Julie Taymor, Sony’s Digital Dream Kids, and the Marxist Labor Theory of Value

Abstract

Julie Taymor is an exemplary artist who has successfully made the transition from avant-garde director of live theatre in the 1980s to become a Broadway director for Disney Corporation with The Lion King, and, more recently, a film director with Sony’s nostalgic look at the music of the Beatles in Across the Universe. Highlights of her career—spanning the latter half of the twentieth century—offer excellent examples of the changes in the economics of creativity and artistic labor for a case study in cultural and aesthetic values under global capitalism. Through interviews, newspapers and financial annual reports, specific moments in Taymor’s oeuvre reveal key distinctions between cultural and intercultural values, between aesthetic and financial exchange values, and highlight themes and limitations in the legacy of the Marxist labor theory of value.

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 13^th international conference of ISSEI, the University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus, 2–6 July 2012, in the workshop on “Commodifying Aesthetics: An Exploration of the Triangular Relationship between Art, Commerce, and Technology in a Global World.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In Media and Participation: A Site of Ideological-Democratic Struggle (Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 2011), Nico Carpentier has identified the postmodern neo-Marxists and their modernist predecessors. The theorists who continue to use and modify Marxist notions of personal and political participation and the role of the work place in productive labor, include Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) on the agonistic model of radical pluralism; Jurgen Habermas (1999) on dialogue in the public sphere; Vincent Mosco (1996) and Armand Mattelart (1984) on the political economy of communication; Michel de Certeau (1984) on body-related tactics; Pierre Bourdieu on mediated representation and power in the social order (1991); and Bruno Latour (2005) on actor network theory. Specific Marxist-inspired artistic movements range from situationist and fluxus to post-fluxus and neo-concretist (Carpentier 2011, 56–59) from the “spect-actor” theories of Brecht’s lehrestucke and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1979), to the emergent “relational aesthetics” of Nicolas Bourriaud (2006), to mention a few of the better known post-Marxist theorists. Sample Marxist informed theorists who continue to investigate the labor theory of value in relation to aesthetics include Frank Popper (1975), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (1998, 2000, 2008), and Anna Dezeuze (2010). On biopower and the virtual realm, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000); Antonio Negri, Empire and Beyond (2006, 2008), and Michael Hardt, “The Withering of Civil Society” (1998). Finally, Ross Abbinnett (2006) argues that the contemporary critique of Marxist theory fails to account for valuations of market prices and suggests a revisionist model of “transeconomic capitalism” that shows the migration of capital away “from the production of real social goods and use values” as a critical condition of the current crisis in the modes of production.

2. Two full-length studies of the Marxian theory of labor value with its historical precedents and antecedents include Peter C. Dooley, The Labor Theory of Value (New York: Routledge, 2005), which views Marx’s theory as both a scientific method and a theory of history (225), and traces how Marx turned the production theory of commodities, from the legacy of Hobbes, Petty and Locke, into a production theory of values (227). It is the doctrine of labor as the producer of all commodities and the origin of value, supported by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, that is rejected by modern economists who note how Marx failed to demonstrate the transformation of labor values into market prices (230). And yet, if Marx did not extend his logic as far into the future conditions as his critics would demand, he was able to turn “the labor theory of value into an ideological attack on the capitalist world” (231). In The Labor Theory of Culture (Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), Charles Woolfson traces the historical precedents of the labor theory from Friedrich Engels, V. Lenin, and Georg Lukacs, to focus on the nature of speech in symbolic transformations of material labor, and the Marxian legacy built upon the leftist psychologists Vygotsky, Lomov, and Leontiev. In “Culture and Finance Capital,” from The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983–1998 ([London: Verso, 2009], 136–61), Fredric Jameson reminds us of the central importance of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).

