Art as Housework

“I make art with a woman who does the dishes.” 
Chantal Akerman, 1976

During the summer of 1971, the Italian feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa was about to circulate a small text entitled ‘Women and the Subversion of Community’ among her comrades of the Movimento di Lotta femminile di Padova. The pamphlet, inspired by Italian workerist debates, kickstarted the “wages for housework” campaign. Immediately translated in several languages, the seminal text led to the creation of an international network of feminists and the publication of a manifesto written by Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici arguing that a “new area of struggle” had emerged within the household. Contrary to what Marxists had long assumed, it was time to recognize that “domestic work is work” and, furthermore, that it produces the most important commodity of all: the labourer. The worker, the seminal text noted, first had to be “nine months in the womb” and must then “be fed, clothed and trained; then when it works its bed must be made, its floors swept, its lunchbox prepared, its sexuality not gratified but quietened, its dinner ready when it gets home.”1 Such a claim had a dramatic implication for many activists of the seventies. It meant that, as Dalla Costa argued, the family was the “pillar of the capitalist organization of work.” Reproductive labour shaped then what Italian Marxists had begun to call the “social factory,” expanding class struggle to schools, hospitals or the community in a broad sense.

These claims were obviously not just analytic but had important strategic implications. Rather than asking for women to be able to join the waged labour market, one had rather to recognize that domestic work was already work and ask for a wage as housewives. Those advocating that “the liberation of the working-class woman lies in her getting a job outside the home” they argued, “are part of the problem, not the solution.”2 Such views naturally marked a significant departure for the more traditional claims about the socialization of housework generally promoted by socialists in the form of free child care or public meals for example. As Silvia Federici argued in a text that launched the campaign in New York in 1975, the proposal of collectivisation of housework could lead to “extend the State’s control over us”3 . What was needed instead was, as the activist Beulah Sanders put it, “mother power”.

A couple months after the launch of the campaign, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman was about to release Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film in which housework is the main topic. Spanning three hours and twenty-one minutes, the film delves into three days in the life of Jeanne, a widowed mother raising her sixteen-year-old son. Akerman films the most common tasks a housewife has to do during the day in their entirety: peeling potatoes, preparing coffee, making the bed and, in her case, prostituting herself at home once a day to replace her husband’s income. A life, as the synopsis states, “perfectly organized, leaving no room for improvisation.” But if the three days have more or less the same structure – cooking, receiving a client, making the bed, doing some errands and caring for her son – by the second day, small things began to change. She wakes up one hour too early, overcooks the potatoes, forgets things, and seems less confident in her movements through the appartement. By day three, her life truly began to unravel, and the camera finally enters Jeanne’s bedroom as she receives her client. There she has an orgasm suggesting that she had her first one the day before, explaining the changes in her life. Until then, she made love as she did the dishes or ironed the clothes of her child, without passion, disgust or pleasure. Her orgasms were, Akerman wrote, “stolen”, explaining why she came “with a mixture of abandon and rage, for a long time and with extreme violence.”4 After that, Jeanne kills the client with a pair of scissors and quietly wait in the dining room, covered in blood.

Quite logically, the film was often depicted as feminist and connected to the debates about housework and the newfound centrality of “reproductive labour.” Akerman herself was somehow familiar with the feminist debates in France and the United States at that time, and it is no accident that such film would be written at that particular period. As the cinema critic Ivonne Margulies wrote, it gave “concrete meaning to a woman’s work.”5 “In its structural delineation of a link between two prescribed female roles – domestic and sexual, the mother and the whore –” she adds, “the film engages broadly with a feminist problematic, one that takes into account also a woman’s alienation, her labor, and her dormant violence.” In a review from 1977, the American director Jayne Loader argued that Akerman’s politics and aesthetics could only be understood “in the context of the historiography and theory of women in the home: as workers who are essential in maintaining the capitalist system through production and reproduction, largely unrecognized and unpaid.”6

Such readings are somehow at odds with Akerman’s own views about the film. As the synopsis sent to the press noted, the “film transcends feminism, rendering obsolete any analysis that confines the feminist issue to household constraints.”7 In fact, the presentation makes quite clear that the film’s aim is precisely not to either celebrate or denounce housework. The task Jeanne does during the film, Akerman insist “are neither embellished, nor exalted, nor particularly connoted as degrading or burdensome.”8 From the very start, as she often remarked, her sole concern was to create “a work of art and not a pamphlet”.9

