the cultural logic of labor

One thing I find curious in the development of the concept of immaterial labor is that at the same time as labor is waxing affect, there is a waning of affect in cultural production, according to Jameson, who has it on good authority. Jameson wrote that art has moved from a certain political depth of high modernism (such as in the work of van Gogh) to a glossy surface lacking the ability to illicit response from subjects (such as in the work of Warhol) other than schizophrenic "intensities" of de-centered (or exterior) feeling. What was once oppositional to capital in art is now too tied up in the cultural logic of multinational capitalism to be oppositional (and affective), so the argument goes.

I am tempted to draw up some tentative links between this waxing/waning dialectic between affective labor and art. This may allow us to challenge some of the assumptions being made about immaterial labor. It seems that Virno's use of the concept of virtuosity provides the most clear link. Virtuosity is "the special capabilities of a performing artist" and "an activity which finds its own fulfillment" and "requires the presence of others." This last part is related to Hardt's version of politics as being in the presence of others and (maybe) in Adorno's being in the presence of art-objects. Although Virno doesn't say it explicitly, I want to say that virtuosity is dependent on (or at least strongly linked to) producing affect. "Contemporary production becomes 'virtuosic' (and thus political) precisely because it includes within itself linguistic experience as such," which means it derives from the basic human capacity to speak as a virtuous performance. And, according to Virno, the culture industry provides a sort of transfer station in which affect in culture or art moves onto other economic sectors and labor in general.

What are we to make of this movement of affect from culture to labor? Is it plausible that affect would show up in the very activity that was one of the first things subsumed by capital after being lost by art, which was most opposed (or autonomous in relation) to capital? Is the culture industry, which produces a being in the presence of spectacles, a proper link between the two?

Am I making up this dialectic in a desperate attempt to finish this post before midnight?