Defining the Labor Theory of Culture

What is the “labor theory of culture”? I first came across this phrase twenty years ago, in a 2004 essay by Michael Denning, Marxist theorist and professor of American studies at Yale. In “The Socioanalysis of Culture: Rethinking the Cultural Turn,” Denning called for a labor theory of culture to replace or, at the very least, supplement, two approaches that were dominant at the time: 1) the commodity theory of culture, which approaches culture as an object with multiple meanings, open for use by radical audiences; and 2) the ideology theory of culture, which approaches culture more as a weapon created by Hollywood and corporate media as a tool for social control.1The problem with these two approaches, according to Denning, is that they position the concepts of work and culture as fundamentally at odds. These approaches imagine work as something we do when we are at work, and culture (or leisure) as something we do when we not at work. Culture is fun. Work is not fun. Work is not culture. Culture is not work. But what if instead, Denning asks, we see culture and work as “synonyms, not antonyms”? What if we see their interdependence rather than their opposition? What if we see that “culture is the product and result of labor, a part of the same process”?2After learning about the labor theory of culture, I promptly forgot about it until 2016, when I was teaching Denning's Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (2015) in a graduate seminar. Steven Gotzler, one of the PhD students in the class, interjected, “This book reminds me of Denning's concept of the labor theory of culture.” I gulped. This sounded like exactly the theory I needed to make sense of a book I had been working on for a long time about eight films and television shows that depicted working-class people in the 1950s. That book is, thankfully, nearing completion and will be published by Rutgers University Press as How the Fifties Worked: Labor, Film and Television in Postwar America.In the last few years I have been trying to better define the labor theory of culture so that I can use it, teach it, and trumpet it to the heavens.3 To do this I first went back to Denning's essay and zeroed in on how Denning defined labor via Harry Braverman's classic text, Labor and Monopoly Capital. Braverman, quoting Marx, argues that what makes humans unique is our ability to conceive of something before we make it. “A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”4According to Braverman, it is this unity of conception and execution, this unity of “head and hand,” that capitalists are hell bent on destroying. First, Braverman explains, the “capitalist disassembles the craft and returns it to the workers piecemeal, so that the process as a whole is no longer the province of any individual worker.” Next, Braverman explains, the “capitalist conducts an analysis of each of the tasks distributed among the workers, with an eye toward getting a grip on the individual operations.” In other words, capitalists try to master, and then dismantle, the production process, with the goal of taking control over all aspects of production.5Braverman argues that this severing of conception and execution, this severing of head and hand, results in the “degradation of work.” Workers, reduced to ever more tedious fragments of the labor process, alienated from one another as well as from themselves, have been made miserable. Their misery stems from the fact that they have been stripped of one of the essential things that makes them human: the link between conception and execution. Labor, Braverman explains, is not merely something that humans do; rather, it constitutes the very essence of who we are. Through labor, Braverman argues, “humans [have] created not only a complex social culture but in a very real sense [have] created themselves.”To make this argument, Braverman uses “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man,” a little-known 1876 essay by Friedrich Engels. In this surprisingly modern and anticipatory essay, a work that prefigured a number of anthropological discoveries in the twentieth century, Engels argues that labor is the key to understanding how humans create themselves. “Labour . . . is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.” In other words, we don't make labor. Labor makes us.6Here I am, writing in a journal called Labor, and you might be thinking: Of course labor is very important! Of course labor is what makes us human! Of course labor is required to produce culture! Ironically, however, when labor historians take up cultural history—especially if they are writing about films and other media that depict labor—they often treat such media using the ideology theory of culture, complaining that Hollywood is biased against labor and thus represents labor through a “jaundiced eye.”7Scholars using the ideology theory of culture argue that Hollywood and the mass media represent working class people through a set of pernicious stereotypes, such as fat clowns, heroic loners, or class traitors. Films such as On the Waterfront or television shows like The Honeymooners and The Simpsons are often used as examples. Think Terry Malloy, an alienated dockworker/gangster, forced to become a “rat”; fat Ralph Kramden, the bus driver, threatening to punch his wife “to the Moon”; or stupid Homer Simpson, the nuclear plant worker, and his catch phrase: “D'oh!”The ideology theory of culture is fairly easy to counter with the rejoinder that culture is never a mere reflection of a single ideology—anti-worker or otherwise. The commodity theory of culture, however, is more complicated to explain, and more difficult to displace. Therefore, to better define the labor theory of culture, I will contrast it here with the commodity theory of culture, which is the most common way that cultural studies—the program I've been affiliated with for twenty-seven years—approaches culture. Although most of the readers of Labor work either in history departments or within the labor movement, I believe you will recognize the commodity theory of culture: it is a ubiquitous framework for thinking about culture that has been used in such places as English, anthropology, and cultural studies over the last fifty years.The Commodity Theory of Culture*What is it?*Who is it for?*How is it used?*Where is it used?