EVENTS
John Roberts. Labour, Emancipation and the Critique of Craft Skills
02/06/2010 – 03/06/2010
A seminar with John Roberts
2 and 3 June, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
The relationship between labour practices and craft skill has again become a topic of considerable importance in the light of recent reflections on the growth of immaterial labour within certain sectors of the global economy. Toni Negri and Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, to name the most prominent contributors to the debate, have discussed what they claim to be the increased intellectual, cognitive and affective content of new labour processes across the productive and non-productive labour divide. In this talk John Roberts will address these claims in relation to the classical debate on alienated labour and aesthetic labour (Marx, William Morris and Harry Braverman). In this respect Roberts asks a number of key questions: how does the vast landscape of alienated, deskilled labour under capitalism prepare a transition to actual forms of self-directed, unalienated labour? What conditions, resources and materials are currently in place in the labour process that would make this transition a realistic possibility? And how might the transition to a new mode of production support unalienated labour for all?
About John Roberts:
John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton. He published his first book in 1990, Postmodernism, Politics and Art, a critique of postmodernism. In the 1990s he also published Selected Errors (1993), a and edited Art Has No History: The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art! (1994). Recently, in a number of books he has turned his attention to re-examining some of the key concepts and categories in contemporary art and cultural theory: the photo document (The Art of Interruption and The Impossible Document), the popular and cultural division (The Philistine Controversy), the everyday (Philosophizing the Everyday) and deskilling (The Intangibilities of Form). The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (2007) focused on the dialectical exchange between skilling and deskilling in art after the assimilation of the Duchampian readymade, Professor Roberts refutes definitions of such practice as nihilistic and antithetical to skill, situating questions of value in relation to changes within the social division of labour in the 20th century. Drawing upon political philosophy, cognitive psychology, Marx’s Capital, and social anthropology, Professor Roberts theorises modernism and the avant-garde essentially as a series of debates centred upon the status of labour in the artwork. Roberts is currently working on a new book on photography and working on a series of essays on the ‘turn to religion’ in current political philosophy. He is also the co-editor (with Matthew Beaumont, Andrew Hemingway and Esther Leslie) of a forthcoming collection As Radical as Reality Itself Recently Roberts has edited (and contributed to) a special issue of Third Text (Vol 23, Issue 4, No 99, 2009) entitled ‘Art, Praxis, and the Community to Come’, dealing with the legacy of relational and post-relational aesthetics in contemporary social art practice, and has published an extensive essay on the politics of contemporary photography in the Oxford Art Journal (Vol 32, Issue 2, 2009) ‘Photography After the Photograph: Event, Archive and the Non-Symbolic’. He is currently finishing a new book for Verso to be published 2011, (The Necessity of Errors), and rewriting and expanding a new book on photography.
Information and enrolment
Language of the Seminar: English with simultaneous translation into Spanish
CENDEAC is accessible for wheelchair users and people with diminished mobility. Whenever possible, we will strive to provide on request a transcript of papers for users with impaired hearing.
Auditorium Capacity: 140 people
Free entry to those who do not wish to receive an attendance certificate (paying users will be granted preferential entry if the auditorium reaches its full capacity).
In order to enrol and obtain a certificate of attendance, you need to:
- Attend all sessions of the course
- Fill in the enrolment form
- Pay the appropriate fee
Enrolment fee: 30 € professionals, 15€ students, unemployed and OAPs (proof of status will be required). Free for holders of a Friends of CENDEAC card.
In order to enrol online it is necessary to fill in the enrolment form and make a payment for the appropriate fee to CAJAMURCIA bank, Account Number 2043 0090 34 2000550928 stating the name of the seminar and sending proof of payment to CENDEAC. Alternatively, you can enrol and pay your fee at the CENDEAC office (Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.).
CENDEAC
Antiguo Cuartel de Artillería. Pabellón 5.
C/ Madre Elisea Oliver Molina, s/n
30002 - Murcia (España)
actividadescendeac@cendeac.net