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Artistic communism - a sketch

Stewart Martin

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Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 4, July, 2009, 481494

Artistic communism a sketch

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Stewart Martin

I
The relationship of art to communism is rarely considered a vital issue
today. The urgent debates it once generated may be readily recalled, but
mostly as dialogues of another age. Controversy has largely dissipated
into nostalgia for some and for others that peculiarly aestheticised aversion, distaste. In general, the pervasive recession of political communism
has effectively separated these debates from the present and its horizons,
and most of the discussion about art and communism now is strictly
retrospective.
Once practically synonymous with humankinds struggle for a future,
communism is now typically embedded in the past, as something that
has been passed, or is in the process of dissolution. Who can now repeat
after Jean-Paul Sartre: Communism is the unsurpassable horizon of our
times? A teleological reversal has become entrenched and capitalism
now stands as communisms gravedigger. Chinas exceptional status is in
name only. Capitalisms current financial crisis might suggest otherwise,
but, so far, it has only tended to confirm how completely communism
has been excluded as a realistic possibility. The fact that state bailouts of
this financial system are considered tantamount to socialism indicates
how reduced the alternatives are. The identification of socialism with
state capitalism at least serves to distinguish communisms historical
radicalism. Art has not suffered communisms fate. Or rather, it has, but
through a striking reversal of fortunes that has seen it recover spectacularly from numerous predictions of demise. The idea that art would
come to an end or be realised with the advent of communism has been
confirmed in the negative. Certainly, the vibrancy of the contemporary
art market is a conspicuous effect of capitalisms ascendancy. This reinforces the remoteness of any consideration of communism in relation to
art today.
Capitalism is now the unsurpassable horizon of our times. The choice
between neo-liberalism and state regulation makes no odds. Global
catastrophe appears more likely to the popular imagination than an end
to capitalism. Indeed, many can only conceive of such an end in apocalyptic terms. To maintain that this is a massive delusion or ideological
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2009)
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DOI: 10.1080/09528820903007750

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482

contraction does not absolve one from confronting it, and even imaginatively exploring its implications. The critique of the present, including its
art, needs to be a critique of capitalism or risk irrelevance at least for
most of us on the globe. This must inform the forging of alternatives.
The ground may be prepared here for re-imagining communism as that
historic movement of capitalisms subversion. There are indications that
this is under way, and the contemporary art scene has offered it limited
but conspicuous sustenance. But this is not a task fulfilled by recollection
alone. Not only is communisms past littered with horrors, but the intensified mode of contemporary capitalism has transformed some of the
conditions of struggle. Besides the evident ideological normalisation,
novel forms of labour and commodification need to be confronted. The
integration of more and more areas of human and natural life previously
beyond the realm of commodification even suggests a shift beyond
Marxs diagnosis of the subsumption of labour by industrial capitalism.
Capitalism has come to appear natural, a way of life, even an inevitable
stage of natural history. The absolutisation of capital is no longer just a
fetish if its historic limits are transgressed.
Art needs to be understood within the context of this expanded capitalist subsumption. It is emblematic of a realm beyond traditional wage
labour that has become capitalised. Indeed, this predicament has been
well recognised for some time, motivating the avant-garde criticism of
arts reification and alienation, and the attempt to dissolve art into life.
However, in so far as contemporary capitalism presents a commodification of life itself, this tends to subvert this strategy a subversion evident
in the contemporary art market and the general commodification of arty
lifestyles. A further development is hereby indicated. The dissolution of
art into life not only presents new content for commodification, but a
new form of it in so far as art or culture has become a key medium
through which commodification has been extended to what previously
seemed beyond the economy. The creeping subsumption of life under
capital may thus be understood as a cultural or artistic capitalism. This
formation extends far beyond the formal realm of the arts, but has nonetheless become the terrain on which the philosophical-political issue of
arts relation to capitalism is now determined. The discussion of
artworks is scarcely adequate to grasping this work of art.
If the criticism of the present confronts capitalisms absolutisation,
moreover as an artistic formation, capitalism appears as an absolute
work of art. Opposition to it is therefore directed to an anti-capitalist
notion of absolute art, or indeed anti-art. This orientation brings communism into view as a relation to absolute art. What is at stake here is not
just a relation but the realisation of communism in art communism as
itself an absolute work of art. The relation is, in other words, speculative:
the differentiation of communism from art, even as politics from aesthetics, appears as the withdrawal from an identity of communism with art,
their mutual realisation within one another. Communism is art; art is
communism. If we are to avoid the over-literal connotations of communist art, we might name this proposition artistic communism.
But the significance of artistic communism is not based solely on its
opposition to artistic capitalism. It is also because of the affinities
between them. Communism historically proposed to overcome the
distinction between work and leisure, labour and play or life, established

483

by commodity production. Contemporary capitalism is typified by a

parallel overcoming of these distinctions, but through commodification.
This is but one of the senses in which we need to understand artistic capitalism as a subversion of artistic communism. Thus, the re-imagination
of communism cannot be fulfilled by a recovery of its past formations,
even if these tell us more than might be imagined about the present.
What is needed is a critique of artistic communism from the standpoint
of the present, its entwinement with an artistic capitalism.

