The possible interrelationship between these developments and depictions of contemporary life in art of the period have been the subject of extensive scholarly analysis, starting with explorations of early artistic responses to the world of modern industry pioneered by the Marxist sociologist and art historian Francis Klingender in his classic text Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947).2 Nevertheless, while the move towards a social history of art that got underway in the 1960s and early 1970s has given rise to an important body of scholarship centrally concerned with the social and political dimensions of artistic representations and practices, histories of nineteenth-century art still feature very little in the way of depictions of industrial work and the condition of the working classes, let alone social conflict, and this is not just a retrospective formalist bias.3 Such imagery is found in the printed media but only occasionally in high art. In the latter, direct picturing of the new realities of the world of industry are few and far between. Such subjects are sometimes tackled in Naturalist work seen to operate in a formally somewhat conservative or academic mode,4 but they are almost totally absent from the art of the late nineteenth century that elicits most scholarly interest—the work of avant-gardes such as the Impressionists, where the milieus are generally ones of bourgeois leisure. Social historians of art have been making a compelling case for some time now that there are nevertheless connections to be teased out between the picturing of modern life in the artistically more innovative art of the period and broader questions of social class, connections whose intricacies remain largely implicit.5 Here I want to up the stakes somewhat and consider ways in which a significant concern with the politically charged issues addressed in the new social theory and its critiques of modern capitalist society did manifest itself more directly in a range of later nineteenth-century artistic depictions which deserve to be recognized as aesthetically compelling.

Firstly, account needs to be taken of the few instances of a picturing of the new world of the modern factory and factory labor in artistically ambitious art of the period. My main purpose, however, will be to examine a more pervasive, socially charged motif widely exploited by Naturalist and Realist artists, namely scenes of rural labor. Without directly representing modern industry and factory work, such picturing of field labor formed a nexus around which realist artistic tendencies and social theory were able to converge. Something of a paradigm shift occurred from previous treatment of scenes of working-class life. These had operated in a largely comic or quaintly picturesque mode, modelled on seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish old master paintings of peasants entertaining themselves and carousing or socializing, but never working.6 My argument is that a concern with the social constitution of labor brought to the fore by industrialization and factory work entered into a new conceptualizing of scenes of agricultural labor—scenes which in reality and not just in art were being affected by the new economic conditions of the time.

Industrial Society and the Painting of Modern Life

Notable amongst the more powerfully conceived paintings of modern industry and labor that gained public recognition at the time, and have also deservedly acquired a certain presence in present-day understandings of the artistic culture of the period, is Adolph Menzel’s Iron Rolling Mill (fig. 2). Completed in 1875, it was purchased for the Nationalgalerie in Berlin the following year. This is a work with all the ambitions of a history painting, both as regards its scale, its elaborate realization based on a large number of studies Menzel carried out in an iron rolling factory in Silesia, the most highly industrialized area of Prussia at the time, and its general atmosphere of dramatic intensity. But of course it is not a traditional history painting. There is a scrupulous Naturalist commitment to factually accurate rendering of the machinery and laboring processes—to the point that Menzel wrote to the gallery director to correct the Nationalgalerie catalog’s technically inaccurate description of the iron-rolling machinery in his picture. The description assumed he had pictured the most up-to-date mechanism, whereas he based his depiction on a slightly older machine which he had observed at first hand, and which he noted had been replaced while he was finishing the painting. This machinery only rolled in one direction and did not yet allow the piece of glowing iron being forged to pass back and forth within the same machine.7 Crucially also, while there was drama in the feeding of the bar of white hot iron into the rolling machine, brought up close to make it vividly present to the viewer, overall the painting does not depict a single event, as would a conventional work of historical narrative, but a situation or process.

Neither, though, was Menzel following the conventions found in depictions of metalworking factories at the time where the vast interior spaces and the machinery usually dominated over the figures.8 Rather than order, there is disorder, rather than integration there is a confusing agglomeration of activities, partly occasioned by Menzel choosing a moment when a change of shift was taking place. Competing for attention with the central group of workers, there are men on the other side of the machine poised to receive the rolled iron, as well as a man hauling to another part of the factory a bar of still partly red hot iron that had been beaten into shape by a steam-powered hammer, men washing up after finishing work, men taking a meal break, and a little behind, a man clasping with his tongs a long iron rail (cooled by now from a white to a red heat) emerging from or feeding into another rolling machine. Beyond the confusion of cranks and rods and the flywheel driving the array of largely hidden machines stretching out into the distance, there are figures at the very back on the left working at a glowing puddling furnace, and just discernible nearby the top-hatted figure of a supervisor (fig. 3). Menzel captured pictorially a particularly significant feature of the organization of work in a large iron-forging factory. The system regulating the confusing array of laboring activities cannot be made visible but is an intangible presence somehow holding the palpable appearances of the scenario together and assimilating them to a larger purpose—the efficient and cost-effective industrial production of large quantities of iron rail.

While in literature the eruption of open conflict between capital and labor in industrial strikes was beginning to be represented by the mid-century, it was not until the 1890s and turn of the century that this occurred to any serious extent in artistic picturings of contemporary life. Such a situation makes it all the more fruitful to examine the few exceptions that stand out as serious attempts to depict a scene of strike action. Again, as with Menzel’s Iron Rolling Mill, these works rendered the strike as a situation rather than a single conclusive event, thereby opening up the scene depicted to a bourgeois audience’s politically varied understandings of and concerns about strikes as manifestations of underlying social conflict.9

Robert Koehler’s The Strike (fig. 4)—the artist, German by origin, remained for the better part of his career in the United States, but had returned to Germany to complete his training—is a work which at one level envisages the strike as a head on confrontation between the factory owner in a top hat standing on the elevated portico on the left and the gesticulating worker below him to his right.10 At the same time, it disperses this focused drama over the various actions and responses of the assembled figures, so it comes to stand for a more generalized social phenomena, a stand-off between capital and labor rather than one between a manager and the leader of an “army” of workers. The work struck a strong chord at the time, prompting extensive critical assessments of its pictorial conceptualizing of strike actions and their political significance, as well as wide critical acclaim when exhibited in New York in 1886 and in Munich two years later.11 That it was not seen as threateningly controversial can partly be attributed to its not being associated with a particular strike—critics variously placed the scene in England, Belgium, Germany and the United States, and were vague about the identity of the factory buildings from which striking workers are shown streaming toward the owner’s mansion. Given the black country setting, the suggestion that these were foundries would make sense, but the artist seems deliberately to have left their precise identity open.

