From: "Simon Emsley" <S.Emsley-AT-unsw.EDU.AU>
Subject: Aesthetic labour and concrete labour
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 14:16:54 +1000


I have been finding the discussion following Mikhail's question on
aesthetic labour most interesting. From my point of view it goes to the
heart of what is most fascinating about Bourdieu's project. As a on-time
art worker in both high and low brow fields of symbolic production I have
had a very immediate interest in this question for many years. 

I have understood Mikhail's question as reducible to the suggestion that
value of the product of aesthetic labour corresponds pretty well to the
amount of labour (which I assume is to mean labour time) embodied
concretely in it.  Respondents following have expanded this proposal, so
that it may be applied to a larger unit of social production, one that
encompasses also a labour of consumption that enables the `understanding'
of a cultural product (Carsten Sestoft). Bourdieu's `maybe' suggests this
may also be his position.

Firstly, the idea that the concrete value contained within different
sectors of production may be differentiated due to the level of affluence
needed to consume the use values arising from the sector's operation
worries me. This argument might be used to justify why rich folks hire
domestic help, or why Saudi oil sheiks enslave Phillipino sex workers in
their London apartments. It doesn't seem to offer a useful (liberating)
approach to value.

More generally, the problem clarified in this discussion turns on the place
of the economic field in Bourdieu's conceptual framework. What priority
should it have? How much should we let it explain? To get out of the mud
which is inevitably churned up in preliminary discussions on what
constitutes value it is useful to return to the notion of field. A field is
generated by a system of social exchanges of forms of capital. The extent
to which a given field may regulate social capitals is dependent on its
capacity to express the idea of equivalence which facilitates exchange. The
economic field, for all its contradictions, is supreme in this regard. This
is why Bourdieu has recognised the economic field as of paramount
determining importance.

Marx's idea of the capitalist mode of production analysed the dominant
system arising through the emergence of commodity production and wage
labour. His idea of capitalism was of a process of becoming, a system which
incorporated the remnants of previous economic modes which had less robust
mechanisms establishing equivalence relations. The `field' of aesthetic
labour is one of a number of areas of production in which the erratic or
non-circulation (for those in the garret) of product inhibits the
establishment of equivalence relations.  Symbolic production (in which
category might be included many professions other than that of aesthetic
labour) does not generally produce commodities of a mass produced nature
and is consequently an area of unevenness in capitalist value relations.

In the case of the high brow sector, the notion of talent is the central
cultural product of the sector.  This product relies heavily on the
artistic habitus of high art and its industrial implications. The cultural
arbitrary from the garret is a very specific symbol of the industrial power
of capital over labour in that backward sector. Canvases of the chosen few
hang like hunting trophies on the walls of industrial capitalists, pilfered
during their brief ventures back into pre-capitalist modes, the jungles of
free thought and unrestricted gesture. High art indulges the management's
industrial fantasy therefore, plucking the worker from destitution.
Fortunately the organised working class takes delight in heretically
spoiling the muse: "in your dreams" the pickets pronounce at the factory
gates. 


Simon Emsley
 
 
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