The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity

Radical Philosophy

Volumn , Issue 146, 2007, Pages 15-25

  Martin, Stewart ^a  

^a MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 35949002851     PISSN: 0300211X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (87)

1. The classic figures here are, of course, Arthur C. Danto and George Dickie. See, for instance, Danto's 'The Artworld' (1964) and Dickie's 'The New Institutional Theory of Art' (1983), both in Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, eds, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology, Blackwell, Oxford, 2004.
2. Notably, this anthology does not offer any exceptions to this tendency within analytical aesthetics to disregard or marginalize the question of art's relation to capitalism or the commodity form. The same is true of another recent anthology of analytical aesthetics, Noël Carroll ed., Theories of Art Today, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2000.
3. See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art' (1935-36), in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, Routledge, London, 1993, pp. 139-212,
4. and Merleau-Ponty, 'Cézanne's Doubt' (1945) and 'Eye and Mind' (1961), in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1993, pp. 59-75 and 121-49.
5. This remains broadly the case for Deleuze and Guattari's influential 'capitalism and schizophrenia' project - Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987) - as well as their writings on art.
6. One can discern this in Lyotard. See his discussions of modern artistic eclecticism as a logic of money in his 'Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?', trans. Régis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984, pp. 71-82. Nonetheless, for Lyotard, capitalism and commodification are not as foundational for the philosophy of art as they tend to be for Adorno and Benjamin.
7. See, for instance, Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1961, or Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977.
8. For reflections on the continuous and discontinuous, affirmative and critical, relations of such an expanded conception of culture see Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London and New York, 1991. Obviously, the Frankfurt School's conception of the culture industry and the Situationist International's conception of the society of the spectacle are influential progenitors of this diagnosis of a new, expanded formation of capitalist culture.
9. This commitment to recovering the critical dimension of art's autonomy is shared by the main antagonists of The Philistinism Controversy, ed. Dave Beech and John Roberts, Verso, London and New York, 2002.
10. It may also be derived from Krauss's staging of a new understanding of 'medium' against the late capitalist sensibilities mimicked by 'installation art' - see her 'A Voyage on The North Sea': Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Thames & Hudson, London, 1999.
11. See Bernstein's and Bowie's contributions to The Philistine Controversy, which do depart from Beech and Roberts in this melancholy.
12. For a fuller, albeit not uniform, elaboration of this, see Bernstein's The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992;
13. and his Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2006.
14. Another notable instance would be Hal Foster's 'The Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse', in his Design and Crime, Verso, London, 2002, pp. 123-43.
15. Perhaps the most well known publication to explore this extensively is Fredric Jameson's Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic, Verso, London, 1990.
16. See also John Roberts's survey of commentary on, and criticism of, Adomo, 'After Adorno: Art, Autonomy and Critique', Historical Materialism 7, 2000, pp. 221-39.
17. See Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, Manchester University Press, Manchester (1990), 2003;
18. and his From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory, Routledge, London and New York, 1997.
19. See also the second lecture of Manfred Frank's Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik: Vorlesungen, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1989, pp. 25-40.
20. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt (1970), 1995, p. 39;
21. translated by R. Hullot-Kentor as Aesthetic Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997, p. 21 (translation altered).