The suggestive impact of the painting has a lot to do with its skillful combination of motifs readily recognizable at the time as paradigmatic of the social conflicts engendered by a major strike—motifs that can also be traced in novels of the industrial scene from Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) in the mid-century to Émile Zola’s Germinal (1885), which was almost exactly contemporary with Koehler’s painting. These motifs include the stiff top-hatted factory owner confronted by a worker activist holding out his arm in reproach, the threat of incipient violence enacted by the worker bending down to pick up a stone to hurl, complemented in turn by the woman, who would be seen as representing a voice of mediation, trying to restrain one of the workers, and the group formed by the woman and children at the bottom left whose plight alludes to the poverty of the families of workers subsisting on low pay, as well as the further hardship they endured when the men were out on strike. Finally, there is the dramatic contrast between the workers’ factory environment on the right and the factory owner’s luxurious dwelling on the left, set in fictionally close proximity to give the disparity visual punch. The painting is less a depiction of a strike than a scenario which invites the viewer to reflect on the nature of such strikes and their roots in stark divisions within the social fabric, even as it deploys visual facts that are individualized enough to make the scenario come alive for the viewer as a reality rather than a merely stereotypical drama. In its own time, as a painting shown in exhibition, it spoke to middle-class anxieties about and concern with the social problems of modern industrialization, while much later when rediscovered in the early 1970s it would be taken up as an image of labor activism by the American trade union movement.12

Characteristic of artistic production in the nineteenth century are these isolated instances of ambitious experiments with subjects that tap into larger public concerns and anxieties. They take the form of singular public statements in which the artist departs from his or her own favored motifs and tries out a subject ungrounded in ongoing practices of visual representation. Such works, while exceptional, are to be valued for the way their motivating conceptions and sources derived to a considerable degree from ideologically charged material located outside the limited purview of visual and artistic culture, as well as for their artistic ambition. The conjuncture of impulses shaping their formation had in part to do with the artist trying out a topical subject that had not been pictorialized before and rendering it in such a way that it was visually compelling, making it stand out at exhibition through its powerful, if potentially controversial impact, and drawing the attention of critics and the artistic public. At the opposite end of the spectrum was work that exploited a motif that was internal to the visual imaginary of art and was then modified so as to project a charged social issue of the moment, of which scenes of agricultural labor were an important instance.

Jean-François Millet’s Gleaners (fig. 5), for example, is much more than a picturesque depiction of a long standing, although at this juncture threatened, custom of allowing poorer women to gather scraps of grain left behind after a field had been harvested.13 Millet has shifted the register of pastoral versions of the motif by bringing out the back-breaking nature of the physical labor involved, and by setting off the foreground scene of the women’s individually pursued efforts with a background one of the coordinated labor of a corvée of workers, bundling and gathering the harvested wheat onto wagons.14 The distant vision of repetitive, mechanical-seeming work carried out under the watch of a mounted foreman (fig. 6) and the relative barrenness of the flat, largely featureless expanse of field—the latter has nothing in it of a conventional pastoral picturesque—parallels in some ways the bleak material conditions and the regulated work routines of a factory, which the rigidly repeating actions of two laboring women in the foreground effectively re-enact on a large scale. The distant field workers, like factory operatives, were hands reduced to the condition of wage or piece-work labor, and as far removed from the situation of the independent peasant farmer as were the impoverished women in the foreground bowed by incessant, meagerly rewarded toil.

Social Theory

Several key features of the social theory of the period help to illuminate the ideological and cultural pressures that give a larger resonance to such depictions of rural labor, both in their earlier Realist and later Naturalist forms. There was first of all a shift from more purely political to social considerations in the radical thinking that got underway in the years leading up to the revolutions of 1848. The more pressing concerns about the persistence and growth of inequality and class conflict, it seemed, could not just be addressed at the level of the political and the legal, but had to take into account the social effects of the workings of the larger economy.15 A central issue was the way in which, with the new industrializing system operating in the production of material goods, the wealth generated was being distributed in a radically unequal way between the owners of property and capital and the rising population of propertyless wage workers. Among reformers as well as the more radical socialists, the idea took hold that this economic nexus, and the class relations and conflicts it produced, had to be addressed if any real political change was to take place. The point was summed up succinctly by Marx in his critique of Proudhon’s socialist thinking published in 1847: “There is never a political movement that is not at the same time social.”16 Proudhon in fact did concur with the general drift of Marx’s declaration. However, he differed from Marx in his insistence that the pursuit of political conflict would not help bring about the needed social transformation of the present mode of capitalist, property-owning production. This led him to take a more extreme position on the precedence of work and economic production over purely political considerations: “public reason has gained the certainty that politics is impotent as regards the amelioration of the fate of the masses; that the preponderance of ideas of power and authority have begun to be superseded in public opinion and in history by the preponderance of ideas of work and exchange.”17

Possibly the most elaborately articulated case for the pre-eminence of the social over the political is to be found in the writing of a German pioneer of social theory, Lorenz von Stein. In 1850 he published an extended analysis of social movements in France from 1789 to the dying days of the Second Republic, prefaced by what he conceived as a new “Theory of Society” which he hoped would help people understand the social crisis of their time, and encourage governments to take measures to address the inequalities structural to the operations of capitalism (at this juncture he had in mind a social democratic political alliance of progressive forces to effect this, but later became a proponent of authoritarian regulation of reform from above by the state). Any serious social reform, he insisted, “must, if it is to be capable of making something possible in the external world, begin its battle with external goods. The external good is the product of bare material and work.”18

This brings into play the central role played by work in the political economy and social theory of the period. Work was already fundamental to the theorizing of political economy in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which begins with the declaration: “The annual labor of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes.”19 Proudhon was probably the most eloquent champion of work as both the origin of the production of the goods on which society depended and a defining purpose of human existence: “Work is the intelligent action of man on matter; work is what distinguishes, in the eyes of the economist, man from animals, to learn to work, that is our goal on earth.”20 What taxed him was degeneration of the conditions of labor that resulted from capitalist exploitation of production. The division of labor, in his view as in that of most of his contemporaries, was fundamental to material progress and could, when properly organized, enhance the quality of the laboring process, activating the mind and imagination of the worker through its increasing complexity as well as its refinement of the performance of work.21 What is more, the collective force realized by the division of labor and the cooperation it involved made it the basis of social solidarity.22 In present-day manufacture and industry, however, driven by the interests of capital, the division of labor had been reduced to something inhuman and barbaric through a minute compartmentalizing of the individual’s labor into unending repetition of the simplest mechanical task. This utter degeneration of labor, in his view, was having a devastating effect on the work force, reducing the inhabitants of the main industrial centers to an alarming level of corruption and barbarism, not of their own making. They were no longer workers in the true sense of the word: “Should I call workers those unfortunate human figures who spend their life at the bottom of a mine or in the infection of a workshop, endlessly repeating the same particle of work, like the pestle of a mortar, the striking of a clock, and the hammer of a forge.”23

For Marx labor had a similar double character. In his early writing he spoke of labor in its most general sense as a combination of “vital activity” and “free conscious activity” defining “the species character of man”; but actual labor as wage labor realized under the conditions of modern capitalism no longer had this quality and had become abstracted and alien for the worker.24 He would attack Adam Smith for envisioning labor as a curse that had to be endured. In addition to being submission to a task, labor, he argued, could also take the form of “self-realization” in the process of overcoming the material obstacles involved when the task was entered upon freely. At the same time, he pointed out, Adam Smith was correct “in saying that labor has always seemed repulsive, and forced on the worker from outside, in its historical forms of slave-labor, bond-labor and wage labor.”25

