Our Pernicious Temporality

This chapter examines the problematic dependence of social labor on a conventional model of autonomous subjectivity, which can effectively bifurcate an instrumental form of subjectivity necessary for political change from a prefigurative transformation of the self necessary to envision an emancipatory future. Socially engaged practices seek to combine these two modalities. In order to preserve this aspect of engaged art practice, it is necessary to supplement the concept of social labor with an alternative model of intersubjective experience found in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. With Bakhtin, readers can identify an aesthetic paradigm that accounts for the creative processes involved in the reciprocal transformation of self and other in “dialogical” artistic exchange. Readers find a parallel resource in anticolonial theory, which embraces elements of a Marxist analysis while drawing our attention to the liabilities of its often-Eurocentric outlook.