the one hand, applying a Performance Studies methodology to Marxism adds an aesthetic dimension to abstract questions of labor, foregrounding the enfleshed and emoting body as a locus of action. On the other hand, embracing Marxist and materialist critique in Performance Studies reinvigorates questions of live-ness, the event, and performative force in relation to larger frameworks of ideology and power. Such conjunctions operate in opposition to the conventional divide between (economic) base and (cultural) superstructure. They illuminate a new set of questions: To what degree are our social formations determined by prevailing economic conditions? How much can culture broadly play a role in the reorganization of economic structures that not only uphold but also reproduce the unequal distribution of wealth and the systematic exploitation and oppression of the many by the wealthiest few? “Living Labor” is a term drawn directly from the work of Karl Marx. In the first volume of Capital, Marx describes living labor as “labour-power in action.” An enigmatic concept, living labor marks a distinction between labor – the activity of work which is legible as productive, often producing goods, services, and commodities that uphold the global circulation of capital – and labor-power: the capacity to work, which is present even when not yet actualized, and can be sold by the worker for a wage. Specifically, living labor revivifies the products of expended labor through the enactment of their use value. As Marx writes: A machine which does not serve the purposes of labour, is useless. In addition, it falls prey to the destructive influence of natural forces. Iron rusts and wood rots. Yarn with which we neither weave nor knit, is cotton wasted. Living labour must seize upon these things and rouse them from their death-sleep, change them from mere possible use-values into real and effective ones. Bathed in the fire of labour,

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