In Capital, he would highlight the potentially invigorating nature of the collective work carried out on a co-operative rather than individual basis:

Apart from the new power that arises from the fusion of many forces into a single force, mere social contact begets in most industries a rivalry and a stimulation of the “animal spirits” which heightens the efficiency of the individual worker … This originates from the fact that man, if not as Aristotle thought a political animal, is at all events a social animal.26

Under capitalism, however, the formal co-operation involved when workers were engaged together on a task ceases to have any real meaning for them. They had sold their labor to the capitalist: “They enter into relations with the capitalist, not with one another” and remain “isolated.”27 His complex discussion pointedly avoids the easy moralizing laments common at the time about the degrading labor to which the working classes were subject and the outright evil of the modern system of division of labor. At the same time, the painstaking analysis of co-operative forms of labor he offers in Capital makes evident the very real interest he had in the concrete details of different working processes and their organization, as well as his attentiveness to the on-going importance of earlier kinds of production and laboring that persisted within, while also being largely subsumed by, the operations of capital accumulation and circulation.28

The way radical thinkers like Marx and Proudhon made labor the focus of their larger analysis of modern society, and of the disparities of wealth and levels of deprivation engendered by industrial development and capitalist exploitation, had a particularly fruitful aspect lacking in more straightforward critiques of social problems which engaged people at the time. Of these, poverty stood out as the single most important concern—the most pressing “social problem.” Taken on its own, it had to do mainly with deprivation, whereas labor was necessarily more complex and far-reaching. As the driving power behind the production of goods and wealth, it was central to the entire realm of the social. At the same time, as exploited under a capitalist system, it lay at the core of the economic deprivation of the working classes. Thinking of labor in such dialectical terms meant that the working classes were not simply represented as victims but also as potential agents.

A similar distinction can be made between scenes of laboring and those of impoverishment in social realist art. There are powerfully uncompromising paintings of extremes of poverty that grant a level of integrity to their human subjects, as Linda Nochlin shows in her fine recent study Misère: The Visual Representation of Misery in the 19^th Century.29 But scenes of impoverishment were prone to sentimentalizing exploitation and were often devised with a view to eliciting indulgent feelings of pity for its victims. The ragged figures featured in scenes of poverty were generally depicted as outcasts of the social system. Laborers, by contrast, including those employed under conditions of brute compulsion, were essential to society’s inner workings. This said, pictorial renderings of scenes of poverty, like those of labor, registered a growing awareness of and concern for class politics amongst the period’s bourgeois audience for art.

In the depictions of working-class labor that feature in the realist art of the mid-century and in subsequent Naturalist or late Realist work, the setting is almost always rural. As a result, such scenes tend to be seen as evading the realities of modern conditions of industrial labor. What was sometimes happening, though, was a transposition of a broader concern with work onto depictions of situations that conformed to a traditional privileging in visual art of natural or rural settings. Moreover, the agricultural and the rural were hardly marginal forms of reality for a significant portion of the population. Even in Britain the rural population was not exceeded by that living in an urban environment until the mid-century, and agricultural laborers continued afterwards to form a key sector of the working population. At this point they still outnumbered those employed in industry.30 Through much of the century, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, “for by far the greater part of humanity, the fortunes of life still depended on what happened to and on the land.”31 While changes in working conditions were not as dramatic as those in manufacturing, a capitalist reconfiguring of conditions of labor, along with ownership of land and agricultural practice, proceeded apace in the countryside. Significantly, Marx’s study of modern capital includes extensive discussion of the capitalizing of agricultural production and the impoverishment of agricultural worker under regimes of wage labor.32 Mechanization was slower in agriculture than in industry—harvesting machines and machine-driven ploughing did not become economically viable on a widespread basis until late in the century, though steam powered threshing machines were already being utilized by the 1830s and 1840s, particularly in Britain.33 A good deal of the laboring in agriculture was still traditional, physical work, so the focus on these in visual art is not necessarily to be seen as pastoral or retardataire, though it often became so by the turn of the century when such motifs had been thoroughly internalized by the mainstream art world as picturesque material.

Interrelationships between the concern with labor in social theory and the thematizing of laboring in the visual arts seem clearest in the moment when a veritable explosion of theorizing was followed closely by the emergence of a new realist art during and in the immediate aftermath of the upheavals of the 1848 revolution. Some connections are quite direct. Critics such as Théophile Thoré, who was also a known political activist, began championing the idea of an “art social” in the 1830s and 1840s.34 In Thoré’s case this included laying the groundwork for advocating the idea of a modern art that would truly picture its own times, in the way he like others imagined the Dutch had done; and later he went on to champion the work of artists such as Gustave Courbet and Millet. Proudhon towards the end of his life embarked on a book about Courbet in which he envisaged the artist’s work as paralleling the theorizing of philosophical writers regarding “the right to work and the right of the worker, announcing the end of capitalism and the sovereignty of the producers.”35

The situation is rather different with the Naturalist and late Realist works of the 1870s and 1880s. The significant turn at this juncture towards artistic representations of scenes of hard rural labor does not have as evident a cultural or political parallel in a clearly defined body of writing as did the earlier realist impulses that took shape in the 1840s and early 1850s. For one thing, the ambitious attempts to anatomize the new social and political order and new political movements—socialism and communism—in the period leading up to the revolutions of 1848 continued to set the broader parameters for much subsequent thinking on the subject. New approaches to analyzing the social only seriously got underway towards the end of the century, when sociology was establishing itself as a formal discipline. Significantly, Marx’s critique of capitalist political economy in Capital, itself grounded in the intellectual and political world of the 1840s, did not begin to gain widespread recognition until over a decade after its initial publication in German in 1867 (the first English edition only appeared in 1887). Still, a shift in the politics of thinking about the social is suggested by the appearance of two German publications on the Arbeiterfrage in 1865 and 1868 almost simultaneously with (but entirely independently of) Marx’s Capital. Their focus on the “worker question” (as distinct from the “social question” which nevertheless remained a common point of reference)36 had obvious connections with related political developments—most notably the formation of political groups that represented workers’ interests, starting in 1863 with the creation of Ferdinand Lassalle’s German Workers Association and the formal constitution of the Socialist Workers Party of Germany (later the Social Democratic Party) in 1875. By the 1880s socialist or workers parties were becoming a significant political presence elsewhere in Europe. At this juncture too, governments came under pressure to establish systems of social welfare directed to the working classes.37 Immanuel Wallerstein, in his overview of nineteenth-century labor and social movements in the aftermath of 1848, offers a suggestive periodization of this early evolution of socialist thinking and activism: “1815 to 1851—‘powerful idea…, weak movement’; 1851 to 1871—‘movement on the rise, idea in decline’; 1871 to the end of the nineteenth century—‘powerful idea, powerful movement’” — though the 1871 transition here seems a little premature for a re-engagement with any “powerful idea.”38

After a period of reaction which had gripped most of Europe in the wake of the revolutions of 1848, the political climate began to shift in the late 1860s with a liberalizing of government restrictions on political life along with a slow revitalizing of proletarian and socialist activism.39 In France the legal suppression of combinations of workers and strikes which had been in place since 1791 was partially lifted in 1864, while in Britain, where the situation had been more favorable to union activity once a temporary ban on unions had been lifted in 1824, the right to strike was given legal recognition with the passage of the Trade Union Act in 1871. The larger social and political context was also being shaped by the onset of what has been called the long depression. This got underway with a banking crisis in 1873 and extended into the early 1890s. While it did not result in an economic downturn as severe as that of the Great Depression of the 1930s, it did cause significant economic instability which exacerbated labor unrest and strikes, and in Europe resulted in serious economic difficulties for the agricultural sector, aggravated by cheap American produce flooding the market. The situation was such that the economic conditions of wage labor in the countryside were seen as in many ways comparable to that in industry.40 The depression and its effects go some way to explaining how issues relating to labor and the exploitation of the proletariat, agricultural as well as urban, might have had a particular resonance for both artists and their audience at the time.