22. See note below for discussion of the translation and philosophical grammar of this proposition.
23. Jameson deals with it in Late Marxism (see in particular pp. 167-8), but his account remains superficial. It is absent from Roberts's survey in 'After Adorno: Art, Autonomy and Critique'.
24. Quoted in 'Editor's Afterword' to Ästhetische Theorie, p. 541;
25. Aesthetic Theory, p. 364.
26. Benjamin wrote to Scholem that the 'inner construction' of The Arcades Project was analogous to his The Origin of the German Mourning Play, in that 'the unfolding of a traditional concept will stand at the midpoint. If there it was the concept of Trauerspiel, here it is the fetish character of the commodity'. Benjamin to Scholem, 20 May 1935, in Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. V.2, Subrkamp, Frankfurt, 1982, 1991, p. 1112.
27. For an extensive discussion of this, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1989.
28. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Why Still Philosophy?' (1963), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, p. 7.
29. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, p. 21.
30. Ibid.
31. This contradictory relation of recognition is not grasped by the existing English translations of Adorno's proposition. Hullot-Kentor has: 'the absolute artwork converges with the absolute commodity'(ibid.)
32. Lenhardt has: 'Here the absolute work of art merges with the absolute commodity' (Aesthetic Theory, trans. Lenhardt, Routledge, London and New York, 1984, p. 32).
33. Lenhardt modifies Adorno's text, making the phrase into a single sentence and breaking the paragraph after it. This is crude, but has the virtue of emphasizing its significance. The immediate context of Adorno's proposition is to draw attention to an affinity that is otherwise counter-intuitive, and both translations are justified in this sense. But 'meets' is preferable both idiomatically and philosophically. Adorno's words are: 'das absolute Kunstwerk trifft sich mit der absoluten Ware.' The reflexive use of treffen here might be exaggerated to allow the translation: 'the absolute artwork meets itself with the absolute commodity'. But Adorno could have used 'sich selbst' if he wanted this sense, and the formulation he chooses is best captured by a simple 'meets'. 'i Treffen' also has meanings of 'to hit', to strike', 'to hurt', which resonate with the counter-intuitive and contradictory relation of recognition at stake here. This remains implicit in 'meets', but is lost in 'converges' or 'merges'. This is also lost in Jameson's rendering, 'coincides with' (Late Marxism, p. 167). (Thanks to Andrew Fisher and Britta Eickholt for discussion of this point.)
34. The philosophical grammar at stake here may be seen as a negative version of Hegel's conception of 'philosophical' or 'speculative' propositions in which opposed or non-identical terms are identified. Whereas Hegel's dialectics sought to subordinate contradictions to relations of identity, Adorno's 'negative dialectics' sought to reveal the irresolvability of contradictions in relations of identity, and this is evident when we elaborate the meaning of the proposition that 'the absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity'. The correspondence of Adorno's proposition to Benjamin's characterization of Baudelaire's use of allegory in relation to advertising as a form of recognition is also striking: 'The commodity tries to look itself in the face i Die Ware sucht sich selbst ins Gesicht zu sehen].' Benjamin, 'Zentralpark', Gesammelte Schriften vol. 1.2, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt (1974), 1991, p. 671;
35. trans. Jephcott and Eiland in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-40, Belknap Press, Cambridge MA, 2003, p. 173.
36. Ästhetische Theorie, p. 39;
37. Aesthetic Theory, p. 21.
38. Ästhetische Theorie, p. 351;
39. Aesthetic Theory, p. 236.
40. 'In order to become a commodity, the product must be transferred to the other person, for whom it serves as a use-value, through the medium of exchange.... [N]othing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.' Marx, Das Kapital, vol. 1, Werke, vol. 23, Karl Dietz, Berlin, 1962, p. 55;
41. translated by Fowkes as Capital, vol. 1. Penguin, London (1976). 1990, p. 131. The limits of the labour theory of value are apparent here. Adorno's revaluation, through the artwork, of the useless and what is not a product of labour is orientated towards exposing these limits.