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II

1. Internationale
Situationniste no 7, April
1962, quoted in Ken
Knabb, ed, Situationist
International Anthology,
Bureau of Public Secrets,
Berkeley, CA, 1981, p 87
2. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The
Inoperative Community,
trans P Connor et al,
University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis
Oxford, 1991
3. See Jacques Rancire, The
Aesthetic Revolution, New
Left Review, series 2:14,
March/April 2002; and
The Politics of Aesthetics,
trans G Rockhill,
Continuum Press, London
New York, 2005. See also
my criticisms in Culs-desac, Radical Philosophy,
no 131, May/June 2005,
pp 3944
4. See Giorgio Agamben,
Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, D
Heller- trans Roazen,
Stanford University Press,
Stanford, CA, 1998; and
The Coming Community,
trans M Hardt, University
of Minnesota Press,
MinneapolisLondon,
1993
5. See Margaret A Roses
Marxs Lost Aesthetic,
Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1984

The proposition of artistic communism to be construed here is singular,

at least in its strictest terms. Considered more broadly, it has many
approximations, and might even be considered a major tradition.
Recently, its proponents have been few and far between. It is as if from
another epoch that the Situationist International declared that communism will be a society of realized art.1 Latterly, Jean-Luc Nancys
conception of literary communism is among the more conspicuous and
significant.2 But his focus is the mythic constitution of community,
which literature interrupts in the formation of an alternative relation,
and he scarcely even considers capitalism. In this he is typical of other
suggestive work, such as that of Jacques Rancire.3 The same could be
said for Giorgio Agamben, who has proposed a rethinking of communism that is linked to the politicisation of life, but which marginalises
capitalism within a diagnosis of modern politics derived from archaic
Roman law.4 His relation to other developments by Italian Marxists
such as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno suggests a corrective, but still
leaves much to elaborate.
The construction proposed here does not derive from a single source,
but a conjunction or correspondence, in particular between the postKantian conception of absolute art and Marxs early conception of
communism. This correspondence was not taken up at that time. Schelling
and Marx never got it together to write a manifesto. Perhaps such a text
has yet to be written; perhaps it is unwritable. Certainly, the construction
proposed here is strictly retrospective. Friedrich Schillers letters On the
Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) came closest in some respects. Other
suggestive texts, such as the anonymously authored Oldest Systematic
Programme of German Idealism or Marxs Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts, remained unpublished until the twentieth century. In
general, the philosophies of art that generated the idea of absolute art do
not articulate a relation to communism, at least not in a form that would
confront modern capitalism; and Marx offered no engagement with arts
absolutisation, whether in its idealist or romantic versions, despite his
notable admiration for art. Even Marxs early plan for a critique of
romanticism, subsequently abandoned, was directed at a conservative,
Christian remnant of its early republicanism.5 Marx approached art and
romanticism through the critique of Hegels reduced image of it, following
the model of Heinrich Heine, who, in works such as The Romantic School
(1836), was probably the most vocal contemporary commentator on the
artistic relation of German idealism and romanticism to Saint-Simonism
and communism. The most direct conjunction of communism and

484

absolute art is grasped by excising the distance created by the mediating

commentaries. The origin of artistic communism is concealed, not because
it is lost but because it was not written, and it is written here from the
vantage of its end within artistic capitalism.

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III

6. The Oldest Systematic

Programme of German
Idealism (c 1796-1797), F
C trans Beiser, in his
edition of The Early
Political Writings of the
German Romantics,
Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1996,
p4
7. Friedrich Schiller, Letter 2,
in On the Aesthetic
Education of Man in a
Series of Letters, eds and
trans E M Wilkinson and L
A Willoughby, Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1967, 1982,
p9
8. F W J Schelling, System of
Transcendental Idealism
(1800), trans P Heath,
University Press of
Virginia, Charlottesville,
1978, p 231