The Realist Impulse

Apprehension of the social can be effected conceptually through theoretical reflection on social formations and the structures underlying them—as in the body of thinking variously described as social theory, political economy or sociology. The picturing of the social, though, generally operates in a different mode. In the Realist or Naturalist forms of picturing dominant in later nineteenth-century depictions of modern life, the scene or situation was designed to be apprehended by the viewer as a directly experienced physical reality. An existential awareness of the social, experienced at a level that was not fully conceptually articulated, was where visual art’s picturing came into its own. There are exceptions, most of it printed material, such as George Cruikshank’s curious hierarchical presentation of Britain’s liberal-monarchical-commercial-mercantile social order in his The British Beehive—A Penny Political Picture for the People (fig. 7). A significant exception in the realm of high art is the unusually ambitious painting Work by the British artist Ford Maddox Brown, an elaborate meditation on the nature of work which he presented along with an extensive description at a private exhibition in 1865 (fig. 8).41 Like Courbet’s Studio it is an experiment in “real allegory,” extending the realist conception of the picture to embrace a conceptual complexity more commonly associated with the public mural. The central motif is building work being carried out in a wealthy suburb of London to lay a new pipe line designed to supply fresh water from a nearby reservoir (the setting, a street in Hampstead, is carefully depicted from life).42 It shows both the laboring involved in realizing part of this program of metropolitan improvement and the temporary intrusion it made on the everyday public life of the street. While featuring labor as a necessary and productive activity integral to the functioning of the modern city, it also sets out to picture, through the array of figures surrounding the central scene, different class-based embodiments of work and attitudes to work (as well as not having to work or being thrown out of work) in British society at the time.

Brown characterized the building work of “the British excavator, or navvy,” not as mere physical labor, but as exemplifying “the outward and visible type of work.” He saw the central figure, the “young navvy in the pride of manly health and beauty,” as occupying “the place of the hero” in the group of workers; but it would be misleading to see Brown as simply heroizing labor. Collectively, the navvies are ordinary men of different age and type, working in the heat of the summer sun, including the slightly sullen looking older man heaving the sand to be used for mixing mortar through a sieve. Brown wanted to make his audience aware of the hazards of this kind of labor. “One incident peculiarly connected with this picture,” he noted in his description, “is the melancholy fact that one of the very men who sat for it lost his life on a scaffold accident before I had yet quite done with him.” Significantly, the central figure vigorously shoveling earth is shown, not firmly placed on the ground, but standing on a wooden platform suspended over a deep pit. Also of note is the group of partially visible figures resting at the side of street beneath the embankment on the right (fig. 9). These Brown designated as unfortunates who are “out of work.”43 They form a presence hovering on the margins of the main scene that cannot be wished away, reminders of the economic uncertainty and instability that can await the laborer, even relatively skilled ones engaged in productive work. Two of the itinerant figures, identified by a pitchfork and wrapped scythe leaning against the embankment above them, are out-of-work agricultural laborers.

An unemployed navvy forms the subject of a later social realist painting by the German-British artist Hubert von Herkomer (fig. 10). This too is one of those one-off, exceptional works that directly addressed a characteristically modern social issue. The painting is usually seen as picturing the situation of the agricultural laborer at the time—in the 1880s and 1890s, rural poverty, as well as poverty in industrial and urban centers, was an issue very much in the public eye.44 Its title, Hard Times, however, echoes that of the one novel by Dickens which deals specifically with an industrial rather than a generalized urban milieu. The tools of the out of work laborer identify him as a navvy or building worker, so not specifically a rural worker, displaced on his forced wanderings in search of employment in this inhospitable bit of countryside. The prospects facing him and his family are exacerbated by their homelessness, a particular problem for navvies who would often have to decamp from temporary accommodation once a building project came to an end.45 If the standing male figure’s situation is bleak—grittily and honestly so—his posture is sustained by a lingering vitality and down-to-earth dignity. He is not shown reduced to a mournful state of total destitution and he still owns his tools. These are hard times, not utterly hopeless tragic ones. He stands there as a subject, not an object of a philanthropically inclined viewer’s pity or concern, and this is true to a degree even of his family, the woman and the two children. Though relatively passive presences, they are not in a state of pitiful collapse, inviting tear-jerking sympathy of the kind often catered to in socially concerned Victorian picturing of the lower classes, but instead are asleep, taking what rest they can.

Courbet in his Stonebreakers (fig. 11) did not attempt a broad conceptualizing of the nature of work in modern society in the way Brown did. Rather, his painting offered up a single, vividly conceived scene, and as such became an iconic picturing of labor. It enjoyed a huge afterlife, and was shown in a number of major European venues in the wake of its appearance as an artistic and political cause célèbre at the Paris salon of 1850–51. This pioneering picturing of laboring figures as significant presences in their own right was a major new departure.46 It resonated strongly with contemporary concerns about the conditions of the laboring poor and the possibility of working class unrest.47 While the setting is vaguely rural, and the scene clearly not an industrial one, it still conjured up modern anxieties about the subservience of human labor to routines and disciplines imposed by mechanization in the new industrial economy. Writing in 1865, the anarchist Proudhon characterized the actions of the older man as follows: “His rigidified arms rise and fall with the regularity of a lever. There certainly is the mechanical or mechanized man, in the desolation made for him by our splendid civilization and our incomparable industry.”48 Proudhon also made the important point that mechanization was not liberating the working classes from hard labor, but rather continuing to subject them to degrading work which the bourgeoisie were spared—whether by continuing to exploit poorly paid unskilled labor to carry out tasks such as stone-breaking, much in demand for providing the raw materials needed for laying out roads and railways, or subjecting those desperate for the barest remuneration to the “crudest, the most painful, the most repugnant forms of work” created by the new industries.49

