October 20, 1999

Art and Wage Labor

The most outstanding fact of the rule of capital, i.e., human labor as a commodity, is the theft of lifetime. There is now a generation of people who are multitalented and correspondingly dilettantish, probably both because of exposure to images of various and interesting things/lives, which, regardless of its intent, the commercial system allows; and because this system refuses all meaningful activity, or stultifies the immediate possibilities, thereby actually encouraging the exploration of those things/lives displayed to get us to purchase the corresponding products. In the grand storehouse of the good life the range of products is likewise spectacular; even despairing lives are displayed, as in film noir or existential novels; even schizophrenia sows an identification ambition in the heart of the spectator, as witnesses the DeleuzeGuattari cult. The practical impossibility of possessing its wares, certain to be sublated in the universal attainment of life, is meanwhile used to power consumption. There is no better word for this overall process than mockery. But many have managed, even if in isolation, to taste a bit of the real life offered onscreen, and many have found that they love to draw, paint, write, act, think, build, make beautiful noises. And this is where they run head up against the barrier. “It’s just for show. You’re not really supposed to take inspiration from the fetishes. No possession by the spirit of the icon. You’re just supposed to buy the idols and worship them as such. Not as spurs to creation.” However degraded spectacular society was at its inception, the recent solidification of the world around the mute idols the system throws up shows that it can go still further. “Do not attempt to write in order to identify with the Beatniks. Do not attempt to paint in order to identify with the Cubists. Do not attempt to make music in order to identify with the Birds and Tranes. All these traditions are dead and forever closed to you! Besides, most important, the market is glutted. We will choose who identifies, and make television shows about the whole disgusting process of star selection, as if to mock your stupid ambition, as if to say to those of you who aspire to a life ‘free’ to be creative, ‘See? See what you'll have to go through? You thought the life of creativity was to get with friends you love and together create something out of it? Ha. We, the ‘producers,’ will decide who your friends are, manage who you meet—after you make the final cut, of course—and then decide in the back office the lyrics to the songs you will be forced to sing. We’ll pay for your lessons, because your ambition is, unfortunately, not accompanied by talent. We managed to eliminate all the state- subsidized artistic resources under Reagan. So, we will take your utter powerlessness to create, and, on the strength of that, combined with your relentless desire still to be ‘creative,’ blackmail you into a training regimen no less strenuous than that of a military boot camp, which is no coincidence, being not much different these days from training for the spectacular showcase, whether in art school, a creative-writing MFA program, or a lottery-style audition along the lines of the selection process for MTV’s Real World.” And the critics chime in, with no less an unsubtle blackmail, disguised as a “progressive” condemnation of the recent past, in accordance with the long-since-wornout ideology of the ascendant bourgeoisie, but with a clever Faustian twist: “In the context of postmodernism, you should know, first of all, that nothing is true and all is permitted: All the traditions you perversely drew inspiration from, despite our masters’ clear instructions simply to admire, are open to you, on your express avowal of their absolute barrenness, on your explicit disavowal of any meaning. Oh, sure, you can be complimented for having provided a new example of an otherwise universally-acknowledged-dead artform/tradition, but you will never be credited with creativity in a nonvampiristic and honest way. For the appearance of creativity, i.e., for access to the means of artistic production and the appearance of such, you must forever renounce it. Do what you want, identify with whomever you want, but (wink, wink) know and embrace that your work is crap, and that all that you can hope for in the artworld—the very opposite of a world of art, a world arted—, being a graduate of one of our institutions of separate knowledge, i.e., blessed with the opportunity of living the life of the artist, or being creative—yes, you—all that you can expect for the sale of your soul is financial compensation. Not that compensation of the spirit for which you got involved at all in the first place, not that ambition to do good work, perhaps even great work, Gesamtkunstwerk—ha!—, not that ambition which possessed you to push through the difficulty of whatever meager solitary artistic creation you may have managed already in this ultraatomised day and age. That part of art is dead.” I am sure every professional artist with the slightest decency and intelligence understands this by now. I am unsure whether any of the successful performers of the most recent artform/spectacle, hiphop, understands.

Entire cities and realms of imagination and intellect are constructed with the express purpose of directing this creative energy/ambition into purchases. It is such an overwhelming edifice that any social component you can think of is either a wholly-owned subsidiary or is used by the capitalists for that purpose regardless of what autonomy it may retain in other respects.

The theft of labor time is the theft of time which could be used for the beneficial and salvific labors of creativity, toward which, after all, all humans are inclined. Most optimistically, it is one of the key manners in which capital digs its own grave, sows the seeds of its own destruction: I am reminded of Herbert Marcuse’s prima facie quixotic hope that biological reactions would bring about the Great Refusal of the rule of capital. Of course, this encultured frustration of creativity, this encultured creativity which has never not been frustrated, is not biological except insofar as biological humanity is the precondition of culture, which makes nature/nurture meaningless anyway. In any case, the frustration feels biological, and has biological ramifications, namely stress and other psychosomata, which raise adrenaline levels, put people generally on edge, cause addictions, and create bursts of anger and self-destruction. Not to forget revolutionary rage.

art wage.labor spectacle postmodernism