3. In addition to Fredric Jameson’s work, sample cultural critiques of Marxist theory include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value,” in In Other Worlds, Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), and Teresa Brennan, “Appendix: The Labor Theory of Value and the Subject-Object Distinction,” in History after Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1993), 197–217. Both Brennan and Spivak, acknowledge the limitations of the Marxian project, yet continue to use the labor theory of value in a dialectic critique, with deletions, additions and revisions, to consider post-structural notions outside of Marx’s modernist perspective. Brennan expands upon the energetic requirements in the materialization of labor, and offers a revisionist view of subject-object relations, while Spivak re-examines the notion of exploitation in relation to use, surplus and exchange values in light of the textuality of Marx’s argument on the value of labor. In Empire (2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri regard the labor theory of value as a theory of the measure of value, that must be extended “beyond measure” into the virtual realm. They recognize how Marx’s future is our present, and retain Marx’s distinction between emancipation and liberation (Negri Empire, 355, 364, 362–63). They also acknowledge the Marxist debt in Brechtian dialectics (Negri Empire and Beyond, 2006, 186–87), and in the critical tools necessary to understand contemporary conditions of the changing composition and nature of labor power (2006, 164). Further poststructuralist critiques of Marx on the changing conditions of labor in the global mediasphere can be found in Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994, 1995); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), and in the pioneering work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, such as Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1984), and A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

4. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), vol. 1, 363.

5. Eileen Blumenthal, Julie Taymor Playing with Fire (New York: Abrams, 2007) 10; hereafter cited in the text.

6. Karl Marx, “Wages, Price and Profit” (1898), Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works in Two Volumes, Vol. 1, Ibid, 418.

7. Julie Taymor, interview by Richard Schechner, “Julie Taymor: From Jacques Lecoq to The Lion King,” The Drama Review 43.3 (T163) (fall 1999): 63.

8. Julie Taymor, “Teatr Loh, Indonesia, 1977–8,” The Drama Review 23.2 (T82) (1979): 68, 69.

9. Marx, “Wages, Price and Profit,” (cited above NB #4) 431–33.

10. Mel Gussow, “The Theater Imagery of Julie Taymor,” New York Times, 25 November 1988.

11. Editorial, “Taste–Review and Outlook: Genius and Disney,” Wall Street Journal, 12 June 1998, 1.

12. Sony Global, “Time capsule,” at http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/capsule/index.html. accessed 17 March 2008, updated 1 July 2008.

13. P. Gelb and P. Jaffe, producers, Oedipus Rex (Matsumoto, Japan: Cami Video and NHK, 1992), DVD.

14. Richard Burt, ed. Shakespeare after Mass Media (New York: Palgrave, 2002),

295–324.

15. Schechner, “Julie Taymor: From Jacques Lecoq to The Lion King,” 38–41.

16. Herbert Blau, The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 166.

17. Edward Rothstein, “Review/Film: Two Oedipuses, One Clad in Guilt, the Other in Clay,” New York Times, 31 March 1993.

18. Blau, The Eye of Prey, 166–69.

19. Julie Taymor, dir. Titus, Clear Blue Sky Productions/Twentieth Century Fox, 1999, DVD edition.

20. Julie Taymor, “Mayhem, Madness, Method: An Interview with Julie Taymor,” interview by Maria de Luca and Mary Lindroth, Cineaste, 25 June 2000, 28–31. See also Blumenthal, Julie Taymor Playing with Fire, 238.

21. Sean Abbot, “Julie Taymor’s Vision Quest,” American Theatre 13.4 (April 1996): 30–31.

22. Richard Burt, “Shakespeare and the Holocaust,” in Burt, Shakespeare after Mass

Media, 305.

23. Paul Allen, the Chairman of Vulcan, was a cofounder of Microsoft, and now owns over forty companies in technology, media and content, including stakes in DreamWorks SKG and partnerships with Disney, as well as franchises for the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers, “About Us,” at http://www.clearblueskyfilms/com/TemplateAboutUs.aspx?contentId=58. accessed 20 March 2007.

24. UMG is a worldwide network of companies in the recording and distribution of music, resulting from the 1998 merger of Universal/Motown with Philips/Polydor, owners of MCA/ Decca/Geffen.

25. “Lion King is Road Royalty,” Variety, 29 July 2007.