While Stonebreakers persisted as a canonic representation of laboring well into the period of Naturalism with its proliferating depictions of rural field labor, Courbet himself did not return to the subject of hard physical work. One slightly later painting, The Grain Sifters (fig. 12), may depict physical work, and even offer up a low-key picturing of the processing of harvested grain, but it would be hard to see it as engaging seriously with a politics of labor, except perhaps in its gendered dimensions. As Courbet himself suggested, it is more in the nature of a “picture of country life.”50 At a stretch, his monumental landscape Siesta During the Haymaking Season, 1868 (Petit Palais, Paris), might be interpreted as an honest projection of what, for a farm laborer, slogging it out in the heat of the summer sun, was the best part of the working day—taking a break and enjoying a brief moment of flat-out rest and sleep in the shade. Here however the exhausted oxen rather than any human figures bear the brunt of evoking the burden of hard physical labor.51

Millet, along with Courbet, was and is widely recognized as a key figure in the realist turn to depictions of rural labor that got underway in the mid-nineteenth century. After making his mark in the early and mid-1850s as a controversial painter of the harder aspects of the rural life (fig. 5), he achieved a canonical status internationally as the painter of the laboring peasantry. More so than Courbet, he featured in later critical writing as a model against which to measure the achievements and shortcomings of Naturalist depictions of the laboring poor. While his relatively small-scale easel paintings were without the overt public ambitions of Courbet’s Stonebreakers, a number were justifiably seen by contemporaries as serious attempts to picture the hard conditions of life amongst the poorer sectors of the rural working classes—though Millet was no socialist and saw himself as depicting in such images the unchanging lot of the working poor.52 Like many of his contemporaries, he produced a number of more conventionally pastoral images which were valued (and sometimes denigrated) for featuring the peasantry as models of the simple life and pious observance, or as naïve embodiments of an originary Frenchness best preserved in the remote countryside.53 Several of these paintings are redolent of traditional family values, and offer an idyllic vision of the independent self-supporting family unit (fig. 16), bracketing out the indications found in a number of later Naturalist paintings of field labor that such family-based groups were often employed as part of a larger workforce dispersed over a landowner’s fields.54

The Naturalist Picturing of Labor

Realist picturing of farm labor soon became quite conventionally pastoral in the wake of Courbet’s and Millet’s early experiments—usually featuring attractive maidens working in slightly rough and earthy but picturesquely atmospheric conditions (fig. 13). Then, in the 1870s, a newly reconfigured painterly Realism emerged that in some ways parallels the “factual” aesthetic and distinctive class inflection of literary Naturalism in the period. In both the novels of writers such as Zola and Naturalist painting, unvarnished representations of lower-class subjects and a proletarian milieu played a significant role alongside the ongoing “modern life” representations of the world of the bourgeoisie. This new tendency gave rise to a number of ambitious, often large-scale works, visualizing some of the rawer realities of hard rural labor. Such painting became quite widespread in Europe from the late 1870s through to the early 1890s (figs. 14, 15, 17, 18, 20), a period when a number of social and political factors converged to place issues relating to the economic situation of the working classes center stage.

A key figure internationally in this shift to a new kind of socially and politically resonant rural naturalism was the French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage. His Haymaking, depicting two exhausted hay-harvesting workers, had a major impact when it was shown at the 1878 Paris Salon (fig. 14). As a recent study by Marnin Young has made clear, this is a scene of rural wage labor, rather than traditional peasant life, though mitigated by isolating the husband wife team and setting the other field laborers engaged in harvesting the hay in the far distance.55 What is “Naturalist” about this painting is both its exacting painterly depiction of the visual and material texture and atmosphere of an open sunlit hayfield, taken together with the way it directly faces the viewer with the bare reality of the figures’ utter physical exhaustion. Theirs is not a pleasurable break from the toil of scything the grass and then raking it (the female work). The tools are just visible, party hidden by the grass, a little above the stretched leg of the prone male figure. Rather it shows them still in the grip of their enforced laboring. The insistent presence of the woman, absorbed in a state of blank psychic inertia that barely rises above the level of physical sensation, with little or no suggestion of inner thought or feeling, both infuriated and fascinated critics who found their habitual response to more conventional pastoral images of the female field worker temporarily interrupted. The international as well as national impact of this kind of work was huge, as can be seen in the painting Winter Work by an avowed British follower of Bastien-Lepage, George Clausen (fig. 15).56 His scene of workers pulling and trimming mangolds—a root vegetable grown as animal feed—was complemented by a pastel showing the mangolds being fed into a slicer in preparation for their being fed to a flock of sheep—testimony to new practices of intensive farming which made it possible to raise sheep in small fields alongside crop growing rather than traditionally in areas of open pasture.

This Naturalist work is significant in part because, like realist art in its more radical earlier form, it took the figure of the working-class laborer as a presence to be reckoned with rather than appropriated by picturesque visions of supposed rural simplicity and naturalness. It also deserves attention because it takes up seriously the depiction of different forms of the social organization of labor. Various levels of coordination and regulation of the work process are detailed, ones that operated in agriculture as well as industry. There is firstly the very traditional social form of laboring, that of the individual worker, or intimate group of workers, operating independently (fig. 16). Such scenes in art often featured the type of the mythic village peasant or artisan who subscribed to no master’s call (except of course that of financial need, which dictated the onerous work hours required to make a living). There is a further superficially similar form of laboring in which the work of individuals or smaller groups, while relatively autonomous, is incorporated within and regulated by a larger enterprise—the figures in pictures of field labor, for example, are often not independent producers working a patch of land they owned or rented, but wage laborers employed by the owner of an estate to carry out tasks requiring multiple hands such as harvesting (fig. 17). Thirdly, there are forms of collective laboring carried out on a more fully synchronized and regulated basis (fig. 21), of which work in some of the larger factories would be the most dramatic instance.

Naturalist art often featured the second, partly coordinated form of labor, as in the monumental painting of beetroot harvesting in winter by the Belgian painter Émile Claus (fig. 17). Here, if one looks closely, it becomes apparent that the working group in the foreground is complemented by other groups scattered across the further reaches of the flat expanse of field.  For critics, the power of the picture lay in its unstable concatenation of hard social reality and compellingly atmospheric rendering of a rural scene. One critic for example commended the painting for successfully combining “powerful realism” in the foreground with “grand fluidity of atmosphere” in the distant view.57 Others noted the feeling conveyed of “the rich land, the currents of air,” “the great beetroot” alongside the powerful presence of “the dehumanized slaves working in the field.”58 Farming beetroot as a cash crop was a relatively modern development at this juncture. Sugar beets were being cultivated on a large scale to cut back on sugar imports form the Americas. Also, in the North of France and Belgium coal mines were often located in the midst of fields where, among other crops, beets were being grown.59

Claus depicted a much more rigidly coordinated form of field labor in another painting of workers weeding a flax field (fig. 18). What marks this out is not just its success in giving pictorial form, through the row of workers slowly making their way across a field, to a closely regimented laboring that operated on a more intensive basis in the new industrial concerns. It also vividly stages the dulling, slightly distracted attentiveness demanded of incessantly repetitive work of this kind (fig. 19). The artist made a point of subtly articulating the workers’ varied levels of engagement, ranging from mindless absorption in the task at hand to exhaustion and snatched moments of low-level social interaction. The commanding gesture of the standing woman in the center marks her out as the supervisor keeping watch; but even she seems caught between the focused attentiveness demanded of the work being done (in her case watching over and regulating it) and a momentary distracted looking out over the field.

