Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen Institute for Applied Theatre Studies

Choreographing Immaterial Labour

MA-CuP-01
MA-CuP-07
BA-ATW-03
BA-ATW-05
BA-ATW-11
MA-ATW-02

“The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.“
- Karl Marx, Fragment on Machines

What does it imply for our continuous investigations of the relation between choreography (?) and the activities/actions of bodies (!) to assume their “real subsumption“ under... What? General intellect? Capital? Are there choreographies without ends and means? Is there a constituent potential in choreography after... When? In what else can virtuosity end up in, instead of the more or less fluent performances of already existing forms? How many?
What impact has money on life as a lively process? What do we exchange? What are we using? Under what circumstances? Are Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, when they render the various interferences between Empire and Multitude into a dialectical opposition, in danger to end up in some sort of wishful thinking for the 21st century? How can we nevertheless wish for and real(ly) desire the Common(s)?
In the course of this seminar there won't be any answers being proposed to these and a lot of more questions. Of course, we will read and discuss not only texts such as the ones by Karl Marx from his “Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie“ or very diverse manifestos which were written in the wake of several aftershocks of the Italien Autonomia movement from the 1970ies (e.g. Paolo Virno, Christian Marazzi, Félix Guattari). We will also have a closer look on more recent developments in the production of discourse and the practice of producing in the fields of Visual Arts, Performance, and Choreography. Although the exodus of (unfortunately?) only a very few workers out of their factories some decades ago has not so much to do with what we nowadays call “precarity“ in the cultural sector, there are some resonances to be discovered between these times, spaces, and (always) specific situations. So: What to do with our choreographies of immaterial labour - if labour is still all-too material?

Introductory Guides (Selection)

Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood (Eds.), e-flux journal: Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, Sternberg Press, 2011.

Karl Marx, Fragment on Machines, Grundrisse einer Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, www.thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf.

Gal Kirn (Ed.), Post-Fordism and its Discontents, Lulu Press, 2010.
http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/post-fordism-and-its-discontents/17517822.

Exhausting Immaterial Labour, Joint issue of “Le Journal des Laboratoires“ and “TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory“ (no. 17), October 2010.
http://www.howtodothingsbytheory.info/?s=exhausting+immaterial.