*Why is it used?*What does it all mean?The Labor Theory of Culture*What is it?*Who made it?*How is it made?*Where is it made?*Why is it made?*What does it all mean?For scholars using the commodity theory of culture the first question is often one of classification: What kind of textual object is it? Is it a book? A work of fiction? A short story? A film? A piece of music? Next, what genre does it belong to: Romance? Horror? Classical? Pop? This is followed, sometimes, with questions about audience. For whom is this cultural object produced? Is it for women, men, children? For an ethnic or racially defined audience?, and so on. Next, how does the audience use it? What do they think about it? What do they do with it? And, finally, what does the cultural object mean? At its best, the commodity theory of culture produces the kind of wonderful work as represented by the British scholar Dick Hebdige and his study of the radical politics of punk: Subculture: The Meaning of Style.But the problem with this approach is that scholarly work produced using the commodity theory of culture often ends up looking a lot like plain old regular literary criticism. The commodity approach focuses on surfaces, on circulation, and on the meaning of the text. A significant methodology within this approach is “close reading.” What does a certain paragraph, or stanza, or film scene, or song lyric mean? According to the commodity theory of culture, the answer can be found most easily, and most obviously, inside the object itself.The cultural critic Eileen Meehan, who, in 2001, also called for a “labor theory of culture,” notes that “much of the work circulated in cultural studies sounds and reads like literary criticism. Culture may be a whole way of life, but it seems to be studied principally through close readings of texts. . . . Indeed, the discourse of cultural studies is so dominated by ‘text’ and ‘reading’ that the metaphoric nature of these terms seems to be lost.”Meehan argues that those of us who study cultural texts need to move beyond the text itself. What we should be doing instead is studying the “production, circulation, distribution, consumption and reproduction” of texts. And what would this mean? According to Meehan, this would require “learning observational and analytic methods of the social research and political economy.”8The labor theory of culture therefore looks for meaning not merely within the text itself but also within the network of human beings, systems, and institutions that make it. The labor theory of culture focuses first on who—on the people doing the labor rather than on the cultural object they produce. The labor theory of culture begins with identifying the great multitudes who write, act, script, paint, print, compose, photograph, film, direct, and design.The next question—How is the cultural text made?—is important because it gets into questions of political economy and industrial processes. A closely related question to “how” is “where.” This is important because things are made in space and time. An industry, even a cultural one, is located somewhere due to the natural and human resources needed by that industry. As Jefferson Cowie has argued, capital moves, but capital is often linked to the physical location of mines and factories and offices and transportation networks and human capital—the people—who make things.The next question: Why? As Meehan has argued, the question of intent is valid. Studying culture, Meehan argues, means studying people, “their actions, and the immediate and larger contexts of their actions.” “Culture,” Meehan argues, is “what people do to express meaning.”9The final step in the process, then, is to consider what meaning has been expressed by a particular text. This step acknowledges that the political meaning of a text is negotiated and multivarious. It is the result of creators who have different political beliefs, different class backgrounds, different agendas, different subject positions. The method I have developed for teasing this out is one in which I toggle back and forth between the story that a cultural object has to tell—the plot—and the story of who, how, where, and why that object is made. What I have found is that the dialectic between these two stories is a labor story.And what I mean by this is that most artists are interested in the conditions of the production of their own work. As a result, artists infuse their creative work with everything from overt statements about their working conditions to the most obscure Easter eggs—clues as to how the work was produced that are buried deep inside the text. If we know how to look, we will see that cultural texts are imbued with compelling stories about how and why they were made.To sum up and to offer a definition, the labor theory of culture is an alternative to the ideology and the commodity theories of culture. The labor theory of culture is an approach that starts from the assumption that the process of making a cultural text is just as important—and can reveal just as much—as an interpretation of the text alone. The labor theory of culture interrogates the text from the point of view of the many people who made it, the place(s) where it was made, the ways it was made, and the reasons people had for making it. The labor theory of culture still cares about a text's political meanings, as well as something about a text's various audiences, but these curiosities are integrated into a larger framework that foregrounds labor.10What are some of the challenges, obstacles, and possibilities represented by the labor theory of culture? It is funny, but also fitting, that the labor theory of culture is quite labor intensive. It is more difficult to study the entire making of a cultural text than it is to isolate the words on the page, or the dialogue spoken by the actors, or the camera angles employed by the director, or the notes written by the composer. The labor theory of culture, in fact, suggests that we should be looking at all of these things, as well as figuring out how they came into being. For the book I am finishing, How the Fifties Worked: Labor, Film and Television in Postwar America, this approach has brought me to more than thirty-five distinct archives and has led me to pore over biographies, autobiographies, letters, production notes, newspaper accounts, reviews, and more.Another