Absorption Without Interiority

Such commitment is quite palpable in the film’s refusal to compel the audience to feel empathy or distaste for Jeanne’s activities. Whether she is peeling potatoes during fifteen minutes or having sex with one of her daily clients, the way Akerman films is exactly the same. “There are no sensationalist”10 or voyeuristic images, she insisted. Like a close-up on a kiss or filming the murder in a different way than the rest of the images. The cameras, fixed at the same height in different places of the apartment (Akerman’s height), give us a precise feeling of the space in which Jeanne is moving, but the shots never change depending on the kind of action she does. The nature of the action, in other words, doesn’t define the way to film. The frames are very frontal and largely symmetrical, and the use of ellipses appears carefully considered. Rather than using them to skip what could be boring for the audience, Akerman only makes cuts between scenes. “I will show little action,” she wrote in the script, “but I will show them completely.”11 In that sense, Akerman’s form is “without sympathy, without antipathy, without subjectivity.”12 As Catherine Fowler noted in her study of the film, the tasks are filmed in a unique style that “seems to ignore our presence.”13

Such refusal to solicit the audience is moreover reinforced by the way Akerman wrote Jeanne’s character. Even though in most of the scenes Jeanne is deeply absorbed in her tasks, the acting of Delphine Seyrig is deeply anti-psychological. While Jeanne does things, as the scenario states, “in an extreme concentration,” nothing transpires about her inner life. It effectively conveys the idea that the character’s permanent absorption does not invite the audience into her psyche or allow us to enter her subjectivity, but instead, seals us off from any interiority. We only see, as Fowler notes, “her external surface,” without having access to “what is going on inside of Jeanne’s mind”, precluding the spectator to identify with her character. This effect is effectively conveyed by the way Akerman wanted Delphine Seyrig to act. Extremely hostile to improvisation, she tried to avoid, above all, a character that looks “more natural.” What she tries to show is not the daily life of a particular woman, but the very concept of the housewife. “It was not necessary,” Akerman argued, “for her to play a character with her quirks or mannerisms.”14 She needed to perform all the housework as precisely as possible but also in a way that is slightly odd, in the sense that it has no particularity. “Every gesture,” Seyrig noted, “has its own energy devoid of sentiment or psychology.”15 “What was required,” Akerman insisted, “was to purify a reality in such a way that when one sees Delphine making coffee, one sees all the women in the world making coffee.”16 And this is precisely why Seyrig was chosen for the role, a quite famous and feminist actress at the time, one that no one has ever seen peeling potatoes before. And the fact that Seyrig, coming from a wealthy family, had probably done very little housework in her life, allowed her to relate to those tasks in a less familiar way. As Akerman’s cinematographer Babette Mangolte recalled, “Chantal was convinced that if she hired someone who knew, there would be no ‘interpretation,’ in a way.” Her unnatural relation to housework and, “her pared-down, non-psychological acting allowed [Akerman] to universalize the subject matter.”17 By rendering the acting visible, the film adopts a formal strategy that both distances the beholder and universalizes what is represented.

Rituals Against Work

But if Jeanne Dielman shouldn’t be seen as a political statement regarding the question of housework, what does it try to tell us about it? At first, the film does seem to follow the feminist take defining housework as disguised waged labour. Akerman often said that the death of the husband was a way to depict the continuity in Jeanne’s life. “She continues to behave as if he were there,” she remarks, replacing his income by the money of her clients. One way to look at this would naturally be to say that what she’s been doing all along has always been waged work. Her prostitution emphasizing that marriage is itself a form of prostitution. An idea that is clearly made by the film including a picture of Jeanne’s marriage in the bedroom where she receives her clients. As the scenario notes, “she had never experienced much pleasure when making love with her husband, but did so like everything else in her life: cooking for him, mending his clothes, etc. And it was in this same manner that she also made love with her clients.” In that perspective, as the script adds, “when her husband died, she accepted his absence in her life almost as easily as his presence.”

But such continuity implies a crucial thing for Akerman and the film: to depict what she does more as rituals than as playing a function within the capitalist economy. Indeed, with the death of her husband and a son on the verge of being independent, the question raised by her actions is rather disarticulated from the reproduction of labour force. They are turned into a series of rituals Jeanne almost does for their own sake, to rhythm her day in a very precise order rather than something being a function of the economy. Moreover, the narrative structure is itself partially constructed around the tension between waged labour and housework, relying heavily on the premise that her sole contractual activity (prostitution) leads to the unravelling of her life. What changes everything is precisely the orgasm she experienced on the second day. A deeply absorptive event but one that is structurally different from her absorption in the ritualized housework. In other words, in her housework she is in the “oubli de soi” (forgetting herself) while in the orgasm, she is fully present to herself.