The notion that art is in some sense absolute may be discerned in various
forms at various times and places, but it assumed a singular intensity in
the late 1700s around Jena, in the wake of the French Revolution and its
philosophical reception, particularly by Kant and Fichte. It is an idea
that constellates the writings of Schiller, Schelling, Novalis, the Schlegel
brothers and Hlderlin, to mention only some of the most renowned.
There are certainly tensions within this fraternity, but they are embedded
within some shared motivations and arguments. Of these, the extension
and resolution of the consequences of the idea of freedom or autonomy
emerging from the French Revolution is primary. Art is proposed as the
realisation of freedom. Autonomy or self-determination seeks the unconditioned or absolute, and the absolute is revealed in art.
The Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism announces
the spirit of this time: Only that which is an object of freedom can be
called an idea The highest act of reason is an aesthetic act since it
comprises all ideas, and truth and goodness are fraternally united
only in beauty.6 Libert, galit, fraternit resound in this artistic manifesto, which proposes a reunification of Kants separation of truth,
goodness and beauty. Kants separation of truth from goodness, or theoretical from practical reason, was proposed as an emancipation of
autonomy. However, as he recognised, this separation threatens to
undermine the free determination of the self in so far as it remained a
natural being. The realm of beauty and art was introduced as a bridge in
his Critique of Judgement (1790). And this opened the way to art
becoming the primary issue of practical reason, despite Kants own resistance to this. Schillers Letters venture further, but remain true to Kants
restraint. Schiller even proposes Beauty before Freedom, because it is
only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.7 But beauty
remains an aesthetic illusion that bridges, but does not unify, the realms
of freedom and nature.
Schelling is the pivotal figure in this scene. Within a tradition that
recognised Plato as foundational he is the first to raise art to the summit
of philosophy: art is at once the only true and eternal organ and
document of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us
of what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely the unconscious element in acting and producing, and its original identity with the
conscious.8 Schellings innovation emerges through an attempt to
resolve the radicalisation of Kants practical philosophy by Fichte. In
parallel to his romantic contemporaries, Schelling objected to Fichtes
absolutisation of consciousness as a free activity constitutive of that
which it is conscious: if consciousness must be conscious of something
that it is not, then it cannot be absolute without ceasing to be consciousness. Kants aesthetics suggested an alternative. The work of beautiful
art, understood as the product of genius, is the outcome of an activity

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that is not a free act of consciousness but is nonetheless an activity, and

not merely a thing in itself that cannot appear to consciousness. The
productivity of genius hereby exposes an activity in which consciousness
and non-consciousness relate to each other as alternative modes of an
absolute activity that is their common foundation. Thus, genius presents
an absolute activity or art since it does not separate the self from the
non-self, presupposed by the activity of consciousness: The work of art
merely reflects to me what is otherwise not reflected by anything, namely
that [which is] absolutely identical [and] which has already divided itself
even in the self.9 This notion of art is elaborated in Schellings subsequent The Philosophy of Art: Philosophy of art in the larger sense is the
presentation of the absolute world in the form of art.10
Schellings early conception of art is somewhat isolated by the sufficiency with which it is claimed to present the absolute. Even his The
Philosophy of Art is more circumspect. This distinguishes him from
Fichtes inattention to art, as well as from the more sceptical conceptions
of Friedrich Schlegel, or Novaliss claim that: Unending free activity in
us arises through the free renunciation of the absolute the only possible
absolute that can be given us and that we only find through our inability
to attain and know an absolute.11 This underpinned an attitude of
yearning and an interest in poetry as that which exceeds our ability to
attain and know the absolute. Knowledge and its inadequacy demand
the two halves of philosophy and poetry that cannot be made whole.
Hlderlins pursuit of poetry instead of philosophy remains similarly
sceptical. Hegel presents less of a fulfilment of Schellings early ventures
in this regard than their ultimate reversal. Hegel did not return to Plato,
in so far as he presents art as the pinnacle of Greek culture and a necessary stage and preparation for philosophy, but he nonetheless resurrects
philosophys grasp of the absolute over and above art.
Schellings proposal of art as the summit of practical reason may be
exceptional in strict terms, but it exposes a general relation of art to
activity and production that is common after Kant, and indicates a
fundamental affinity with Marx and his conception of communism as a
society of free producers. However, the continuities here with Marx
must be qualified, above all by his materialism. And while the absolutisation of art served not only idealism but also its criticism, it remains
questionable whether it is compatible with materialism. Certainly a
materialist construction of absolute art is not developed by Marx and is
perhaps yet to be developed.

IV
9. Ibid, p 230
10. F W J Schelling, The
Philosophy of Art, trans D
W Stott, University of
Minnesota Press,
MinneapolisLondon,
1989, p 7
11. Novalis, Fichte Studies,
Cambridge University
Press, CambridgeNew
York, 2003, pp 1678

The scene from which we can derive the idea of absolute art is also the
scene of a new conception of life. Indeed, art and life are co-constitutive
here in many ways even if the young Schelling does not emphasise this.
The unity of freedom and nature presented by art expresses a form of life
that is equally irreducible to nature or freedom, at least in so far as they
are conceived in opposition to one another. Schiller articulates this in his
tripartite conception of drives. Here, life is the object of the sense drive,
which stands opposed to the object of the form drive, namely, form.
Their mediation is in living form, the object of the play drive. And it is

