|
ABOUT THE LOGICS OF A MARKET PLACE
By Peter Stamer
In May 2007, the German choreographer and director Helena Waldmann was
asked to organize a workshop during the annual Theatertreffen, a festival that
gathers selected German theatre works of the year. She asked participants
coming from all over the world to follow the critically acclaimed artist's
invitation to do – NOTHING. The participants shouldn't work on anything they
would normally do for their artistic
practice. Rather, she proposed a workshop where people were paid to look
out of the window. A "shop without work" is how this endeavour was announced by
Helena Waldmann; renewing the notion of political theatre, that's what the
director was aiming at with her workshop: "The name itself translates economy
completely into art, since a workshop is a meeting of creative people who
collaborate on something that is to be consumed later. A theatre piece for
example. One is used to that: Even art is work […] and does not reside outside
of the order of work and consumption." (Arnd Wesemann: Immer feste tanzen – Ein Feierabend! Bielefeld 2008, p. 56)
A metaphor for a try-out space
For dance workshoppers, Waldmann's proposal reads a bit odd, for
workshops – as the name says – are designed for and to work. Yet, in terms of
labour economy, her offer is revolutionary, since the participants get money
without having to sell their work, without offering their bodies in the shop of
labour. This is political insofar as her event is somehow compliant with the
claim of a movement that advocates unconditional basic income for everyone,
regardless of employment status, age, or wealth: money for nothing, a dream of
a better society. Sounds unreal? Not if one compares this with the given workshop
situation at for example ImPulsTanz. It's not that workshoppers are paid for
nothing, for sure not. But it's not even that workshop participants would be
paid for their work. Here, they even pay to have the chance to work! And still,
one would consider Waldmann's proposal more twisted than the ImPulsTanz one;
Waldmann's refusal to work caused some commotion whereas ImPulsTanz workshops
are considered to be the normal case, particularly in the arts sector.
Why is that so? One might say that the term "workshop" at least how it's
used here serves simply as metaphor for a try-out space where participants
would tinker first and see later what the result of it might be. As if there
was no real work involved since every action is bound to a playing subject, a
"homo ludens" whose interest is to enjoy his/her own creativity. But they
wouldn't create any surplus value that could be remunerated in a game, so, to
be more radical in this logic, as long as there is no money involved, a
creative action can't be called work – then, it's a hobby.
Who produces the surplus
A workshop therefore is a space where participants would exploit
themselves and even pay for it. The only one who gets paid is the workshop
leader. Unlike rehearsals where dancers work for a choreographer's product
and therefore sell their bodies and minds, in workshops, artists work for
themselves. They do so because they want to learn something from the leader.
That's why they pay for it. They buy the leader's faculty of leading them
somewhere else, e.g. to more creativity, more mobility, more technique, more
knowledge. Yet, the surplus is not produced by the teacher, but by the
disciples themselves, since they do their work of improvement. This is called
an investment since one day they could profit from what they have learned, e.g.
could become teachers earning some money with their skills in the same way.
Expectations of a pay-off, future investment.
So the workshoppers go shopping to continue their education, correct
their flaws, and work on becoming complete – on their level as individual
volunteers. But doesn't a workshop privatize knowledge in a precarious way?
Workshop is not a discipline where the practice of knowledge would be
epistemologically structured, it's rather idiosyncratically ordered, due to the
wishes of the individual workshoppers or practice consumers. The individual
rules over and overrules the class in a one on one situation. Even though the
work of education is not for free, it's at least based upon the free will of
the attendees. This is why one doesn't get a certificate or diploma that might
be acknowledged, for what one learns remains in the uncheckable realms of
subjectivity.
A space of negotiation
So what is at stake with workshopmania is the illusion that the sessions
are chosen and put into a shopping cart solely due to the subjective pleasure
and voluntariness of the workshopper. Since one is not paid for this work,
responsibility and legitimation are a.o. expected to be found in the sheer
pleasure of it, the (sometimes masochistic) fun of working for oneself.
Workshops viewed upon from this perspective bring forward and nourish a
precarious practice that somehow impregnates nowaday's arts field: "Okay, I am
not paid, nevertheless I rule over my time since I am selecting what I want to
know and do, and at least, I am spending my time with having fun." And if it's
fun, it can't be conceived as work in that logic. Nevertheless, "spending one's
time" means that one is giving his/her time away, like spending energy or
money: One even pays for it. The work that is to be done for oneself is no
longer (and perhaps has never been) a good which has to be paid for, and
furthermore is valuable. It becomes a sort of private interest rather than
being in the interest of a community. In this spirit of self-contained
voluntariness, the work of a subject becomes cheap and exploitable. What seems
to lead to empowerment of the self through work on subjective well-being,
threatens to disempower the subject since it is no longer understood as being
part of a social field, but becomes structurally depoliticized, apolitical, the
self as a work of individual consumption – sold in a shop.
What is a shop? A space of negotiation where goods are offered in trade
for money. If the goods have a reasonable price in relation to their quality,
they are bought by consumers. So consumption is not for free whereas the will
of shoppers is. Before a workshopper at ImPulsTanz is permitted to join, s/he
has to pay a registration fee to cover adminstrative costs for staff, office,
telephone, and the like. It's like paying the costs for maintenance of a shop
separately from the purchase. The attendee then has a photo taken that gets put
on a workshop pass, identifying him/her to have permission to visit the
workshops s/he has paid for, saying: I am a shopper. On the reverse side of the
passport, one finds a list with every workshop attended, which reads like a
shopping list. And the more one shops workshops, the cheaper they become, the
less the participant has to pay, the passport becoming a bonus card.
Role model for new labour
The transaction of money is not to be dealt with the leader (supplier of
a desired good) directly, but the institution which offers and organizes the
lessons (the dealers who run the shop of workshops), it is creating a surplus
by ordering the relation of demand and supply. Yet, the more the participants
work the less they have to pay for it (which is a bonus value). The more one
buys, the less one pays. This asymmetricality is only possible if work is
counterfinanced by other means, if the workshops are subsidised by other income
sources. These other sources permit to create workshops which produce work for
both leaders and participants: since work cannot come up for itself, it has be
subsidised. This is at the core of modern economies which have to provide their
people with work in order to keep them working.
Economies support and pay for labour which to the contrary was
historically meant to create taxes to maintain the economy. Work is no longer a
source for national prosperity, it becomes rather an economic burden for it has
to be created in order to employ people and keep their self-status. Ironically
enough, this is why workshoppers fit in the image of new work, becoming a role
model for new labour since they have already fulfilled what economists of the
new market are dreaming of: flexible, willing, underpaid, but eager to take bad
pay for self-fulfillment. Of all things, dancers.
(August 28, 2008)
|