26. Sony Global, “Corporate Fact Sheet,” at http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/, accessed 20 March 2008. The Corporate fact sheet for Sony Global outlines their five divisions in Electronics, Game, Entertainment (such as motion pictures and music) and Financial Services (such as insurance and banking sectors), and its main product groups further divided into specialized corporations for audio, video, televisions, computers, semiconductors and electrical components.

27. With current annual sales and operating revenues running at approximately $70 billion per annum, the transnational operations of Sony Global are governed under the legal jurisdiction of the Tokyo District Court of Japan, where Sony paid approx. $457 million in taxes in 2007. International tax agreements and trade policies have been decided in response to Sony’s relationship with Japanese tax law. Financial records of Sony Global reveal intricate adjustments to working capital and profits from capital in a range of tax jurisdictions across the globe in the form of instruments for currency exchange, profit deferral, differentials and transfers, cost accounting methods for hedging on fiscal taxes, and investment strategies in futures on key trading currencies.

28. Sony Global, “Corporate Fact Sheet,” 3. Sony assets were valued at close to 10 trillion U.S. dollars in 2007 on annual revenues valued at (124 yen to the U.S. dollar) around $67 billion dollars. In 1997, 67% of Sony Global’s overseas sales were in U.S. dollars (Sony Global 1997, 33), although only 27% of sales were in the U.S. sector. Such sales of content were outside of the 65% of Sony Global’s total worldwide sales made from sales of electronics.

29. “Profiles,” Variety Online, at http://www.variety.com/profiles/Film/Main/173896/Across+the+Universe.html?dataSet=1&query=Across+the+Universe, accessed 19 March 2008.

30. Across the Universe was number six in the nation, as reported in 882 engagements, bringing in over a million a weekend, as of November 2007. By November 11, box office was under a million dollars/week (Variety Online).

31. Investor’s.com, News Headline at 2007 PR Newswire, Reed Business Information, 2008, at http://www.investors.com/breakingnews.asp?journalid=58781975, accessed 20 March 2008. Oddly, the music recording for Across the Universe was made in analog tape with vintage microphones for artistic purposes, then distributed in a re-mastered digital format.

32. Blau, The Eye of Prey, 1987 (opus cited NB#16 above), 169.

33. Chew Wan Ying, “Across the Universe with the Beatles,” Malay Mail, 23 November 2007 (Kuala Lumpur: New Straits Times Press, 2007), 19.

34. Julia Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in The Portable Kristeva Reader, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 28.

35. Julie Taymor, interview by Sylviane Gold, “The Possession of Julie Taymor,” American Theatre 15.7 (September 1998): 5.

36. Wan Ying, “Across the Universe with the Beatles.”

37. In private conversation with Ashlan Phoenix Gray, Vancouver, BC, 15 March 2007.

38. Rick Lyman, “Director of ‘The Lion King’ says, ‘I’m doing what I do’,” New York Times, 14 October 1997, 1. Taymor is quoted as saying: “I want the people to be aware of both the puppet and the actor,” she said. “I don't want to upstage the puppet, but I also want people to see the actor, too. That way they can watch it on different levels. They can focus on the puppet or they can focus on the actor or they can focus on the way both of them are working together. ”

39. Gold, “The Possession of Julie Taymor,” 3.

40. Edward Rothstein, “Ethnicity and Disney: It’s a Whole New Myth,” New York Times, 14 December 1997, 37. Rothstein detects Taymor’s identity politics when he writes,

“The film The Lion King rejected the Disney myth more completely by focusing on a new notion of ethnicity: its hero was not an outsider yearning to join the center or thriving outside it but a disinherited heir who had to recapture his ethnic kingdom. The Lion King is not about accommodation and influence but about ethnic identity.”

41. Schechner, “Julie Taymor: From Jacques Lecoq to The Lion King,” 55.

42. In order to overcome the net operating loss before taxes for 1995, Sony had a write off of $265 million from Goodwill. With consolidated gains in foreign exchange, fiscal tax deferrals and good retained earnings from previous years, the company’s balance sheet showed a good reserve, and did not affect shareholder dividends for the year (Sony 1997, 42).