No abstract

The setting for Fictional Labor combines both the physical and virtual spaces of modern cities: Paris, Lodève, Fameck, unnamed banlieues and commercial zones, and the information space of the Internet. This setting reveals a melancholic civilization suffering from the adverse effects of neoliberal politics, digital automation, and marketing industries, including the proletarianization of knowledge and sensibility. The question is how the creative work of generating a positive will and motive for living is possible in the absence of ethos. The book’s methodology combines close analyses of literature and the visual arts with political, ecological, and economic perspectives on the meaning of labor under capitalism. By offering a new sense of cultural production as labor, the theory of fictional labor foregrounds the ethical formation of sensibility to alterity. Each of the four chapters that follow presents a figural instantiation of fictional labor: surplus-word, mask, vector, and savage-word.

The creative capacities for future-oriented, collective meaning-making are ethical capacities that give moral reason, which the book has attributed to cultural production as a form of labor. The Conclusion considers the significance of the ethics of fictional labor in light of tumultuous protests and disruptions in the recent years of 2016 – 2021, including the Gilets jaunes and the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast to reactionary revolts that repeat the violence in history, fictional labor must generate both a turning against and turning towards the realization of positive, collective projection. Since fictional labor is neither limited to the four figures presented in the book nor limited to the specific works of art that were chosen for analysis, the book invites readers to launch further expressions of fictional labor. The persistence of fictional labor will continue to be critical for addressing the most pressing ethical questions of the 21st century, including environmental ecologies, the survival of life, and climate change.

This book advocates for the ethically formative labor that fiction accomplishes. As a force of production, the fictional labor of literature and the visual arts shapes the formation of collective meaning in an era marked by the negligence of social, financial, and environmental responsibility. As neoliberalism’s hegemony since the 1980s has intensified through the proliferation of digital technologies in the 21st century, considering works of creative art as an ethically productive force is a necessary complement to political and economic critiques. The book invites readers to rethink how mutations in the production, circulation, and consumption of literary and visual materials are implicated in the commodification of information and attention for private gain. The link can have a positive effect that transforms the social relation from a capitalist ethos that expends life for profit to an alterity-driven ethos that defends life. But remedying the paucity of moral sentiments of social existence requires fictional labor to generate ethical sensibilities, cares, desires, and wills. The book’s close analyses demonstrate the aesthetic and formal aspects of literary and visual art that mediate between social relations to yield a dependence alterity, including the otherness of a precarious present, a menacing future beyond economic mastery, and an environment enmeshed with living beings and things.

No abstract