April 3, 2015

Lyman Hall, Room 211

Materialist Mourning: Danh Võ and the Object’s Extension of Life

For the young Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts, the production process results in the worker’s conferral of life onto the object of production. This occurs as a part of the worker (living labour) is transferred to and objectified in the object that she makes. For Marx, objects possess a vitality: both that which is stolen from the worker and that which the object accumulates as it circulates. The result is tables that dance and, within the capitalist mode of production, objects that come to dominate the very people who made them. But is it possible that the conferral of life onto objects contains a condition of possibility for the realization of an anti-capitalist and even a communist way of being in the world? In this essay, Chambers-Letson built upon arguments by Marx, Jean-Luc Nancy, and José Muñoz, in order to argue that the extension and sharing-out of life can be understood as an experience of communism. Reading the work of conceptual artist Danh Võ alongside the work of Marx, Jean-Luc Nancy, and José Muñoz, the talk suggested that in some cases the circulation of the things onto which life has been conferred, transferred, and extended, fosters the experience of communist sociality. In part a meditation on queer mourning, Chambers-Letson argued that Võ’s work invites us into a reimagined relationship with objects and things, structured less by conditions of alienation and domination, than upon an experience of community – one that is founded upon the extension and sharing out of life, especially the lives of those that we have loved and lost.

Joshua Chambers-Letson is Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern Univeristy. He is the author of A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (NYU Press, 2013), winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award from the Association of Theater in Higher Education (ATHE). His second book project, The Coming Communism: Marxism and Minoritarian Performance, studies the rehearsal, anticipation, and realization of actually existing communism in contemporary performance and art. He has (or has forthcoming) articles in Social Text, Political Theory, Criticism Journal, Cultural Studies, MELUS, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Trans Asia Photography Review, Theater Survey, and TDR: The Drama Review. Along with Ann Pellegrini and Tavia Nyong’o he is a series co-editor of the Sexual Cultures series at NYU Press, a queer theory imprint founded by Pellegrini and José Muñoz.