Search

In the historical study of modern American capitalism, labor unfreedom in agriculture has been conceptualized as an exception to liberal labor relations in the post-slavery polity, from debt peonage to the threat of deportation from workplaces populated by non-citizen migrants. At the same time, state-enforced labor compulsions and restrictions are increasingly part and parcel of what scholars call neoliberal exceptionalism. This article argues that agricultural and neoliberal exceptionalisms are related, by tracing the historical genealogy and juridical production of a restrictive work status, the deportable temporary labor migrant, across political economies in the modern United States, from imperial construction in the Panama Canal Zone, to agriculture, to the knowledge economy. Contrary to existing notions of temporary work visas as a new form of unfreedom in neoliberalized advanced capitalist states, I show how the threat of deportation is older and rooted in the rise of the liberal regulatory state in a post-slavery, yet persistently racial capitalist political economy. The import of understanding this history of government intervention increases as the liberal regulatory state's coercive logics and practices intensify and circulate in agriculture and under a post-Fordist regime of accumulation, reproducing racial capitalism in the labor process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine my practice-as-research piecesWhat The Money MeantandSERVUS!in terms of how their design and delivery make visible those labour and exchange relations characteristic of late capitalism. After a brief introduction, I take the reader through theoretical debates around service work’s proliferation and existing arguments about its relationship to performance, as well as an argument for the ‘agonistic’ potential of aesthetic activity. I move on to argue that SERVUS! provides an example of how the one-to-one performance form can both reveal reification in action and rupture or speak back to its enactment, via techniques including explicit payment, over-enunciation or ‘flourish’ and what I term affective dissonance. I then demonstrate howWhat The Money Meantextends these techniques by applying them across a specific scenographic design and participatory structure.What The Money Meantinvites audience members to communicate with the performer by tipping, which I argue might be seen as a dramaturgical tactic of audience participation. I conclude by arguing that the performance of service, especially that which plays upon the one-to-one structure, can work ‘agonistically’ by both revealing the precarity of late capitalist labour and subverting its delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]