Self-Negating Labour: A Spasmodic Chronology of Domestic Unwork

What is still interesting about housework?  There are several directions that could be taken here.  Domestic work still figures as the work that is not really work, unless you can afford to pay someone to do it for you: it is the realm of reproduction, the daily, endless, prosaic activities that do not produce anything and whose character is repetition. They ensure that the conditions are in place for other kinds of activities paid work outside the home,for example and maintain institutions such as education, art and politics, both physically and socially. Here we start to see the ambiguous position of domestic work; it is both evidently work a concrete interaction with the world that is performed by humans and achieves certain effects and not work, since it is  not socially recognized in the way other work is in capitalist societies, through a wage, a contract, and regulations. Globally and historically, it has been delegated largely to women, who patriarchy and capitalism argued were naturally situated in the home.  Hence part of the political stakes of housework for feminism, especially its socialist and materialist tendencies, had to do with its central role in the gendered division of labour, and its status as the work that capitalism doesn't pay for, at least not directly, but which it requires for capitalist paid work, and capitalist social relations more broadly, to continue every day.  Finally, housework was an emblem of the domination that formed the basis of the 'free' and equal contract between the worker and the boss. Hence, there was a lot of effort put into identifying housework with 'productive labour', in Marxist terms, at a time when the workers' movement was seen as a powerful and mobilizing progressive force. Included in this politics was also 'socializing' housework, as the private and atomised nature of labour in the home was seen as the source of its invisibility, and its weakness in the face of the 'naturalizing' ideologies of patriarchy, religion and capitalism. This fed into the feminist interrogation of the family unit as the 'cell' of capitalist social production, which was taken up by other social struggles linked to 'minority' articulations, such as gay and lesbian rights movement.  Here, housework is posed as a direct articulation of the 'personal is political' tenet of those times, which saw the sphere of intimacy as traversed by the same relations of value and power that found their official expression in the 'public sphere'.

But in order to land this genealogy in the present, we would also need to look at housework as a political site, and its proximity to artistic work, as both are premised as being somehow outside the wage-labour relation.  This becomes even clearer through historical examples of feminist conceptual artists performing housework as art, which anticipates the emergence of 'relational', 'affective' and 'creative' modalities as key to the transformation of both work and art, and their shaping by the structural transformation of capitalism in the past several decades, e.g.'financialisation', 'neo-liberalism', etc. This would take in the 'culturalism' of contemporary production and the melancholic recuperation of politics in the sphere of art as 'participation' and as a normative 'criticality', in line with the economic hegemony of 'critical consumption' and collectivities organized around such practices, especially online. The negativity of housework and artwork alike (they do not really 'produce' anything) can be both economically valorised (production of 'something' is no longer considered important) and act as a paradigm of the rejection of efficiency, rationality and commodification of time that still rule over our current moment of 'non-production'. 

A case study: 20th c history of domestic work has seen labour-saving strategies originating in the factory imported into the home appliances, Taylorist routines. A good reference here is the 'Frankfurt Kitchen' at the birth of Modernism in the 1930s, which saw the liberation of the housewife to be liberation as a housewife, with a more rational arrangement of the kitchen, as opposed to Socialist feminists who saw this liberation as the collectivising of the drudgery of household work and the abolition of the wage something that could not be brought about by design but only through class struggle. So domestic work also crystallizes the tensions at the heart of the Modernist project between social emancipation and a rational aesthetics of consumption, which persist to this day.

This loss of distinction between 'work' and 'non-work' might give indications of how sites such as home and art have been, or can be, potential sites of concepts and practices that anticipate post- and non-capitalist social relations, which would mean not payment for domestic labour or considering art just another form of work, but the dissolution of art and labour as separate and incompatible types of activity. Yet, paradoxically, in order to keep such a horizon in focus, it might be necessary to insist precisely on their incompatibility at a time when the 'hollowing out' performed by financialized modes of accumulation insist that in the general submission to the imperatives of the value-form, any distinctions or subjectivities that cannot be conflated with the anthropology of capital do not exist, and 'crisis' is simply an opportunity to impose this dogma more ruthlessly than ever.