(Re)aestheticizing Labor

Dear Colleagues,

We live in a society where the nature, definition, and perception of labor are undergoing fundamental changes. The notion of immaterial labor blurs the line between productive and unproductive labor, as well as between production and consumption, showing the rising weight of the affective, aesthetic, intellectual, and cognitive work in contemporary social reproduction. Digital technologies now allow individualized mass productions (mass personalization), where transnational capital relentlessly pursues creative expression and artistic connoisseurship of the users. This results in the expropriation of so-called artistic/creative labor and the reduction of aesthetics to social engineering, as well as the abstraction and commodification of artistic creation (designing) in tune with technological thinking and consumerism. What we witness is an increasingly impoverished and abstracted notion of art and an increasingly broad and ambiguous notion of labor.

Marx has taught us that it is through labor that the sensuous subject and the sensuous world open up to each other, transforming and constituting each other. Unalienated labor produces beauty and is carried out in accordance with the laws of beauty. The aesthetic function manifests itself only through specific historical social practices. With the insidious division of labor in the modern world, however, art and practice are brutally separated. Such a separation has prevented us from grasping the temporal/historical dimension of art, which does not stem from abstract contemplation but embodied praxis. It is, therefore, necessary to reexamine the connection between art and labor, in the artistic, creative, and communal modes of work such as artisan, handicraft, and collective projects both by revisiting their original meanings and by theorizing the relationship between labor and art in new social realities. We welcome theoretically informed submissions whose topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The original connection between the concept of “labor” and the concept of “aesthetics” and/or its historical development
• Socialist and postsocialist labor aesthetics 
• New forms of labor communities and their aesthetic representations
• Labor, aesthetics, and gender/race/class/ethnicity/nationality/religion/politics in various artistic forms
• The new forms of capitalist exploitation through the lens of aesthetics
• The new forms of resistance and subjective expression that can contribute to the new conceptualization of aesthetics

Prof. Dr. Ping Zhu
Prof. Dr. Zhuoyi Wang
Guest Editors

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