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486

in the beauty of art that living form is above all presented.12 The differentiation of life from brute nature is a primary motivation here, something Schlegel asserted more graphically: Pure life merely for lifes sake
is the actual source of baseness and everything is base that is not infused
with the world spirit of philosophy and of poesy.13 Genius, as inspired
nature, suggested just such a spiritualised life. Kant had already indicated how the judgement of beautiful works produced a feeling of life
that was intelligible, not merely sensible. In fact, this modified the
strictly moral determination of life that he had previously proposed,
according to which it is defined in contrast to any natural inclination.14
This is motivated in part by the need to mediate between the realms of
nature and freedom, if only for the sake of moral action, but the distinction of moral life from natural life remains decisive for Kant. The
attempt to overcome Kants distinction through an absolutisation of art
simultaneously indicates life as a unity of freedom and nature, an absolutisation of life or the consideration of the universe as a mysterious organism.
In these meditations on life we can discern issues that have come to
the fore in modern capitalism. Marx was decisive in developing these,
making the conflict between capital and life central. But his is an account
in which life is emancipated above all through communism, not art.

V
12. Friedrich Schiller, Letter
15, On the Aesthetic
Education of Man, op cit
13. Friedrich Schlegel, On
Philosophy: To Dorothea,
in Theory as Practice: A
Critical Anthology of Early
German Romantic
Writings, eds and trans J
Schulte-Sasse et al,
University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis
London, 1997, p 428
14. Life is the faculty of a
being by which it acts
according to the laws of
the faculty of desire.
Immanuel Kant, Critique
of Practical Reason [1788
trans], L W Beck,
Macmillan, New York,
footnote to p 11 [Ak p 9]
15. Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, The Communist
Manifesto, trans S Moore,
Penguin Books, London,
2002, p 105
16. Karl Marx, Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts
[Third Manuscript], in
Early Writings, trans R
Livingstone and G Benton,
Penguin Books, London,
1975, 1992, p 348

Even if we endeavour to interpret the relation of Marxs conception of

communism to art beyond the few explicit links he suggests and within
the expanded context of post-Kantian philosophy, we face major obstacles. Marxs atheistic historical materialism and commitment to the
critique of political economy proposes radical criticisms and displacements of his philosophical heritage. Any correspondence between the
ideas of absolute art and communism that can be rescued here needs to
be understood in these terms. However, Marxs opposition to philosophy is notoriously overstated, and many of his criticisms may be understood as radicalisations, if not continuations, of innovations reaching
back to Kant.
Marxs critiques of private property, political economy and capitalism remain indebted to the project of autonomy generated by the French
Revolution. His criticisms are directed at the limits of bourgeois conceptions of freedom, not at abandoning freedom altogether. The Communist
Manifesto projects an association, in which the free development of each
is the condition for the free development of all.15 The primacy of labour
and production for Marx is already integral to the primacy of practical
reason within post-Kantian philosophy, reaching right down into Kants
conception of knowledge as an activity. Marxs notorious objection that
philosophy should change the world might be true of late Hegel, but
scarcely of Fichte. If communism is, as Marx claims, the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man,
the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between
objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity,
between individual and species, then it is just as much a solution as an
alternative to philosophy.16 In general, Marxs ideas of communism and

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487

17. Faith and Love, in Beiser,

op cit, p 48
18. Friedrich Schlegel, Critical
Fragments no 65, in his
Philosophical Fragments,
trans P Firchow, University
of Minnesota Press,
MinneapolisLondon,
1991, p 8
19. Before we make ideas
aesthetic, ie mythological,
they will have no interest
for the people. Conversely,
before mythology is
rational, the philosopher
must be ashamed of it.
The Oldest Systematic
Programme of German
Idealism, op cit, p 5