The German painter, Max Liebermann, who before he turned to an Impressionist way of working in the later 1890s and shifted the social center of gravity of his work to more bourgeois milieus, made his name as a Naturalist and produced some of the more effective and gritty paintings of rural labor in the period (fig. 20). In his painting The Flax Barn he also experimented with depicting a work scene that related more immediately to the industrial economy of the period (fig. 21). It pictures a relatively traditional manufacturing process, carried out in a rural rather than urban or industrial setting in a part of Holland where, as in many parts of Europe, manufacturing continued to operate without steam power using older forms of wooden machinery. At the same time, the coordinated factory-like structuring speaks more directly to the social organization of labor in modern industry than field laboring scenes. The setting is a reasonably large flax-spinning establishment or flax barn in Holland devoted to the production of the thread that would be woven into linen. The children on the left are doing the drudge work keeping the spinning wheels turning. The women’s more skilled work operates in two phases—first they move backwards, teasing out from the bundle under their arm a string of flax fiber which is being spun by the action of a whirling spindle in one of the machines on the left; then, once a full length of thread has been spun, and the spindle reoriented so the spun thread begins to wind around it, they move forwards, guiding the thread as it is wrapped around the turning spindle. In contrast to the variety and seeming confusion of working activities in Menzel’s slightly earlier industrial scene, Iron Rolling Mill (fig. 2), here one sees a systematically ordered, strictly synchronized form of labor common in textile manufacture that was developed most fully in the mechanized textile mills of the period. This highly regulated organization of the laboring process is dramatized pictorially by Liebermann through the tightly structured compositional ordering, with the grid-like lay-out of the interior paralleling the measured back and forth movements of the female workers. Significantly, Liebermann here is giving pictorial form, not only to a strictly ordered spatial organization of labor, but also to a temporal regulation and synchronizing of the workers’ movements. The painting met with almost immediate official recognition, entering a public collection, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the year after it was painted, where it still holds pride of place as a depiction of labor along with Menzel’s Iron Rolling Mill which, as chance would have it, had previously been owned by Liebermann’s uncle.

How Liebermann’s Flax Barn spoke to viewers at the time of larger concerns with the modern organizing of labor and the conditions of factory-like laboring, as well as to a middle-class fetishizing of hard work, is evident from the range and intensity of ideologically charged responses it elicited. One critic complained about the unrelenting presentation of “everyday mechanical work”; another saw the rendering of collective absorption in a basic, repetitive labor process more positively, commenting how, in conveying the atmosphere of the strictly ordered working space where only the humming and purring of the wheels would have been heard, “The great word ‘work’, the motto of the nineteenth century, speaks loudly to us.”60 Later, one critic came up with a particularly revealing comment on Liebermann’s preoccupation with collective laboring, this time as realized in his painting Workers in the Beet Field (fig. 20): “Though each figure is also well characterized, the picture was not painted for such individual characterization. It was painted because the artist was seized by the pathos of work and by the beauty of this massed group that was to certain extent stylizing itself under the compulsion of the same activity.”61 The Flax Barn too is notable for its visualizing of the social dimensions to the worker’s incorporation within a structure of collective laboring—on the one hand there is the individual women’s absorption in a relatively smoothly coordinated work process (fig. 22), and on the other their subjection to a highly regulated pattern of repetitive tasks. For contemporaries, Liebermann’s painting, while not directly depicting factory work, gave visual form to the inherently conflicted social character of factory laboring—its efficient integration of workers’ efforts in a synchronized system of production, later very attractive to modernists, but equally its imposing on workers a coercive regime of enforced productivity.

Liebermann’s Naturalist painting brings into focus a significant aspect of Naturalist depictions of the material conditions of working-class laboring, namely that the pictorial paradoxes inherent in the successful visual rendering of such scenes echo at some level those of the contending social and political currents in the phenomena depicted. In the Flax Barn, the finely inflected, almost geometric clarity of the open space and of the figures’ placement within it creates a sense of order and measured containment, but one that is also somewhat oppressive or unyielding. The subtle play of subdued, evenly distributed light gives a felt fullness to the expanse of space and a barely perceptible warmth and muted animation to the environmental features and figures it illuminates; but it also throws into relief the general drabness of the environment and its suppression of spontaneous animation. At the level of pictorial effect the painting delivers an undeniable aesthetic charge that is both engaging but also incipiently alienating. The labor being figured might momentarily strike a view as reassuring, possibly as a triumph of finely coordinated and productive manual work; but there is also rigid regimentation. The figures are subjected to the imperatives of a larger force sustaining the steady output of yarn by ensuring that the machinery keeps spinning and the workers continue feeding and servicing it efficiently. That it is hidden and seems not to require the agency of human supervision makes it all the more powerful and pervasive. In the final analysis one is presented neither with straightforward celebration nor straightforward critique of labor, though possibly a bit of both. In this respect the picturing is true to the material realities of a laboring carried out under the aegis of a capitalist system of production. There is the unceasing pressure of exploitation and coercion which subsumes, but never entirely, the actual laboring process; the laborer is to a degree dehumanized, but retains a residual integrity and a low level of subjective engagement with the work she carries out. The more degradingly inhuman factory conditions of the nineteenth century largely extinguished such possibilities, but this could not be said categorically of labor in general at the time. Realist picturing of work, because of the overlay of pictorial aesthetics integral to a compelling depiction, tends to a bias in the more positive direction. This article is designed to prompt thinking about the give and take between the complexities and deep-seated tensions lodged in understandings of labor in the nineteenth century and the more easily negotiable complexities and tensions of an artistic realism attempting to picture the realities of labor by drawing on, but also to an extent resisting, the aesthetic compulsions that fully engage a viewer.

Admirably, Beech, in order to take the commodification thesis seriously, requires some kind of “mechanism” or mediation that would plausibly subsume art under the commodity form. This proves difficult in classical economics. The account is easy to summarize, though Beech’s account is full of complexity and useful detail. Simplifying: classical economics can only treat the value of art as some version of a monopoly price, since its economic value—thinking here primarily of what we now call the secondary market in the visual and plastic arts—cannot be derived from inputs. This is interesting, and art is indeed exceptional, but in a way that will ultimately be unsatisfactory for Beech’s purposes, as the “exceptionalism” of art puts it in the same category as fine wines, relics, or rare stamps, which turn out amusingly to be among the small set of examples to which classical economics perennially returns.

