Practice comes before Labour: An attempt to read performance through Marx's notion of practice

Abstract

What is the relationship between the critical categories 'performance' and 'labour'? Both terms are historically produced concepts, existing within certain philosophical, cultural and theoretical discourses. Within the context of art 'performance' is a broad category, which has come to mean anything from staged dance pieces, sculptural installations and mass demonstrations. Labour, also a compound term has broad connotations and can simply mean both paid an unpaid physical work. But as is well known, labour also appears in various forms and meanings in Karl Marx writings where it takes centre stage. My aim, on a broad scale, is to interrogate the historical formation and manifestation of the category of performance and its immanent relationship to forms of labour as they appear in the history of Western thinking and in particular in a Marxist discourse. More specifically – within this essay – is my intention to analyse performance as a generic category within the field of art as it established itself in the post-war period and its immanent affinity with a specific category of labour which appears in Marx's early writings. I will do this, firstly by examining the historical construction of performance as it took shape from the 1950s and onwards in the field of art. I will demonstrate that this category of 'performance' is generic, is constructed relationally to other categories and concepts within art. I will then investigate, not the concept 'labour' but the much broader term 'practice', which appears in Marx's early text “Theses on Feuerbach” from 1845. 'Practice' lays the ground for both 'labour' and 'production', which are developed in Marx's more mature writings such as Das Kapital. My point is that any philosophical and conceptual inquiry into 'labour' must begin with 'practice' in order to understand the former's depth.