The contractor is here in the city with a job to do. The job on this occasion is to produce and exhibit a number of objects for perusal and sale. For ten years now the contractor has been riffing around these ideas of work and labor that once animated the field of production, though lately the contractor has been feeling his age and everyone seems to have at least three jobs, the contractor notwithstanding. In any case, there are kids to feed. Parents everywhere will do almost anything to feed their children. Even the bourgeois circles in which the contractor now spends his working life are no exception to this rule.
According to Contractor Marx, the fact that the contractor feels alienated from his own public is an occupational hazard and not in the least bit unusual or exceptional. The contractor came of age intellectually while parading his virtual person around social media: Prior to that, the contractor held a series of service jobs in which the customer was always sovereign. Perhaps because of all this, the contractor spent years hung up on service and performance, which amount to the same thing: modes of doing in which the other is projected into the frame and present even when out of view. There is a sociality to this phenomenon that finds its object in the notion of having an audience. The contractor is aware that everything he does is somehow intended for this other, but the function of the relationship has become obscure.
In part this is down to the fact that a genocide has laid bare what everyone already knew: that all this work and labor, at every level of production, in every field and every city, only serves to reinforce a war machine. The war machine is the habitus and the conduit and the vessel and it arches over everything, like heaven. It’s hard for the contractor to imagine a way in which his objects could retain any semblance of meaning under these circumstances, but then again, thinks the contractor, who even cares? He’s just doing his job. In this country especially, thinks the contractor, people understand this rationale. And really, there are worse jobs. And everybody has to work.
The contractor has often been in some form of therapy, an invention of the modern project in which the mind is brought into the realm of manageable objects, like coins, commodities, and children. Certain therapeutic discourses hold that nothing is inexpressible; it is, in fact, the non-expression that causes trouble, and if only this can be reversed then the life force can flow once more, with self-expression as its happy analogue. Because the contractor was at some stage resistant to this approach, he was referred to cognitive behavioral therapy, a modality optimized for getting contractors back to work. In cognitive behavioral therapy, contractors need not necessarily express themselves so long as they remain broadly functional within the remit of common life. But all of common life now exists under the widening arch of the war machine.
These days the contractor thinks a lot about the limits of expression. It all strains uselessly across a matrix of ruin. But the contractor will get the job done somehow.
Contractor Adorno had something to say about the barbarism of aesthetic production after genocide—this barbarism, both then and now, being yoked to money’s ghosts and bourgeois terror and the petty glamours of his field, which make the contractor feel angry and ashamed. A journalist writes to ask the contractor about his new body of work, and the conversation feels melancholy, like going through the motions, in part because the schemata of well-rehearsed biographical platitudes seems to exceed anything that a contractor might have to say. But worse than that, thinks the contractor, is claiming with glib eloquence that one’s work enacts or explores or examines anything at all in the time of murdered children.
But the contractor will do his job, as the journalist will do hers. As will the purveyors of objects, in whose employ the contractor will make his work. As will the other contractors who show up to the public unveiling, who labor in their own studios at forms of self-expression intended at best for sale and perusal, as will the ministers of culture in their offices and the soldiers who shoot at children and the air-kissing bon vivants whose generosity funds both the war machine and the field in which the contractor finds his employment.
“I’m just doing my job, ma’am,” says the contractor to the journalist. This is an unsatisfactory answer, and they both know it—it seems disingenuous, like so much else in this field.
The contractor could have told the journalist all kinds of things. He had something to say about this city in the heart of the economic fortress, the relentlessness of an ungrieved history, of disavowal as a psychoanalytic mechanism that creates its own shape in the hollow of what is never said or expressed. He had something to say about the growth of an economy as a psychic correlate to raising children. The contractor could have told the journalist about his own daughter, since journalists love that kind of stuff; but the contractor has learned not to bring too much of what he loves into his work. He could have talked about how growth is figured and configured, optimized and restricted at all the appropriate junctures. How unconscious philosophies come to live in buildings, bodies, language, and signs. About the forbidden longing for what is wild and unrestrained. About the way that plants, animals, and children come to stand in as symbols for it; about the way that everything living must be controlled and corralled against the chaos in the heart of the shape at the center of the hollow. About the disavowal itself, and how it is projected outward and punished without mercy. About how the whole field in which the contractor works seems to exist inside this disavowal. How contractors like him are deployed to reproduce this barbarity in a flurry of press shots and pithy conversations in which he and the journalist would play out their roles, like anybody who follows orders. Shame sings out in its own voice, though words feel inadequate under the sign of genocide and would be edited out of the story should the contractor try to redress this. What the contractor wanted to say. Something for which words won’t do.
An earlier version of this text appeared to accompany the exhibition “The Contractor” at Galerie Molitor, Berlin, September 21–November 8, 2025.