Neoclassical economics, on the other hand, in its most radical (that is, most interesting) form, cannot—is designed not to—treat art as exceptional, with counterintuitive (or loony) consequences. But on its own account, the looniness of the consequences is not a bug of neoclassicism, but a feature. Since neoclassical economics derives price from a demand curve, rather than value from inputs, it “permits of no economic exceptions of the classical type” (104). George Stigler and Gary Becker, for example, want to argue that “widespread and/or persistent human behavior can be explained by a generalized calculus of utility-maximizing behavior, without introducing the qualification ‘tastes remaining the same’” (1977, qtd 110). This last de-qualification is important, because it is there that the work of art loses its extra-economic and genuinely exceptional character. We don’t have to introduce constant taste as an artificial boundary condition; taste needn’t come into the matter at all. It is not that working through one artwork will open up meanings and possibilities previously undisclosed in others; it is rather that the “increase in music capital,” for example, associated with listening to music “increases the productivity of time spent listening to music” (qtd 111). Quality is transformed into quantity, and aesthetic judgment, Kant’s “judgment of taste,” is transformed into utility-maximizing behavior all the way down, as the “shadow cost” (qtd 112) of musical difficulty decreases with exposure. Beech (or I) might protest that this misses the specificity of art altogether, that “to suppose no alteration of character and taste in the experience of art is to suppose no genuine experience of art at all” (117). To which Stigler and Becker would presumably reply that if observable behavior can be explained without the concept of a “genuine experience of art,” there is no reason to suppose the latter exists.

So what Beech shows in this chapter is not so much that art remains exceptional even within neoclassical economics (where it looks something like an “addictive good”) but rather what a world where the work of art was a commodity like any other would look like: a world where there are no aesthetic judgments, only preferences to which the market responds. The logic of a market economy is such that “consumer sovereignty” pertains: “Consumers’ preferences… can be regarded as the ‘determining’ factor… [and] may be said, therefore, to have logical ‘priority’ over the other elements in the situation—viz., in the sense in which ends can be ‘prior’ to means” (L.M. Fraser [1939] qtd. 120). Needless to say, “the artist has a very pragmatic interest in maintaining his or her hostility to the market” (123).

The middle of the book takes an historical turn, contrasting the postwar Keynesian treatment of art with the neoliberal turn against it. Keynes himself was the first chairman of the Arts Council, and under his leadership the Council supported public funding for the arts that was “not only removed from the political process, but was protected from the market mechanism too” (132). But Keynes and in the U.S., more explicitly, Galbraith, do not advocate this position based on an analysis of art as economically exceptional; they do so based on an understanding of art as excepted from the economic. Galbraith calls for art policy “to subordinate economic to aesthetic goals—to sacrifice efficiency… to beauty. Nor must there be any apologetic nonsense about beauty paying in the long run. It need not pay” (J.K. Galbraith [1966], qtd. 148). Needless to say, the relevant thesis of what we now think of neoliberalism is almost precisely the opposite of this: art must pay. The subsequent chapter discusses the neoloberal reaction against public support for the arts after 1966. If art is exempted from economic rationality, then from the standpoint of economic rationality public arts funding is simply a cost without a benefit. If art is to be subsidized, it should “take the form of vouchers so as to maximize consumer sovereignty and reduce government monopoly” (Ruth Towse [1996] paraphrasing Alan Peacock, qtd. 160). Of course this would do the opposite of what public funding for the arts is meant to do, as art that already thrives on the market will do better, and art that does badly in the market will do worse. But once you have said this, you have said exactly what neoclassicism says: “catering for merit wants… is directed, not to the satisfaction of consumer sovereignty, but to the interference with it” (Edwin West and Michael McKee [1983], qtd. 167).

With Marx the problem becomes more interesting since, on Beech’s account, Marx “understands precisely that artistic production must be classified as outside capitalist commodity production” (185) altogether. Beech undertakes an extensive and astute reading of Marx’s fragment “Results of the Immediate Production-Process,” written for the third draft of Capital and printed as an appendix to Ben Fowkes’s English translation. Let us go straight to the source: “books, paintings, and all art-products as distinct from the artistic performance of the artist at work” are the product of a particular kind of labor, namely “non-material production” that “results in commodities that stand apart from the producer, so they can circulate as commodities in the interval between production and consumption.”2 About such products Marx is clear: “Here capitalist production is practicable to a very limited extent. Unless a sculptor (for example) engages journeymen or the like, most [artists] work (when not independently) for merchant’s capital, for example a bookseller, a relationship that constitutes only a transitional form toward merely formally capitalist production.” (R 133 / C 1048).

In a nearby passage, Marx tells us that “A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker” (R 128-29 / C 1044), an easily misunderstood term that simply means her work does not valorize capital: she produces beauty, but does not take part in a process that yields surplus value. “If she sells her singing for money, she is to that extent a wage laborer or a dealer in commodities” (R 129 / C 1044), depending on whether she is employed by a bandleader, say, or works independently. “But this same singer, engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing for money, is a productive worker, since she directly produces capital.” (R 129 / C 1044). Only at the last stage has her labor undergone the “the subsumption by capital of a mode of labor developed before the emergence of capitalist relations, which we call the formal subsumption of labor under capital” (R 101 / C 1021). Her employer might extend the working day—make her perform more often for the same pay—but it is hard to imagine the entrepreneur ploughing a portion of profits back into transforming “the real nature of the labor process and its real conditions” (R 117 / C 1034-5)—automation, deskilling, and so on. “Only when this occurs does the real subsumption of labor under capital take place” (R 117 / C 1035), and only with real subsumption do we enter the permanent revolution of the capitalist production process. As far as the commodification of art is concerned, we have nothing to worry about. After all, as Beech points out of his own field in another context, “there is no labour market for the visual arts” (178): “no artist applies for the job of being an artist, no artist is employed in such a job by a firm, and… artists are not paid wages (178). Commodities as such pre-exist capitalism: in fact, they are one of its preconditions. So if we are not worried about the specifically capitalist subsumption of labor into a self-revolutionizing valorization process, what do we worry about about when we worry about commodification?

There is, however, a labor market in the visual arts, a fact that does not so much disprove Beech’s point as reconfigure it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics produces an “Occupational Outlook Handbook” that predicts trends in the U.S. labor market. “Arts and Design Occupations” are predicted to increase “from about 773,100 jobs in 2014 to about 789,700 jobs in 2024.”3 (To get a sense of scale, compare about 261,900 graphic designers in 2014 with 913,500 home health aides). “Projected growth will be due to increased demand for animation and visual effects in video games, movies, television, and on smartphones. As companies continue to increase their digital presence, more art and design workers will be needed to help create visually appealing and effective layouts of websites and other media platforms.” A character animator for a video game company performs directly productive labor, and her job is subject to deskilling, automation, and all the rest. For that matter, so does our singer. The production process for the music commodity—a CD or a download—has followed and continues to follow the familiar trajectory of saved labor through increased organic composition of capital. A staggering amount of musical knowledge has been incorporated into machines, and distribution—on Marx’s account the last stage of production rather than the first stage of circulation—proceeds now with a fraction of the labor input it did even a decade ago. That our singer’s job is still recognizable—and the advent of autotune is only an easily audible reminder that even this is far from straightforwardly true—is no more important to the status of the commodity that emerges from the production process as a properly capitalist commodity than is the fact that a machinist’s job is still recognizable. These changes in the production process leave their marks, often very deep ones, on the product of musical labor. However, as we shall see shortly, none of this—thankfully, as discussions of productive and unproductive labor get tedious in a hurry—is immediately relevant to the issue at hand.

