The Eighth Biennial Radical Philosophy Association Conference, November 6-9, 2008, San Francisco

Jos Mara Durn Art without an end product Discussing Virnos A Grammar of the Multitude

Introduction I have divided this paper in two quite different sections which are after all interconnected. In the first part I will discuss Virnos main standpoint in A Grammar of the Multitude (2004), which briefly says that in post-Fordism productive labour takes on the appearance of servile labour and resembles virtuosic activities like the speech of the politician, the performance of the stage actor or the concert pianist. According to Virno, one key characteristic shared by all these activities is that they do not leave us with a defined object distinguishable from the performance itself, i.e. there is not a separate end product after the activity is completed. Virno draws his argument on a concrete reading of Marxs distinction between productive and unproductive labour. In a certain moment of the Grammar Virno argues: virtuosic labor, for Marx, is a form of wage labor which is not, at the same time, productive labor (p.54). I will challenge this assumption through a close reading of those passages of Marx that Virno uses to support this concrete hypothesis. In the second part of my paper, I will use my previous examination of Virnos assumption to open up a discussion about a mode of production that is traditionally considered of being outside the realm of productive labour, namely fine art. I will examine some theoretical analysis about art and cultural practice in post-Fordism which are very much indebted to post-autonomist thought. It is not my purpose to offer here a complete solution to the problems I find in Virnos reading of Marx. On the contrary, I intend to put forward an alternative way to understanding the status of cultural producers in todays capitalism, which implies to raise questions about the commodity character of their labour and class struggle in the field of cultural production.

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The Eighth Biennial Radical Philosophy Association Conference, November 6-9, 2008, San Francisco

Virnos reading of Marxs distinction between productive and unproductive labour Virnos reading of Marxs distinction between productive and unproductive labour is found in a small section of the Grammar within the second part entitled: On virtuosity. From Aristotle to Glen Gould. There, Virno writes: Marx analyzes intellectual labor, distinguishing between its two principal types. On the one hand, there is immaterial or mental activity which [now Virno quotes Marxs Results of the Direct Production Process (1988)] results in commodities which exist separately from the producer [] books, paintings and all products of art as distinct from the artistic achievement of the practicing artist This is the first type of intellectual labour. On the other hand, Marx writes, we need to consider all those activities in which the product is not separable from the act of producing those activities, that is, which find in themselves their own fulfilment without being objectivized into an end product which might surpass them. This is the same distinction which Aristotle made between material production and political action. (p.53) Virno argues that according to Marx the first type of intellectual labour, that is the one in which the production process results in commodities which exist separately from the producer, conforms to the definition of productive labor (p.54). Referring to the second type, Virno suggests that for Marx: where an autonomous finished product is lacking, for the most part one cannot speak of productive (surplus-value) labor (ibid). The question now is, if this description corresponds with Marxs distinction between productive and unproductive labour, as Virno claims. First of all, in the concrete passage that Virno quotes, Marx was pointing to modes of production which were not fully subsumed into capital, in which the capitalist mode of production can only be applicable on a very restricted scale. These modes of production are from the perspective of the capitalist mode of production unproductive. Thus the assumption that, according to Virno, the first type of intellectual labour conforms to the definition of productive labour is misleading. But this is not the main problem. The emphasis Virno lays on an end product to qualify productive or unproductive labour is not to be found in Marx, at least not in that form. If we consider some of the examples that Marx pointed out, we see that Marxs analysis was pointing
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The Eighth Biennial Radical Philosophy Association Conference, November 6-9, 2008, San Francisco

to the commodity character of living labour, to the concrete relations between labour and capital, in which the particular content of the labour, its specific utility or the peculiar use value in which it is represented (Marx 1982: 2173), writes Marx, has nothing to do with the specific determination of productive labour. The fact that some human activities are not directly involved in the production of a material thing does not support the assumption that they are unproductive from a capitalist point of view. Moreover, Marx insists that the idea of defining productive and unproductive labour in terms of its material content is commonly due to a fetishist conviction peculiar to the capitalist mode of production, e.g. to think that the formal economic determinations like the being of the commodity or the being of productive labour are qualities belonging to the material repositories of these categories (1988: 114-115). Since Virnos argument relies very much on the Aristotelian opposition between production and action, he neglects the concrete relations between living labour and capital. Virno starts from the assumption that in post-Fordism those who produce surplusvalue behave like the pianist, the dancers, etc. (2004: 55), i.e. like non-productive workers which are not directly involved in the production of an independent product or commodity. The labour of these workers is not exactly constrained to the rule of value as it is found in the traditional Fordist factory, i.e. the centrality of the working day and its labour time for the production of commodities. As it is well-known this latter paradigm has undergone a crucial shift in post-Fordism. While today we experience an overflow of labour, the labour of individuals paradoxically presents itself as miserable residue, writes Virno (p.104). Equally, the labour time inside the factory becomes negligible (p.101). Virno argues that if the material production of objects is delegated to an automated system of machines, and the activity of productive labour seems to be reduced to a sort of maintenance, the services rendered by living labour resemble linguistic-virtuosic services (p.58), i.e. for Virno todays living labour takes on the qualities that Marx thought of being characteristic of unproductive labour. This has a crucial consequence, since the difference between productive and unproductive labour, or between production and political action, simply decays, writes Virno, when productive labor, in its totality, appropriates the special characteristics of the performing artist (p.54). Although Marx himself would have foreshadowed this situation, only today it has become the empirical reality of the post-Fordist structure (p.100-101). We can see how Virno reduces Marx distinction between productive and unproductive labour from an analytical category to a historical process that today or in
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The Eighth Biennial Radical Philosophy Association Conference, November 6-9, 2008, San Francisco