42. Ästhetische Theorie p. 351;
43. Aesthetic Theory, p. 236.
44. Ästhetische Theorie, p. 337;
45. Aesthetic Theory, p. 227.
46. 'Sein Werk hat seinen Augenblick daran, daß es die überwältigende Objektivität des Warencharakters, die alle menschlichen Residuen aufsaugt, synkopiert mit der dem lebenden Subjekt vorgängigen Objektivität des Werkes an sich', Ästhetische Theorie, p. 39;
47. Aesthetic Theory, p. 21.
48. Ästhetische Theorie, p. 40;
49. Aesthetic Theory, p. 22.
50. Ästhetische Theorie, p. 36;
51. Aesthetic Theory, p. 19.
52. Das Kapital, p. 51-2;
53. Capital, p. 127. Italics added.
54. Das Kapital, p. 247;
55. Capital, p. 342.
56. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Reclam, Stuttgart, 1963, 1995, p. 68;
57. translated by W.S. Pluhar as Critique of Judgement, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1987, p. 44. Kant's use of the concept of form i Form] is complex, diffuse and is often used adjectivally rather than as a concept in its own right, but it finds one of its key determinations in Kant's concept of purposiveness i Zweckmäβigkeit], which Kant refers to as a translation of forma finalis. See Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 94;
58. Critique of Judgement, p. 65.
59. Ästhetische Theorie, p. 39;
60. Aesthetic Theory, p. 21.
61. For an incisive discussion of these continuities that does contribute to a philosophy of capital, see Peter Osborne's 'The Reproach of Abstraction', Radical Philosophy 127, September-October 2004, pp. 21-8. This includes discussion of Adorno, but not of the passages at stake here and, in particular, not of Adorno's contrast of 'form' and 'abstraction', which in certain respects is characteristic of the 'reproach' Osborne criticizes.
62. Das Kapital, p. 86;
63. Capital, p. 165.
64. Das Kapital, p. 85;
65. Capital, p. 163.
66. Das Kapital, p. 88;
67. Capital, p. 167.
68. Das Kapital, p. 53;
69. Capital, p. 129.
70. See sub-sections 'Critique of Kant's Concept of Objectivity' and 'Objectivity and Reification', in Ästhetische Theorie, pp. 246-8 and pp. 260-62;
71. Aesthetic Theory, pp. 165-6 and pp. 174-5, respectively.
72. Ästhetische Theorie, p. 338;
73. Aesthetic Theory, p. 227.
74. 'Magic is bloody untruth blutige Unwahrheit, but in it domination is not yet disclaimed by transforming itself into a pure truth underlying the world which it enslaves.... Magic implies specific representation. What is done to the spear, the hair, the name of the enemy, is also to befall his person; the sacrificial animal is slain in place of the god. The substitution which takes place in sacrifice marks a step towards discursive logic. Even though the hind which was offered up for the daughter, the lamb for the firstborn, necessarily still had qualities of its own, it already represented the genus. It manifested the arbitrariness of the specimen. But the sanctity of the hic et nunc, the uniqueness of the chosen victim which coincides with its representative status, distinguishes it radically, makes it non-exchangeable even in the exchange. Science puts an end to this. In it there is no specific representation: something which is a sacrificial animal cannot be a god. Representation gives way to universal fungibility.' Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1981, 1997, pp. 25-6;
75. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2002, pp. 6-7.
76. Das Kapital, p. 86;
77. Capital, p. 165 (translation altered).
78. Das Kapital, p. 87;
79. Capital, pp. 165-6.
80. Ästhetische Theorie, p. 337;
81. Aesthetic Theory, p. 227.
82. Ästhetische Theorie, p. 338;
83. Aesthetic Theory, p. 228.
84. See Stewart Martin, 'Anti-Art and Autonomy: Adorno's Theory of Avant-Garde Art', Constellations, vol. 7, no. 2, 2000, pp. 197-207;
85. republished in Theodor Adorno, 4 vols, ed. Gerard Delanty, Sage, London and New York, 2004, vol. 2, pp. 179-91.
86. For a critical test and extension of Adorno's dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy see Stewart Martin, 'Critique of Relational Aesthetics', in Verksted 8. ISMS 1. Recuperating Political Radicality: Constructing the Political in Contemporary Art, ed. Marta Kuzma and Peter Osborne, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo, 2007, pp. 97-129;
87. reprinted in Third Text 87 (vol. 21, no. 4), July 2007, pp. 369-86.