Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture

4 The Solitude of Labor: On the Relationship between Creative Labor and Artistic Production

4 The Solitude of Labor On the Relationship between Creative Labor and Artistic Production Art’s declaration of independence is... the beginning of the end of art. —Guy Debord Every nature must produce its next, for each thing must unfold, seedlike, from indivisible principle into a visible effect. —Plotinus THE ESTHETIC DIMENSION OF LABOR When the concept of labor is considered ontologically, it takes, within social ontology, the place that the concept of being has in pure ontology. This means that labor is still being, but it is not being as such, “pure” being; rather, it is practical, “impure” being: it is what enters into the constitution of the whole spectrum of social life. As such, labor is not a category of political economy, yet that does not mean that it has no economic function at all. The economy itself, economic life, is now understood in a completely different way; to be sure, it remains an essential part of social life, but it does not stand in a relationship of opposition (of determination as opposition) to culture. Nor is culture the superstructural product, the epiphenomenal appearance, of the economy. Labor occupies an intermediate position between economy and culture , it functions as the middle term of a syllogism, which means that a synthesis now obtains such that the categories of economy and culture appear as merely analytical names for what is in fact a totality: the totality of social being. In this totality, all events have equal value and necessity. These events can go from the production of useful objects to artistic production, from exchange to language, from language in its everyday use to poetry, from the system of laws to the knowledge and management of one’s habitat as well as of the universe as a whole. Labor performs the function of the universal concept present in the constitution of all these events—of the most common concept . These are events or expressions of nature, yet they go beyond nature. Labor, which is in itself a natural and objective force, reshapes nature, and it is the modality or direction of this reshaping that becomes problematic. Labor is being as sensuous human activity. The concept of being of traditional metaphysics can only be understood, within a project of social ontology , in terms of the concept of the sensuous, and this, in turn, is nothing but labor itself. It is not, of course, labor as a curse, nor labor as wage labor, but, rather, labor as the transforming and self-transforming activity of human beings; it addresses both questions of scarcity and the question of desire. The discourse of metaphysics and ontology now enters a poietic and practical dimension. The emphasis on the concept of the sensuous brings us into the domain of esthetics. For political economy, the regulation of the totality of life can only happen through a fragmentation of that same totality. In that sense, esthetics would be a separate domain, one that is reached on a second thought and, as it were, after having satisfied more fundamental and pressing questions. However, from the point of view of poetic ontology, the esthetic dimension of labor is labor’s fundamental and univocal disposition. The sensuous, as labor, invests all expressions of life: it is not limited to the sphere of “mere” production, nor is artistic production a superstructural moment of limited and special interest. The esthetic disposition becomes a metaphysical disposition. Here one should consider Nietzsche’s thought. Nietzsche is in fact the thinker who said this in the clearest and most forcible manner. For Nietzsche, the destruction of traditional metaphysics is followed by a regime of sensuous and artistic activity. Yet, this artistic activity must be metaphysical in character . In The Will to Power, Nietzsche says, “An anti-metaphysical view of the world—yes, but an artistic one” (1968: #1048). Here, art replaces metaphysics. Yet, to say that art replaces metaphysics means to give art a much wider meaning than it usually has. If art replaces metaphysics, then art is no longer an ephemeral expression of human activity, it is not a special modality of life reserved to special circumstances and people. Rather, it becomes a common concept, a subversive and radically new regime, and its movement is equal to that of the emancipation of the senses described by Marx (see Chapter 1). It is a metaphysics of immanence, metaphysics of this world, the world we are. In the world we are, art becomes metaphysics—a poetic metaphysics, to be...