the post-Fordist stage of capitalism turns to be blurred. Virno even comes to assert that in the new situation we find no real help in the polar oppositions [productive versus unproductive labour] of Marx (1996: 192). This rather narrow formula leads to a misconception of the notion of labour as it is found in Marx. One could still ask if, though Virnos premise on non-productive labour is questionable, his conclusion provides useful insights into current capitalism. Next I am going to give an alternative view to Virnos assumptions by tackling a mode of production that is commonly thought to be outside the realm of productive labour, namely fine art.

On artistic labour and the law of value For some cultural theorists the increasing precarization and deterritorialization of labour in current capitalism, which places labour at the margins of which it has been assumed as the hegemonic place of the production process, i.e. the Fordist factory, seems to concede an apparently autonomous space used by some cultural workers mainly to develop a culture of public practice and communicative action. Antonio Negri refers to spaces of self-valorization that capital cannot entirely reabsorb (2008: 43, emphasis in the original). Negri speaks of the labour of imagination and freedom as an excess that characterizes the immeasurability of cognitive work. If cognitive work, immaterial labour are no longer measurable in terms of the classical labour theory of value that, according to Negri, measures work according to the time employed in production, then the capacity of capital to contain the productive force of labor (immaterial, cognitive, affective, linguistic, etc.) in itself also wears out (p.20-22). Following Negri, if the exploitation of capital has penetrated all areas of social life, like in the precarious condition, at the same time this situation opens up more points of resistance that are not circumscribed to the traditional factory and the consequential creation of value. In this society of networks, cooperative work and creative subjectivities that contest the homogenization pursued by capital, cultural workers have an important role to play in producing the public regime of resistance. Cultural theorist Brian Holmes refers to this context through his notion of the flexible personality. If the flexible personality alludes, on the one hand, to working conditions in precarization, on the other hand it also stands for spontaneity, creativity, cooperation,
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The Eighth Biennial Radical Philosophy Association Conference, November 6-9, 2008, San Francisco

mobility, experimentation, etc (2006a: 99). This argument is significant. Its importance relies on that it lets us open up a discussion about how is really constituted this precarious space of cultural producers in relation to the processes of capital social domination and valorisation. That is, it lets us question the productive or unproductive/non-productive status of artistic labour today. Holmes thinks of the data produced by the project Makrolab, initiated in 1994 by the Slovene artist Marko Peljhan, as gifts offered to other sites, other devices, other receivers, other possible futures (2006b: 142). Contrary to the typical art work that can generate an aesthetic content which is an intrinsic part of its musealization, Holmes examines Makrolab within the notions of drift, flux, the nomadic machine (Makrolab is a real modular lab, very futuristic) and deterritorialization. The products of Makrolab also escape the traditional flow of commodity circulation since its content, as the Makrolab team says in its web page, is public and the results are published in electronic form and are freely available on the internet and other matrix resources.1 Realizing Negris standpoint (2005: 80) Makrolab does not produce commodities but social cooperation, something that could be also stressed, quoting Virno, as the centrality of linguistic communication for the contemporary process of production (2008: 45). Interesting is that Holmes also points to a specific working environment in which the team of Makrolab has shown a good deal of pragmatism to obtain financial support for the project. Holmes calls it being real: Being real means obtaining funding, logistical support and cultural prestige for an expensive sci-art project that originates from a small Eastern country and operates subversively on the fringes of the globalized exhibition system, drawing on the autonomous energies of the hacker ethic and the tactical media crowd to conduct civilian counter-reconnaissance with hightech equipment (2006b: 139). As financial partners of Makrolab in several of its different projects it can be mentioned the Slovene mobile phone company Mobitel UMTS, the ministry of culture of the Slovenian Republic or the British foundation Arts Catalyst among others. Through this institutional support we have a hint of the valorisation process that takes place, and valorisation that Holmes analysis simply ignores. Thus considering Makrolab as an artistic practice or virtuosic labour in Virnos sense where non commodity has been produced, I would suggest that

See online at http://makrolab.ljudmila.org.

