17.4: Subjectivity and Revolutionary Creative Labor
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- Marwan M. Kraidy
- University of California Press
This chapter has been grappling with the extent to which different contextual environments and constraints generate different types of creative labor with different levels of precarity. From the preceding critical comparison of what I called industrial and revolutionary creative labor, we can conclude that the extreme strictures of revolutionary contexts lead to a specific relation between the individual and the social. In The Creativity of Action , Joas singles out three metaphors, which emerged between 1750 and 1850, that are central to creative action: expression, from the work of Johann Gottfried Herder; and production and revolution, both elaborated by Karl Marx. Each of these metaphors, Joas argues, “represents an attempt to anchor human creativity in at least one of the three ways of relating to the world. The idea of expression circumscribes creativity primarily in relation to the subjective world of the actor.” In contrast, “the idea of production relates creativity to the objective world, the world of material objects that are the conditions and means of actions.” “And finally,” Joas concludes, “the idea of revolution assumes that there is a potential of human creativity relative to the social world, namely that we can fundamentally reorganize the social institutions that govern human coexistence.” 36
Revolutionary creative labor, I conclude, entails the convergence of expression, production, and revolution. Revolutionary contexts are characterized by total upheaval—social and political but also economic and cultural—in which everything is up for grabs. These contexts of tremendous flux and peril require a total expenditure of resources, calling on people to mobilize to enact subjective and objective changes to the world they live in.
The definitional field delineated by expression, production, and revolution encompasses familiar axes of tension: the individual versus the social, the ideational against the material, the reformist in contrast to the radical. Such a field is a particularly apt space to grapple with the revolutionary creative labor emerging in the Arab uprisings. If, as Joas and Mayer argue, creativity entails coordinating a variety of means, responding to incentives, and working within constraints, and if, as I have already argued, revolutionaries respond to specific motivations and work within strictures distinct from the constraints of the factory floor (or, for that matter, the production studio), then revolutionary creative labor is indeed a distinct kind of creative labor. 37
Revolutionary creative labor contributes to the creation of a subjectivity that is radically different from that of industrial labor. Jasper noted that artists can “generate and regenerate the very subjectivity they pretend only to display.” 38 This echoes Lazzarato’s argument about immaterial labor, which “presupposes and results in an enlargement of productive cooperation that even includes the production and reproduction of communication and hence its most important content: subjectivity.” 39 Whereas Lazzarato argues that immaterial labor changes the relationship between producer and consumer , it is productive to think of revolutionary creative labor as changing the relationship between ruler and ruled . One important aspect of Lazzarato’s thesis is that the shift from manual to immaterial labor transforms the three elements of what he calls the aesthetic model of labor—author, reproduction, and reception—by emphasizing their social rather than individual aspects. Creativity, Lazzarato concludes by way of brief mentions of Simmel’s work on intellectual labor and Bakhtin’s focus on social creativity, is social rather than individual, a point also made by Joas and Mayer.
Ordinary people from among the hitherto ruled, having become revolutionary activists, enact revolutionary creative labor to get rid of the ruler. Revolutionary creative labor, then, occasions a shift in subjectivity from the atomized docility of subjects under dictatorship to the collective rebellion of politicized agents in revolution. In Foucauldian terms, we can describe revolutionary creative labor as a technology of revolutionary selfhood . It mobilizes expressive and affective resources alongside the material resources of “noncreative” revolutionary labor— demonstrating in the street, staffing barricades, confronting security personnel, wielding sticks, shooting guns, tending to the wounded—to effect fundamental and political change.
The body is crucial to the project of revolutionary selfhood. As I have argued elsewhere 40 (though without grappling with the conceptual minutiae of creativity and labor), the body—as instrument, metaphor, symbol, medium—is central to revolutionary creative labor. Mayer explains how creativity pertains to Joas’s concept of a “situation,” by which he means “the ability of the body to move and communicate in an innovative way. . . . [C]reativity must be enacted through both the body and the social system of meanings that recognizes the action as different from the norm. . . . Creative action unifies the mind and body in doing something perceived as different. . . . This means that thought must be materialized, but also that the material is cause for later reflection.” 41
But in revolutionary contexts of the twenty-first century, the body must be understood as a central and agentive node among a panoply of other media—from cardboard to digital video—that are harnessed by revolutionaries in an all-out campaign to change their lives. The body, then, must be understood as the animator of what I elsewhere called “hypermedia space,” a space of signification with multiple points of access created by interconnections among various media platforms. 42 In the case of the Arab uprisings, these include media that can be characterized as mainstream (television, newspapers), new (mobile devices, social media), and old (puppetry, graffiti), alongside the oldest of them all, the human body, which operates all other media.
Revolutionary creative labor, then, is an embodied, extremely precarious practice unfolding in a life-or-death situation, one among several kinds of labor (from physical struggle to mainstream media production) that challenge authoritarian leaders. Whereas, as Mayer argues, assembly-line work is a kind of creative labor that should to be situated within the broader context of media creativity, a different kind of creativity is at work in what I defined and explicated in this chapter as revolutionary creative labor. Indeed, a final distinction can be made between forms of creative labor that are embedded in localized contexts (the factory) which are otherwise not creative (the assembly line), what in this chapter I called industrial creative labor, and revolutionary creative labor, which consists of explicit and self-conscious forms of revolutionary creativity that are intended to be launched into broader trajectories of circulation. By enacting contextually new forms of political subjectivity and directing them at radical change, revolutionary creative labor seeks to find, congeal, and mobilize publics.