challenge is that of discipline. An anonymous historian reviewing an earlier draft of my current book declared that it was inappropriate to answer historical questions with cultural texts. I disagree, of course, so I have tried to become better at more and different kinds of disciplinary things. As an undergraduate I was a Middle Eastern studies and English major; in graduate school I was trained in American studies. I have many of the habits and instincts of a historian, but learning to be a better one, learning to understand (and explain) the political economy of cultural production, learning about the history of unions in the culture industry, and learning some of the tricks that biographers use—all of this has been important, too.Another difficulty has been resisting the postmodern tendencies of the commodity theory of culture. When it comes to the labor theory of culture, the author is not dead. The author is—or, rather, the multivarious creators are—very much alive. As a result, such possibly antiquated concepts as authorial intent and film history are present in my work. Sometimes I interpret authorial discourse, to be sure. But the labor theory of culture occasionally has me feeling like a literary biographer from the 1930s or 1940s—an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy.At the same time, the possibilities represented by the labor theory of culture are rich and exciting. Denning detailed several of these in his 2004 essay, and I will expand on them here. The most liberating possibility for me has been allowing myself to replace the concept of social class with the concept of labor. Though I use the term class on occasion, I am done trying to ascertain the precise class status, or the precise class identity, or the precise class allegiances of a multitude of cultural producers, or that of their fictional characters. At the same time, by switching from class to labor I have been able to answer a question that pestered me for years: In the postwar period, why were all of these seemingly middle class and even extremely wealthy writers, producers, directors, and other creators interested in telling the stories of sweaty longshoremen and dusty garment workers?What I realized, finally, is that virtually all of these creators—and those into in the first of the twentieth to the and radical industrial that were within the postwar culture as a result of the of What I realized, finally, is that cultural from a of class used the stories of working-class people such as and garment workers to express their own and even their of about the fact that they were control over their own processes. These creators were against capitalists in the cultural who were trying to that fundamentally human link between conception and a result, the labor theory of culture has me that if you have to labor to make a if you need a in to then you are a can be but class can also be used by the for the of and consumption of In contrast to these the of us have to labor for a are the possibility represented by the labor theory of culture is the of a of that we to the of the I have been able to so much about what cultural creators were thinking some years is that the Hollywood to create this in such great that it part of the culture itself. with the of and culture in the twentieth century, this kind of work into what as some of the of in the with such as about the making of The of and of “The in The labor theory of culture is made in a by the production of cultural and so to the kinds of about who, how, where, and It used to be that we only these by into letters, and other and possibly of the labor theory of culture is that it has made me a better close of cultural texts. camera and that made sense have to me as I have to understand more about the labor through which they were Denning to this in his 2004 essay when he asks, do the of work become the of In my this question produces about a cultural those that have seemingly been to use an from my in the film The one of the with the is set inside the of a garment Although the ideology approach to The has this as and of real work the song with the is very much about real work The song is as a that the with the time, time, the the out the and that from the In this the of in a garment are quite into the of The song and the represent and the problem of industrial of working the of time and with the suggests another of the labor theory of of studying work processes. The commodity theory of culture often focuses on a single an a individual who can be the as well as the for the meaning of a cultural text. I understand this and it would be so much to study one at a time. But the labor theory of culture us to see that everything we or or to or is produced by a the and not the The labor theory of culture us a method for the study of in cultural the labor theory of culture us to and that have been all workers for in her work Denning me to in his 2004 all the reasons artists might be of their the number of and other artists who have at execution. If labor is required to for or to it will be for you to make this is no that the first work I here . . . me how to for the creators inside even the most of the culture in the history of by an on by and and I very about the the of the Hollywood was one of postwar only and was most postwar only one, as I was to and as a result I am able to say a lot more about the that and people in another the labor theory of culture has led me to make some discoveries about the of On the one hand, be a two and of his made a about But was forced to the political that his as an I using of and the that in a in a about an in an which was written by a and a and was in makes to as about and the of the the and the an American and of the who has been by the to be their before he is by a is the most on the his a long way . . . even if you see it . . . When are the working to say . . . all the way out to the of the working are And a whole for with their own labor theory of culture is a a a way of It our eye on the people who have made whole for with “their own It also reminds us that we labor, and as we work to that and link between conception and execution, to make the and and culture, it is also this very labor that us that makes us that makes us who we are. This is the I to to the and of Labor in the Steven Gotzler, and for their on earlier of this