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Virtuosität strukturiert, anders als Arendt es formulierte, heute somit nicht mehr nur das politische Handeln, sondern zunehmend neue immaterielle, auf einem weiten Begriff von Kreativität basierende Arbeitsverhältnisse, die keineswegs als „unproduktiv“ zu verstehen sind.
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Let us return now to Virno, who refers to Marx as well as Arendt to explain the current precarious forms of production and life. However, from his perspective, Marx recognizes the activity of performing artists (among whom he includes teachers, doctors, actors, orators and preachers) as “labour without work” only, and draws an analogy between it and the activities of servants. Consequently, in Marx’ terms, neither virtuosos nor servants produce a surplus value. For him, they both belong to the “realm of non-productive activity” (54). However, Marx should not be accused of banishing cultural producers in general to the realm of unproductive labour since he does not tie the distinction between productive and unproductive labour to the content of that labour. On the contrary, “productive labour is to be a definition of labour that has absolutely nothing to do with the specific content of labour, its particular usefulness or the peculiar utility value in which it appears.”[14] Marx defines productive labour, rather, through a relationship: though not a relationship with money in general and with the question of whether an activity is performed for financial reward or for free. The only relationship that constitutes productive labour, for Marx, is the one with capital. “Productive labour is exchanged directly for money as capital” and is therefore labour that “sets the values it has created against the worker himself as capital ”[15] The service of a doctor as well as that of a cook signifies, on the other hand, an exchange of “labour for money as money”,[16] and is therefore not considered productive. Marx also clarifies the distinction between the two exchange relationships of labour, taking the example of a virtuoso performer: “A singer, who can sing like a bird, is an unproductive worker. To the extent that she sells her song for money, she is a wage labourer or tradeswoman. But this same singer, engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker since she directly produces capital.”[17]
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