historical materialism were directed against Hegels absolute idealism,

and only extended to the rest of philosophy in so far as Hegel was its
fulfilment. This image of Hegel was Hegels own, and in so far as it is
oversized it limits Marxs criticisms.
Nonetheless, if Marxs criticisms of philosophy should not be extended
beyond Hegel, at least not without recognising the alternatives, does this
mean that we can construct a correspondence between Marxs conception
of communism and Schellings notion of absolute art, or perhaps
Schlegels or Novaliss? The transition from the history of spirit to the
history of modes of production was a fundamental innovation by Marx,
displacing the philosophical project to grasp the absolute by the critique
of capitalism. But capitalism remained for Marx an alternative mode of
idealism, an illusory or fetishised absolute. In this sense his critique of
political economy remained a critique of Hegel: namely that capitalism
presented an idealism that could not ground itself absolutely except by
abstracting from labour. This suggests an alternative or true absolute in
labour or production, not as a humanism or freedom from nature, but as
a metabolism between freedom and nature. This cannot be grasped
philosophically or in consciousness, but neither is it conceived as alien to
consciousness such as Kants conception of the thing in itself. In these
senses we can interpret Marxs conception of production as akin to Schellings, and, by the same turn, interpret Marxs conception of communism,
its disclosure of the character of production, as akin to Schellings conception of the artwork. It is tempting to regard Marx as more closely aligned
with the negative conception of the absolute suggested by Novalis or
Schlegel an affinity elaborated by Adorno, albeit implicitly. But Marxs
account is one of positive supersession, not negative yearning.
Still, this subterranean identity of communism and absolute art needs
to be considered in relation to the apparent displacement, if not opposition, of terms that is otherwise so striking. The privilege of art in Schiller,
Schelling and the Romantics stands in stark contrast to Marxs attention
to the proletariat and social labour. Rather than proposing the idea that
man needs art, and that man becomes man through art, Marx speaks of
communism generating the need for society, contra the need for money,
and of man becoming man through social labour. However, certain
affinities are also concealed here, extending to what may be construed as
a replacement of terms. Above all, the absolutisation of art as activity is
realised in the absolutisation of labour as activity. Schellings artistic
Spinozism is fulfilled by Marx. The opposition of fine art to labour maintained from Kant onwards is effectively taken up in Marxs critique of
crude communism, at least in so far as we can understand art as a
corrective to a society of labour without creativity and pleasure. Real
communism is a relation of social labour that is, for this very reason, a
communism of art. Novalis had already proposed that every person
should be an artist albeit in a formulation that remained monarchist.17
And Schlegels conception of poetry as republican speech seems to
anticipate the free association of communism.18 Is not communism the
realisation of the idea of the aesthetic state, or rather of that aesthetic
association that cannot be a state, according to the Oldest Systematic
Programme of German Idealism? Marxs unity of proletariat and philosophy in communism seems to echo the Programmes call for a unity of
the people and philosophy in mythology.19 The unity of nature and free-

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dom exposed in art is reformulated in Marxs conception of natural

history. Schellings call for the whole man is recalled by Marx.
Communism is an association of free creation.
Some will doubtless regard the evident labour of construction here as
tantamount to a refutation, especially since the objections are all too
familiar. The stand-offs between various forms of Romanticism and
Marxism are certainly renowned. Romantic anti-capitalism tends to be
a byword for delusion. But the very tension within these objections testifies to a latent homology that is being refused, the negative image of arts
identity with communism. In this sense, artistic communism names the
unhappy separation of art from communism and communism from art.
Still, if the identity of communism and art is born mute, it does find a
voice subsequently, albeit falteringly. Besides the Situationist International, we might listen to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. But perhaps the loudest is Suprematisms identification of creation
as the common dimension of nature and humanity disclosed in nonrepresentational art. Here, for instance, is El Lissitzkys presentation of
Suprematism as an identity of art and communism, echoing Marxs own
correctives to crude communism:
if communism which set human labour on the throne and suprematism
which raised aloft the square pennant of creativity now march forward
together, then in the further stages of development it is communism
which will have to remain behind because suprematism which embraces
the totality of lifes phenomena will attract everyone away from the
domination of work and from the domination of the intoxicated senses. it
will liberate all those engaged in creative activity and make the world into
a true model of perfection.20

VI

20. El Lissitzky, Suprematism

in World Reconstruction
(1920), trans J E Bowlt, in
Bowlt, ed, Russian Art of
the Avant-Garde, Thames
& Hudson, London, 1991,
p 158. This text has no
capitalisation.
21. See Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts
and Preface to A
Contribution to the
Critique of Political
Economy, in Marxs Early
Writings, p 349 and p 425
respectively.

The conjunction of absolute art and communism is formed in terms of

life. Life is in many ways their common medium and stake. The preoccupation of post-Kantian aesthetics with life is effectively extended in
Marxs articulation of communism as an appropriation of human life,
or historical materialism as the study of the mode of production of
material life.21 But Marx also proposes a certain radicalisation of life,
conceiving it in opposition to its spiritualisation. The notion of life
derived from Kants aesthetics and underpinning the subsequent consideration of absolute art is in large part defined by the harmony or unity of
sensuousness and spirit, and was developed in contrast to Kants moralism. But Marxs materialism and suppression of the moral determination
of communism marks a shift. The spiritualist vitalism emanating from
Kants Critique of Judgement stands in contrast to the materialist vitalism indicated by Marxs early writings. However, this should not be
exaggerated. Marx understands life principally in terms of labour, that
is, in terms of a production in which spirit and nature are entwined.
Labour is life, living labour. Thus, it is not that life is opposed to spirit,
but rather that spirit is already part of life through labour. Thus, Marx
reverses the injunction to spiritualise life, not in order to exclude spirit,
but rather to draw attention to the unity of spirit and life within labour.
This is elaborated in Marxs foundational distinction of abstract labour