So, even though Jeanne tries to produce continuity, sex construed as wage labour is precisely what raises the structural difference between waged work and housework. One where she controls her actions, and one that is outside of her control. As Akerman explained on many occasions, for Jeanne “not having pleasure was her final freedom. If, during her work, Jeanne had found pleasure in making love with her clients, she would have yielded to them, she would have yielded to men.”18 Refusing pleasure, in other words, was her “last space of freedom, the one she did not relinquish.” The illusion of continuity that Jeanne tries to maintain is therefore undermined by her entry into wage labour and the loss of control she experienced over her actions. As the synopsis notes, “due to the eruption of pleasure in her body,” “it’s as if Jeanne dissociates herself, splits herself.” Split between the ritualized aspect, defined by “rules that Jeanne has made her law” and the paid labour, where she is unable to control her actions due to the irruption of pleasure. What the film offers then is not to equate both but rather to underline what is specific about waged labour.

Expanding on this distinction, one could argue that what is important here is precisely the problem of the alienation of work rather than the inability to recognize “hidden work.” In the context of his argument about alienation Marx had famously argued that under capitalism, labour became external to the labourer. That is, through the generalization of the wage system, the laborer is subjected to an alien power – capital – and “the worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working, he does not feel at home.”19 The worker then becomes estranged from himself (one could say “divided” as Jeanne) and, by extension, from the society he is indirectly shaping. The question raised by Jeanne’s entry intro wage labour is therefore a criticism of what capitalism does to work: subjecting it to an alien will.

Housework Against Wages

This question is precisely what tended to be obfuscated by the idea of wages for housework. By asking for housework to be treated as waged work, such a strategy opened the path for the commodification of the private sphere. Rather than socializing reproductive labour, the following decade was characterized by the rise of the “care economy”. New markets were created, expanding capital’s grip even to surrogacy and demonstrating that, as Beverley Best has already noted, from “the standpoint of capital, the specific arrangements of social reproduction are, in themselves, irrelevant in the context of a systematic and ongoing separation of the bulk of humanity from the means of production.”20 The family, far from being the pillar of capitalism, can function as an institution to reproduce wage labour, but as the following decades have shown, capital can also function with waged nannies and rented wombs.

One could argue that Akerman’s offered a different path. One that put at the centre of her concerns, the refusal of work to be a commodity. Her commitment to form and art being thematized in Jeanne’s refusal to understand her actions solely as wage labour. “I believe” Akerman famously said in 1976, “that form highlights class relations within the image.” In other words, the truly political claim of her film was precisely to defend its autonomy as a work of art. An autonomy that Jeanne tries to defend in her own life. Not as a sphere she enjoys or that we should celebrate but rather as a space defined by its own rules, self-governed. In other words, her resistance to what could make her lose control over her actions also offers Akerman a way to make art out of it. For Jeanne, housework is a space that is still protected from the estrangement of work under capitalism. And for Akerman, her anti-psychological portrait of housework is a way to protect her film from the audience, to give it an autonomy despite the political nature of its topic. Both, in a way, resist the temptation of making housework just a means for an end: either money for Jeanne or politics for Akerman. And in that sense, the true politics of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce lies in its form.

• 1Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (London: Falling Wall Press, 1972), 11.
• 2Ibid., 35.
• 3Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975) 40.
• 4Jeanne Dielman, scénario in: Chantal Akerman, Oeuvre écrite et parlée. 1968-1991 (Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2024), 120.
• 5Ivone Margulies, “A Matter of Time,” Criterion, August 17, 2009.
• 6Jayne Loader, “Jeanne Dielman. Death in Installments,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 16 (1977, 2005): 10-12.
• 7Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Dossier Presse, 1976.
• 8Ibid.
• 9Chantal Akerman, Oeuvre écrite et parlée. 1968-1991, 142.
• 10Ibid, 245.
• 11Ibid., 104.
• 12Boris Lehman, “Jeanne Dielman,” Clés (December 1975): 18.
• 13Catherine Fowler, Jeanne Dielman (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 7.
• 14Chantal Akerman, Oeuvre écrite et parlée. 1968-1991, 141.
• 15Quoted in: Chantal Akerman, Oeuvre écrite et parlée. 1991-2005, (Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2024), 928.
• 16Chantal Akerman, Oeuvre écrite et parlée. 1968-1991, 140.
• 17Quoted in: Jacques Siclier, “Un film hyperréaliste sur l’occupation du temps,” Le Monde, 22 January 1976.
• 18Chantal Akerman, Oeuvre écrite et parlée. 1991-2005, 1274.
• 19Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
• 20Beverley Best, “Wages for Housework Redux: Social Reproduction and the Utopian Dialectic of the Value Form”, Theory and Event 24, no. 4 (2021).