This extract is from Frédéric Lordon’s recently published book Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire (Verso):
“[A] good number of recent studies in the sociology of work discovered in the figure of the artist a pertinent metaphor, and even more than a metaphor, a common model, for those employees reputed to have personal qualities of strategic importance to their company, notably ‘creativity.’ Since neither the products nor the processes of creativity can be determined or controlled in advance, the only possible approach to the creative subject is one of laissez-faire. The mobilization of these strategic employees thus assumes by its essence conditions of extensive autonomy and weak directionality. Yet this very rare, isolated tribe, this limit-point of employment, has been turned into a general model for the overall project of neoliberal normalization. Is not the artist the very emblem of ‘free will,’ and the unreserved commitment of the self? More to the point, is not the artist the proof par excellence that the second correlates with the first? For artistic creativity arises from the alliance between the artist’s specific skills and the condition of coinciding with one’s desire. And this is precisely the ideal formula which the neoliberal enterprise would like to reproduce on a large scale, evidently with the provision that each employee’s ‘own desire’ must be aligned with the desire of the enterprise.” (123–24)
Has the twentieth-century discourse of art and the artist been complicit in late-capitalist exploitation in the way that Lordon implies? Can the artist resist serving as a model for workplace exploitation?