The Performance of Production and Consumption

Abstract

The core of this essay offers a reading of several of Marx's central arguments, showing the continuity of production with signification and performativity. I bring the insights of poststructuralism with regard to the performativity, constructedness, and discursivity of identity together with a modified but nonetheless substantially Marxist view that social organization is implicit in the organization of production, broadly construed. The argument moves in two directions, showing the performativity of production and the productivity of performance. On the one hand, I expand the definition of production to include a range of activities not normally considered production; on the other hand, I am concerned with the central role of corporate production and of products that flow through the marketplace in producing identity and community. At the conclusion of the essay, I shift focus from Marx's texts to a set of texts that argue an opposing view, that try to distinguish performativity from production. These antiproductivist theories see production as only reproductive, not dialectical or dynamic, and locate freedom and liberation (from production) in an exterior space, a representational excess frequently named performance. Through a critique of these texts I mean to point to what I hope will be a more useful emancipatory strategy, a strategy of participation. My goal in expanding the definition of production, while attending to the broad effectivity of production more narrowly construed, is to address the relationship between exploitation and domination, between the economic (narrowly conceived) and the social (which in a broader conception of the economic, such as that proposed by Marx, must be read as a productive force in itself). In expanding the definition of production I mean to displace the opposition between the economic and the social, production and signification, exploitation and domination in order to emphasize that the relation between these processes is one of complicity rather than analogy.' Specifically, I want to articulate a relationship between processes of capital accumulation and the various new social movements, often euphemistically referred to as communities, that have been understood to be responses to domination on the basis of race,