After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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in the question of production, opens up another set of possibilities.55 Marx was sure that performance “produces something,” he just couldn’t decide what this something is.56 In an attempt to provide an answer, he turns his attention in a passage in the Grundrisse to the example of a piano player. He begins, as he so often does, by playing the part of (and ventriloquizing) his archenemies (bourgeois economists), asking their question: “Is it not crazy … that the piano-maker should be a productive worker but not the piano-player, although surely the piano would be a NONSENSE without the piano-player?”57 In response, Marx distinguishes between the reproductive labor of the piano-maker and the apparently unproductive labor of the piano player: “The piano-maker reproduces capital; the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue.”58 Put otherwise, the piano-maker makes a commodity with measurable value, whereas the pianist produces no thing; the pianist merely performs. Much later in the text he contradicts himself, describing performance as a productive form of labor: “Actors are productive workers, not by virtue of the fact that they produce plays, but in so far as they INCREASE THEIR EMPLOYER’S WEALTH.”59 I turn to this internal debate because, in the final instance, Marx’s confusion over the contradictory nature of performance teaches us more than his attempts to resolve it. His confusion reveals performance to be that which confounds quantification, confuses definition, and reorganizes the very notion of value, opening up new ways of conceptualizing and organizing the world beyond the limits defined by the capitalist mode of production.
Whatever Taylor produces as he labors at the piano undoes quantification insofar as it is “not productive for capitalization.”60 Still, Marx insists that the pianist is producing something: “Doesn’t the pianist produce music and satisfy our musical ear; doesn’t he also produce the latter to a certain degree? In FACT, he does so.”61 And notice that it’s not merely that Taylor produces sense (“music,” the song), but that in so doing he produces the listener or, more accurately, a community of listeners (“our musical ear”) who now listen for the sense of freedom (“how it would feel to be free”).62 The pianist makes this new kind of subject in the form of the listener, as much as the listener oriented toward the sound of freedom’s becoming calls the song into being.
Marx understood the creation of an audience, a public, or common sense as the work of aesthetics: “An objet d’art—just like any other product—creates a public that has artistic taste and is enjoying beauty. Production therefore produces not only an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.”63 Production cultivates a subject with a taste or desire for an object (“Production therefore creates the consumer”), a process through which production makes two things: the “material to satisfy a need, but it also provides a need for the material.”64 Like the younger Marx (of 1844), who argues that the regime of private property reduces people’s senses to the singularly impoverished “sense of having,” the Marx of 1857 argued that capitalism manufactures the “sense of having” by creating a feeling of need and the desire to have: “The need felt for objects is created by the perception of the object.”65 Aesthetic production, like any other form of production, not only produces objects for consumption (“the material to satisfy a need”); but also produces the sense of needing itself (“the need for the material”), and thus a “subject for the object.”
Taylor’s song calls for and produces listeners who listen for the sound of freedom’s feeling. His melody follows a fairly simple pattern: four couplets, followed by a bridge back to the top. Repeat. But each time the group returns to the start of the circuit, Taylor’s fingers express a fugitive, improvisatory drive, dancing across the keys and constructing new patterns of sound or innovative lines of flight from within the limited coordinates set by the melody. Perhaps “standard,” these jazz improvisations still insist that wandering and exploring might be the most interesting route toward freedom—a kind of always pushing away, breaking off, going somewhere and toward something. As the song posits the wish for freedom, it gives concrete, corporeal form to this wish at the level of the sound.
Simone’s friend, Lorraine Hansberry, insisted on the documentary and transformative functions of the aesthetic in her midcentury call for young black writers to “write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be.”66 As Shana Redmond describes it, Hansberry’s “insistence that art be used also accounts for what it should be used in the service of; she argued that [the writers] must tell the story of ‘our people,’ whose stories speak to not only the present at hand but also the future that will someday exist.”67 This praxis was exemplified by the playwright’s use of the stage in the service of black freedom struggles, where performance functions as a means for both indicting present conditions and rehearsing and realizing other possible futures.
Performance reaches into a spectator through the senses, and it also produces sense in and for the community of spectators. In so doing, it may produce a collective consciousness, or common sense. As Robinson writes, “The shared past is precious, not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness, of knowing, of being.”68 Such shared consciousness, or what Kara Keeling calls “common sense,” may reify the dominant order by providing, “in the form of clichés, a way of continuing present movements.”69 But common sense may also “enable another type of mental and/or motor movement to occur, thereby enabling an alternative perception.”70 In such circumstances, common sense may provoke, and inspire alternative perceptions to surface. It aids the birth of new consciousness and the new worlds that spring forth from such consciousness. It may simply be the sense of being together, of sharing something, but it can also be the seed of revolutionary praxis.
Performance, in Louis Althusser’s assessment, has the capacity to produce “a new consciousness in the spectator,” but recognizing the zone of indeterminacy between an art object and the spectator, he insisted that this consciousness will be “incomplete, like any other consciousness, but moved by this incompletion itself, this distance achieved, this inexhaustible work of criticism in action.”71 Rather than functioning as deficit, the encounter with incompletion can drive the spectator toward action, or praxis: “The play is really the production of a new spectator, an actor who starts where the performance ends, who only starts so as to complete it, but in life.”72 To be “moved” by incompletion is to recognize, as Bloch wrote (citing Brecht), that “Something’s Missing,” and then do something about it.73
Aesthetics are imbued with a powerful capacity to envision and foster change. As conceptual artist Adrian Piper writes, “One reason for making and exhibiting a work is to induce a reaction or change in the viewer.… The work is a catalytic agent, in that it promotes a change in another entity (the viewer) without undergoing any permanent change itself. The value of the work may then be measured in terms of the strength of the change, rather than whether the change accords positively or negatively with some aesthetic standard.”74 Herbert Marcuse similarly argued that art achieves its revolutionary power not by virtue of its explicit political content or formal quality, but because of its ability to play with and transmute form, while catalyzing a transformation in the spectator’s consciousness: “The critical function of art, its contribution to the struggle for liberation, resides in the aesthetic form.… By virtue of its aesthetic form art is largely autonomous vis à vis the given social relations. In its autonomy art both protests these relations, and at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience.”75
Art’s formal alienation from the “real world” (its translation and abstraction of reality into the aesthetic dimension) opens up the possibility for subverting and sublimating the existing world—like Taylor’s improvisations, which move past the constant (the melody) from which his song is continually breaking free. His song rehearses but also realizes (in aesthetic form) the ceaseless capacity for new possibilities to emerge into the world as it trains the listener in a fundamental revolutionary truth: that which merely is (the norm, the constant, the straight line, the melody) is not the only way things have to be. But Marcuse is careful not to exaggerate art’s emancipatory capacities: “Art is also the promise of liberation … the promise is wrested from established reality. It invokes an image of the end of power, the appearances (Schein) of freedom. But only the appearance; clearly, the fulfillment of this promise is not within the domain of art.”76 Instead, like Althusser, Marcuse argues that the fulfillment of this promise ultimately falls to the