Immaterial Production

The premise of this half-day symposium was to explore changing conditions of artistic production, asking how artists 'both embody and contest the precarious working conditions of immaterial labour' and whether art, within this state of affairs, has the capacity to serve as 'immanent critique of capitalism'. Immaterial labour is a concept that has gained currency in the art world since at least the 2008 conference at Tate 'Art and Immaterial Labour', which included appearances from Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato and Franco Beradi (Bifo), thinkers who have been essential to the reformulation of a postMarxist analysis of labour around the concept of immateriality. Lazzarato's 'Immaterial Labour' essay of 1996 posited that the work in sectors such as graphic design, the cultural industries and the service industry has largely replaced industrial production as the engine of western economies and thus new forms of resistance around this need to be articulated.

Critiques of immaterial labour have revolved around its lack of attention to connecting the deindustrialised West with the shift of the proletariat to the industrialised global south. In addition, doubt also revolves around what exactly the concept contributes beyond a simple intensification of Marx's notion of real subsumption, as an authence member at the symposium highlighted. The continued failure to fully acknowledge or address the feminist scholarship which provides an underpinning for the concept forms another blind spot. No mention was made hae of the crucial work - by Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici among others - which examines reproductive labour. Clearly housewives, care workers and sex workers, for example, form a larger constituency of 'immaterial labourers' than artists and cultural producers. The gender politics of this should...