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from living labour where abstract labour is alienated labour. It is on

this basis that he develops a critique of capitalism as fostering abstract or
dead labour, as opposed to the communist emancipation of living
labour: life versus capitalism.
Marxs critique of capitalism as idealism cast suspicion on philosophy
in general as an ideology of capitalism a suspicion that he only began to
elaborate. This can be extended to the idea of absolute art as a mode of
the spiritualisation of nature, thereby underpinning the critique of postKantian aesthetics as a bourgeois ideology that fosters art as an alienation
of life. The affirmation of life contra art here matches the affirmation of
life contra capital. This criticism is evidently indifferent to the identity of
communism with art as an emancipation of life. This needs correction.
But this complex now stands in face of a further complication, since, if
contemporary capitalism presents an increasingly successful integration
of life into the reproduction of capital, it would seem that we are no
longer faced with the simple opposition of life and death suggested by
Marx.
Contemporary capitalism suggests that capital has become a form of
life, and art or culture has been bent to this end. Opposition to capitalism
is therefore no longer a matter of life versus capital, but of non-capitalist
life versus capitalist life. If this makes the artistic formation of capitalist
life the primary object of criticism today, it is in opposition to this that
the artistic formation of communist life needs to be developed.

VII

22. This is Ferdinand

Krnbergers phrase, which
Adorno made the epigraph
to part 1 of Minima
Moralia: Reflections from
Damaged Life, E. Jephcott,
trans, Verso, 1982

The idea of artistic capitalism, at least as it is sought here, is no less

singular a formulation than that of artistic communism. There are
approximations in William Morriss criticism of leisure, or Rodchenkos
opposition to representation. But Adorno and Horkheimers conception
of the culture industry and Guy Debords diagnosis of the society of the
spectacle are probably the major precedents. However, the contention
here is that artistic communism is itself the fundamental precedent. The
idea of artistic capitalism is therefore developed as a subversion of artistic communism, elaborated through the consideration of a series of key
approximations.
The culture industry is archetypal of artistic capitalism in so far as it
intimates the incorporation of culture into industrial commodity production, inaugurating a culture in which life does not live.22 However, its
significance is only really grasped when the dual implications of this
process are considered, namely, not only the industrialisation of culture,
but also the culturalisation of industry. This mutual process is equally at
stake in the communist conception of culture industry, as the industrial
dissolution of arts alienation within an elite realm removed from everyday life productivism proposed a culture industry in this sense. Adorno
and Horkheimers account in Dialectic of Enlightenment focuses on the
capitalist appropriation of high art through its mass reproduction,
scarcely acknowledging the subversion of communist culture it presents.
To recognise this is to grasp how the culture industry produced a capitalist productivism. It is in this sense that we can think of it as a subversion
of artistic communism by artistic capitalism.

490

Adorno and Horkheimer were well schooled to reflect on the transformations this induced for German aesthetics, but their reflections are
reduced and muted, perhaps because they are presupposed. An exception
is from a preparatory text for Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno:

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The commercial character of culture causes the difference between culture

and practical life to disappear. Aesthetic semblance [Schein] turns into the
sheen [Glanz] which commercial advertising lends to the commodities
which absorb it in turn. But that moment of independence which philosophy
specifically grasped under the idea of aesthetic semblance is lost in the
process. On all sides the borderline between culture and empirical reality
becomes more and more indistinct.23

23. T W Adorno, The Schema

of Mass Culture (1942),
trans N Walker, in The
Culture Industry: Selected
Essays on Mass Culture, ed
J M Bernstein, Routledge,
LondonNew York, 1991,
p 53
24. Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W Adorno,
Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments
(1944, 1947) trans E
Jephcott, Stanford
University Press, Stanford,
CA, 2002, p 98
25. Marx, Economic and
Philosophical
Manuscripts, op cit, p 355
26. T W Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory (1970), trans R
Hullot-Kentor, University
of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1997, p 21
(translation altered). See
also my essay The
Absolute Artwork Meets
The Absolute Commodity,
Radical Philosophy no
146, November/December
2007, pp 1526

The notion of culture being dissolved here is assumed to be bourgeois,

and the reference to aesthetic semblance alludes to Schiller. Adorno does
not discriminate between alternative forms of culture industry or alternative forms of bourgeois aesthetics. Rather he emphasises the Kantianism
of Schillers conception of aesthetic semblance its offer of a mediation,
but not unification, of freedom and nature and proposes this as a disappearing source of criticism. This conflates the overcoming of Kant,
whether by Schelling or Marx, with capitalist industrialisation. Any
suggestion of an alternative artistic communism is thereby foreclosed.
Adorno and Horkheimers investment in schematism confirms this:
The active contribution which Kantian schematism still expected of
subjects that they should, from the first, relate sensuous multiplicity to
fundamental concepts is denied to the subject by industry. It purveys
schematism as its first service to the customer.24 The post-Kantian alternatives to schematism sought within the realm of imagination and art,
which Marx inherits in his conception of industry as the historical
relationship of nature, and hence of natural science, to man25 are
occluded by Adorno and Horkheimers critique of consumerism here.
The subversion of artistic communism by artistic capitalism is again
demonstrated in passing.
Adornos conception of modern art, in particular his diagnosis of
how the absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity, suggests a
further scene in which the post-Kantian conception of art is subverted
by capitalism.26 And Adorno is explicit in noting how the form of
modern art discloses not the feeling of life, claimed by Kant, but a feeling of death, the dead labour of capital. But the notion of absolute art
here is the late, exclusive form of lart pour lart associated with Charles
Baudelaire, certainly not the more encompassing form of Schelling or
the Romantics. And it is in its exclusivity that the absolute artwork
dissociates itself from the everyday life of capitalism, for Adorno
presenting itself as if it had no equivalents within a society of equivalence or universal exchange. This presents a subversion of capitalist
culture and even projects a communist utopia, but without recourse to
past constructions of communist art.
It is perhaps above all Walter Benjamin who engages with the
conjunction of post-Kantian aesthetics and communism, and who elaborated a communist art from these sources. And it is tempting to think he
has all the answers, if only he is questioned correctly. But the decisive
issue here concerns the diagnosis of late or evolved capitalism, and
Benjamins studies are limited in this regard.