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The Eighth Biennial Radical Philosophy Association Conference, November 6-9, 2008, San Francisco

Makrolab was able to pursue its aim due to its use of unproductive labour. This already points to a specific mode of production as established in relation to the capitalist mode of production. In this specific mode of production capitals are consumed but not valorised. This concrete trait of artistic labour, and beyond the political implications of the use value produced by the artist, does not presuppose an independent sphere of direct action, as Holmes seems to believe. On the contrary, this is a distinct sphere of production, remaining however unproductive from the perspective of capitalist direct valorisation. It embraces both the ideological framework of private and public support to the arts and the reproduction of the relations of production within the art world, these being considered not only as the reproduction of a specific form of social relations regarding the selling of the commodity artwork but also, paraphrasing Althusser, as the reproduction of the submission of artists to these conditions of labour. Nevertheless, I do not intend to impute to Holmes or other theorists inspired by post-autonomist thought the wrong analysis. By dealing with artistic labour as concrete labour, i.e. labour with a definite aim their analysis on the whole is right, even illuminating, for example by taking account of all those artistic practices that apparently counteract the dominant bourgeois ideology of artistic value, like those in which no object is produced or where the artistic practice is a form of creative engagement focused on the process of organization itself (Sholette 2007a: 436-437). The crucial difference with my point of view is that I think we should also emphasize the importance of the social relations between living labour and capital within the production contexts.2 And this is also the missing point in Virnos analysis of virtuosity. In this respect, critical art theory has not been able to examine seriously if artists experience a specific form of selling their labour power as a commodity offered in the marketplace of public and/or private financed exhibitions, museums, galleries and State subsidies. There is a way, developed by Marx in the Grundrissen, to understand this particular situation of art as unproductive labour. We can grasp the social relations between the mode of production of art and the capitalist mode of production in terms of the formal subsumption of labour under capital, i.e. the capitalist use of other modes of production to reinforce the accumulation of capital. For example, encouraging culture
2

Sholette has a point in focusing his analysis on creative practices already present in the shadows of the culture industry (2007a: 433). More questionable is if the examples Sholette provides work in reality in the shadows of the culture industry. Sholette is aware that it would be disingenuous of me to suggest that the art collectives and dark activities provide a totally satisfactory solution to the radicalization of creativity now or in the future (p.458). In any case, Sholettes standpoint does not undermine the necessity of an analysis of the art world in relation to capital social domination. See also Arte y revolucin in the age of enterprise culture, 2007b.

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The Eighth Biennial Radical Philosophy Association Conference, November 6-9, 2008, San Francisco

and arts has become a major feature of the entrepreneurial city, where different global metropolises are competing for attracting capitals. And the same could be said about many capitalists who through their investments in pompous art collections are looking forward to amending symbolically their brutal accumulation. Thus regarding artists contexts of production, if the analysis is focused on the relationship between capitalist domination and artistic practice, I suggest that we should find a way of considering artistic labour as labour that creates and forms the value of commodities (somehow similar to Marxs definition of abstract labour [see Marx 1986: 61] although recognizing its particularity), this determination being able to assume different forms in todays capitalism, those of productive and unproductive labour. I do not need to stress that this is the perspective that the neoclassical economic analysis of the arts rejects, precisely because it violates the equilibrium formula between supply and demand. Which is the relevance of such an approach? As I said, it implies to raise questions about the commodity character of artistic labour and class struggle in the field of cultural production, thereby recognizing within this perspective the truly capitalist nature of some obvious things like gallery business, public and private financed exhibitions and museums in which different forms of valorisation, ideologically and economically considered, take place.

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The Eighth Biennial Radical Philosophy Association Conference, November 6-9, 2008, San Francisco

Bibliography Holmes, Brian (2006a) La personalidad flexible. Por una nueva crtica cultural, Brumaria. Arte, mquinas, trabajo inmaterial, 7: 97-117. Holmes, Brian (2006b) Utopa codificada: Makrolab o el arte de la transicin, Brumaria. Arte, mquinas, trabajo inmaterial, 7: 131-142 Coded Utopia: Makrolab, or the art of transition, in Continental Drift, online at http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/. Marx, Karl (1986) Das Kapital, erster Band, MEW 23, Berlin: Dietz. Marx, Karl (1988) Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses, MEGA II/4.1, Berlin: Dietz. Marx, Karl (1982) Productivitt des Capitals, Productive und unproductive Arbeit, MEGA II/3.6, Berlin: Dietz. Negri, Antonio (2008) The Porcelain Workshop. For a New Grammar of Politics, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Sholette, Gregory (2007a) Dark Matter, Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere, in Matthew Beaumont, Andrew Hemingway, Esther Leslie & John Roberts (eds.) As Radical as Reality Itself. Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century, Bern: Peter Lang: 431-459 online at http://gregorysholette.com/. Sholette, Gregory (2007b) Arte y revolucin in the age of enterprise culture, online at http://gregorysholette.com/. Virno, Paolo (2008) Three Remarks Regarding the Multitudes Subjectivity and Its Aesthetic Component, in Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw (eds.) Under Pressure. Pictures, Subjects, and the New Spirit of Capitalism, Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press: 31-45. Virno, Paolo (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Virno, Paolo (1996) Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus, in P. Virno and Michael Hardt (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy. A Potential Politics, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press: 188-209.

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