Layers of labor in cultural production

notes on aesthetics and commitment from the transparent factory

Octavi Comeron

pp. 167-181

in: Begüm Özden Fırat, Sarah De Mul, Sonja van Wichelen (eds), Commitment and complicity in cultural theory and practice, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

Transformations of forms of labor and the blurring of boundaries between work and life are challenging many of our social parameters. Cultural institutions question their economic structures, and corporations turn themselves into cultural products. Subjectivity is becoming the landmark resource of capitalism, and immaterial labor increasingly overlaid upon material production. Conservative movements within the art market run parallel to institutional claims for the dissolution of the museum's walls. In this multilayered, shifting context, commitment and complicity in artistic and cultural activities often twist into an ambiguous spiral fueled by the productive system, as the erasing of borders and boundaries that was once the committed reply of the avant-gardes to the rigid compartmentalizations of the industrial age now assumes the very same trajectory taken by the expanding post-Fordist factory. This chapter seeks to perform a critical reading of this new scenario by suggesting a political approach to the role of aesthetics at a time when most of the traditional borders have seemed to blur.