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 his- tories 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.
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