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VIII

27. Guy Debord, Thesis 1, in

The Society of the
Spectacle, trans D
Nicholson-Smith, Zone
Books, New York, 1995
28. Ibid, Thesis 2

The society of the spectacle diagnosed by Debord is perhaps the most

explicit approximation to an idea of artistic capitalism that has been
established, extending the implications of the culture industry in significant respects. But it remains an approximation. In broad terms, it is
proposed as a diagnosis of evolved capitalist societies, in which the
dominance of production by the commodity form has become intensified
and modified to the point of becoming image or representation, rather
than being limited to objects or products. This, Debord claims,
completes the alienation of lived life: The whole life of those societies in
which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an
immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has
become mere representation.27 But, the relation of spectacle to art and
thence artistic capitalism is problematic. It is both obvious and obscure,
superficial and profound. Debords own synonym for spectacle is representation or image, rather than art. And while spectacle is commonly
assumed to refer to representations or images, suggesting that Debord is
proposing a general iconology that would at least incorporate a theory
of art, in fact, he understands spectacle primarily as a social relation. If
these obvious links to art are superficial, there is a more profound
connection in so far as Debord defines the spectacle in terms of an
autonomous image: The tendency toward the specialisation of imagesof-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous
image, where deceit deceives itself.28 This characterisation invokes an
idealist aesthetics for which the concept of art is pivotal. It is in this
context that we can understand Debords absolute image of capitalism
as an absolute artwork, and think of the society of the spectacle as a
diagnosis of artistic capitalism.
Debord does not reflect on this correspondence explicitly. If
anything, it is silently inherited from Georg Lukcss critique of generalised reification in History and Class Consciousness. Debords notion
of non-alienated life also seems to draw on Lukcss early Hegelian
Marxism that is, a Marxism that suggests a point of indifference
between absolute idealism and materialism. Consistently, Debord does
not invest in the critical separation of culture and practical life pursued
by Adorno, but in their lost unity. This difference might be understood
sequentially or historically: where Adorno faces the dissolution of the
independence of culture, Debord faces the result of this as a unity of
culture and life that has repressed life, although he also appeals to a
period before the independence of culture from life. Both share an objection to the false absolutisation of capitalism.
Nonetheless the conjunction of communism and absolute art finds no
explicit articulation in Debord. The interpretation of the society of the
spectacle as a subversion of artistic communism cannot be attributed to
him. Ostensibly it falls foul of his commitment to Marxs summary
verdicts on post-Kantian philosophy. Debords appeal to the repressed
unity of life resonates with this background. It is notable that he appeals
to life rather than labour or activity, thereby proposing a vitalist modification of the correspondences discernible between Marx and Schelling.
The fact that Debord makes the struggle between capital and life pivotal
is certainly significant. It reacts to the intensified sense in which capital

492

has colonised life. But life remains uncolonisable for Debord; capital
remains death.

IX

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A further source for the diagnosis of artistic capitalism is the studies

associated with the Italian Marxists or post-Marxists that have focused
on the extension of capitalist subsumption, especially with regard to
post-industrialism, such as those of Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato and
Virno. Of particular interest here is Virnos artistic characterisation of
the virtuosity of post-industrial labour. His argument is that postindustrial capitalism relies on forms of labour that are not orientated
primarily to producing a product, but rather to producing cooperation
and organisation, drawing on social and linguistic faculties. The contention here is that this reorientation of labour dissolves the traditional
separation of labour from political action. The virtuosic artist is the
model for this transformation in so far as his/her focus is on his/her
performance and the social space it produces, rather than a separable
product.29 Of equal interest here is Virnos diagnosis of this transformation as a form of communism that has now become internal to capitalism, producing what he terms a communism of capital.30
These arguments contribute to the diagnosis of an artistic communism
that has been subverted by an artistic capitalism. But the parallel, particularly as it concerns the notion of absolute art, is certainly precarious.
Virnos allusion to virtuosity as a form of art is more of an illustration
than an emphatic investment in the concept of art. And he does not draw
on post-Kantian aesthetics to elaborate it, but rather Aristotle. If we are
to pursue this parallel we need to consider his fundamental proposition
of a form of labour without product in terms of post-Kantian conceptions of practice and labour. And here we do find a similar attention to
an activity that is not reduced to the knowledge or production of objects,
and that is, rather, free and self-determining. However, this is limited.
Virnos focus on productivity without product ostensibly reintroduces
the separation of subjectivity from objectivity that the idea of absolute art
was introduced to resolve. Indeed, there is a certain subjective idealism to
Virnos investment in the general intellect or language as a medium
dissociated from the medium of producing products.

