Sometimes I’m happy that there seems to be a big conversation going on about labour and art – and what the labour in artworks is like. That is important, at least in understanding artworks’ social immersion, that they are inextricably sunken into a context of perennial suffering. But I am worried too about the notion that artworks are to be addressed from the standpoint of labour, a standpoint which imposes once again on artworks an indignity in their immanent critique of social objectivity, which asks that artworks de-objectify themselves for the sake of some broader social critique; to do away with their objectivity for the sake of the labouring subject within. At worst these discussions of art and labour tend to the blandest and most idealist sociologism, they affirm the position of the subject as if it weren’t as degraded as the object – as though subjectivity as it exists today is something we could truly pin our hopes on. There is, in the background, something of an old operaismo thought that saw the structural relations of subject and object fixed or fixated with the tension between them absolutely mediated by the paths of technology and technical determination. The artworks become a terrain for asking how that technology can be weaponised: failing to understand that in such a terrain one fights an enemy – capital qua subject – that has long been illuminated by its own false historical suns. The study of technology becomes nothing but an autopsy of a dead relation, which is no longer textured with polar strain and tension. That old operaist thought has always sold utopia too cheaply in exchange for insurrection; it has always sought to conceal what was already revolutionary in bourgeois culture – the most revolutionary culture to have ever existed, in fact that archetype of a tradition intertwined with dissolution.
The conversation of art and labour is unfortunately for the most part nothing but the bland and idiotic inversion of bourgeois formalism: but just as bourgeois formalism had its truth in the rupture of form – the inability of the artwork to hold itself from the natural-historical world and to close itself off without reflecting – so too does the question of art and labour have its truth where, in the artwork, the labouring (revolutionary subject) recognises itself as already an object and already having been closed in upon itself, struggling with the history of individuation. It is hardly a surprise that the artwork then, in its formal tensions, in its separation from the world in which it is enmeshed, drops out of view in this inversion because according to theory struggling labour was already a universal subject who has no need for the artworks’ formal determination (just as the labour in the work drops out of view for formalism.) That artworks might draw its strength from degradation, that they might mutely speak as objects, as something more than the affirmation of one dialectical pole is passed over. But we ought not to forget that the affirmation of the subject was the pole that hitherto has always been victorious.