29. Paolo Virno, A Grammar

of the Multitude: For an
Analysis of Contemporary
Forms of Life, trans I
Bertoletti et al,
Semiotext(e), Los Angeles
New York, 2004, p 55
30. Ibid, p 111

The preceding approximations offer a fragmented but relatively coherent

indication of the artistic character of evolved capitalism and how it
subverts artistic communism. However, there remains another crucial
consideration that has yet to be fully confronted, namely the subsumption of life by capital, for which art or culture has been a decisive
medium.
This involves a move beyond Marxs account of subsumption, which
is essentially concerned with productive labour rather than labour in
total or life, and focuses on the transition from the formal to real
subsumption of labour by capital. Formal subsumption, for Marx,

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493

31. See Karl Marx, Results of

the Immediate Process of
Production, in the
appendix to Capital, vol 1,
trans B Fowkes, Penguin
Books, London, 1976,
1990, especially p 1021

concerns the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of labour

conducted according to independent means, such as the buying in order
to sell of exotic artefacts. Real subsumption concerns the organisation of
labour to the end of capitalist accumulation, something Marx diagnosed
within industrialisation.31 Real subsumption is also characterised by
Marx as developing the social character of labour, by which he means
the expansion and refinement of the division of labour within production, its increased specialisation and interdependence, and its incorporation of apparently remote forms, such as science and new technologies.
However, this social form is strictly limited by Marx to labour that is
productive of surplus value. It is this delimitation that is at stake in the
subsumption of life by capital. Thus, if we need to think of evolved capitalism as an increased integration of all aspects of social and natural life
within the process of capital accumulation, then this suggests a move
beyond Marxs account.
The extension of capitalist subsumption to life in general is, in many
ways, merely a quantitative increase of the scope of what goes into
productive labour. However, it also leads to qualitative transformations.
For Marx, living labour, which is the fundamental ground for labour
power such that it can be expropriated, cannot be subsumed by capital.
Capital is, for him, fundamentally parasitic on living labour, and
although capital aspires to self-valorisation, whereby it would be the
creator of value, this aspiration remains unrealisable or a fetish. If living
labour is subsumed by capital then this presents a decisive break with
Marxs conception of capitals metabolism, as well as with his investment in the potential of living labour to be an agent for overturning capitalism. This break is routinely overlooked or underestimated. Capitalist
life would have been a contradiction in terms for Marx. It no longer is.
For some it is self-evident. To claim that life has been completely
subsumed by capital is an exaggeration, but we need to confront it as an
imminently approaching horizon rather than an impossibility. It suggests
a new periodisation of capitalist subsumption: no longer between the
formal and real subsumption of labour by capital, but between the
formal and real subsumption of life. Clearly these overlap. The real
subsumption of labour presents a formal subsumption of life too.
Indeed, if we stick to Marxs fundamental identification of labour and
life, then subsumption of life concerns the subsumption of labour in
total, extending to the general productive metabolism of nature and
history. But the real subsumption of life would inaugurate a new epoch
of capitalist production and of struggle against it. Capital would no
longer be opposed to life as its other. Rather than a form of non-life or
death, capital becomes itself a form of life. And opposition to capitalism
is no longer grasped by the affirmation of life tout court, but by an affirmation of non-capitalist life or communist life, which is thereby also a
negation of capitalist life.
It is in terms of this novel struggle between capitalist life and noncapitalist life that the formations of artistic communism and artistic
capitalism assume their critical significance today. The conjunction of
communism and absolute art presented a form of life, indeed a certain
affirmation of life, that was not dominated by spirit. This induced a
standpoint from which capitalism could be criticised as a repression of
life by spirit. And its historical significance for the struggle against

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capitalism can scarcely be overestimated. However, if capitalism must

now be approached in terms of a life subsumed by capital, then this
subverts the affirmation of life, or at least renders it inadequate. The
struggle for non-capitalist life must now confront capitalist life. And if
artistic communism is to be renewed and resume its historic potential as
the avant-garde of this struggle, it needs to grasp the character of this
subversion and re-imagine what a life without capital would be.