Now, obviously, this isn’t what Beech is talking about at all. Video games and pop songs are the culture industry, not art. (But are we willing to say, a priori, that no pop commodity can be a work of art?) But then Beech does not quite mean that artistic labor cannot be really subsumed under capital; it is rather that the kind of artistic labor that produces something we think of as obviously and unproblematically art (as we cannot quite think of the pop song) is not really subsumed under capital. Adorno’s concern in the culture industry argument was not that ambitious oil painting (or things like it) would become commodified, but rather that ambitious oil painting and things like it would cease to exist, crowded out by things like video games and pop songs. The scenario is not unimaginable: a perfectly functioning culture market, without countervailing institutions and run perhaps on Peacock’s voucher system, would tend toward it.

It turns out that Beech shares Adorno’s concern. As we have already seen, “the agenda of the market” (123) concerns Beech throughout, and it reaches a kind of crescendo at the end of the book: “the left have been ill-prepared to defend art against market forces, incapable of distinguishing between those artists who produce commodities for the market, and those who do not” (356). One of his most important arguments, one I will not have space to engage in full here, is for government subsidy as “the only force strong enough to curb the power of the markets” (368). Beech’s instincts here (as himself a practicing artist) work somewhat against the grain of his official analysis. Indeed, by the final chapter the question of artistic labor has virtually disappeared, and when the book arrives at its climax—a ringing peroration on a “utopia for art”—the market and its antagonism to aesthetic value have emerged as Beech’s primary concern: “Our utopia for art must be based on discourse as a non-market mechanism for attributing value to art and this must be democratised not merely by extending existing competences but by subverting the expert with philistine knowledge. The market cannot bring this about” (370). Except for the philistine thing, which strikes me as a little undefined, I wholeheartedly agree with this. For Beech, the problem is not the real subsumption of artistic labor, because genuinely artistic labor cannot be really subsumed – not empirically, but by definition. The problem is rather markets, which threaten to supplant aesthetic judgment with market judgment, a usurpation that would have the effect of “artists who produce commodities for the market” crowding out “those who do not.”

The labor standpoint, which Beech is not alone in exploring in this context, had a certain hard-nosed appeal, but it’s not the mediation we’re looking for. Astoundingly, Beech never asks the obvious question: what does it matter if the work of art is a commodity? A pair of shoes being a capitalist commodity—or a pre-capitalist, “simple” commodity, or a non-commodity—has, unless we are talking about Heidegger’s pair of peasant shoes, no bearing at all on its being as a pair of shoes. The same goes for hammers, road salt, wallpaper. But it matters to Beech (he has written nearly 400 pages on the topic) whether works of art are commodities like any other. For Marxists at least, the problem with the shoes (and with the hammer, the salt, the wallpaper) has nothing to do with questions about its status as a pair of shoes and everything to do with what goes on in the labor process, “the hidden zone of production, on whose threshold it is posted: “No admittance except on business.”4 (K 189 / C 279-80). While there is no lack of exploitation in the culture industry, such exploitation concerns us in precisely the same way it does in any other industry. What is at issue is why the commodity-being of the work of art matters to its status as a work of art, while the commodity-being of a hammer does not matter to its being as a hammer.

In order to account for his concern with the market, Beech invents the concept (but it does not quite yet amount to a concept) of “commodification without commodification”: something like the reality of the appearance of the commodification question, which, as Beech himself remarks, has a “material basis” (123) in the logic of the market as the universal metabolic process in a developed capitalist society. The ideology of consumer sovereignty (or, if you like, “affect,” “punktum,” “the emancipation of the spectator,” “relational aesthetics,” or even, in most but not all of its acceptations, “political art”) proclaims, in its various vocabularies, that the customer is king. If the customer is king, the artwork bears no normative force: rather than challenging forth judgments, it merely elicits preferences. From this standpoint the market is prior to labor: only if market preferences triumphed once and for all over aesthetic judgments would the real subsumption of artistic labor (that is: the real death of art) be in view. Instead of starting with labor, we must start with the market.

Markets preexist capitalism, as does the commodity—indeed Marx’s word is not a specialized one at all, just Ware, goods produced for exchange—so the specificity of a Marxist critique of the art-commodity might seem to pose a problem. But really things aren’t so serious. The tendential universality of the market as the instrument of social judgment is both an ideologeme (Becker, but also Adam Smith) and a real process (actually existing voucher schemes, but also the attack on labor unions). As we all know, the logic of the commodity, that bourgeois obsession of “Western Marxism” and symptom of its historical defeat (but aren’t we all defeated now, at least for the present?), is laid out in Part One of Capital I. In the second chapter of that Part, the chapter on exchange, Marx lays out the logic of the market: his own version of “consumer sovereignty,” which I have explicated as thoroughly as I am able elsewhere.5 We are all familiar with those passages of the Grundrisse and The Communist Manifesto that describe the necessary expansion, both intensive and extensive, of the market, but let us take a moment to remind ourselves:

Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome: first, to subjugate every aspect of production itself to exchange….Trade appears here no longer as a function between independent productions for the exchange of their excess, but as an essentially all-encompassing precondition and aspect of production itself.6

It is the tendential universality of the market as the sole organ of social metabolism that represents the originality of the capitalist market; the structure of the market described in Chapter 2 of Volume I applies otherwise to capitalist and pre-capitalist markets alike. The main feature of the exchange of commodities, as I have tried to show elsewhere, is to subtract normativity from the product of labor: this feature distinguishes the commodity in pre-capitalist and capitalist exchange alike. This is the point of Marx’s detour into the phenomenology of the market (since “commodities cannot go to market and exchange themselves… we must look behind them, to their owners [K99 / C 178]), but neoclassicism’s “consumer sovereignty” agrees here with Marx: in commodity production, consumer preference is prior to the intention of the producer, which is entirely subordinated to the goal [Zweck] of exchange. The buyer expresses a preference—different buyers express different preferences, with the same commodity or with different commodities—but does not need to supply a reason.

The subtraction of normativity (the a priori disqualification of Beech’s “judgments of value in art”) is what we worry about when we worry about the “commodification” of art. Since meanings are normative (you can misunderstand a meaning, but then you have misunderstood it), the commodity, produced for exchange, can have no meaning. It can only elicit (or fail to elicit) a preference: consumer sovereignty. Most of us, most of the time, are rightly worried about the labor process: speed-up, automation, and the rest. But for the work of art, the threat of its “real subsumption under capital” is posed via the mediation of the market: commodification means subsumption under the market; it means the erosion of the normative force of the artwork.

In the fragment from which we have mainly been reading, Marx writes:

The more production becomes the production of commodities, the more each person has to become a dealer in commodities and wants to make money, be it from a product or a service… and this money-making appears as the purpose [Zweck] of every kind of activity. (R 125 / C 1041)

Here, in other words, is the conceptual basis for Beech’s “commodification without commodification.” If we remember that the Kantian formula for aesthetic judgment is “Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck,” purposiveness without purpose, we begin to see why aesthetic judgment is incompatible with the market, why the market is a threat for the work of art, why commodification is a problem. Aesthetic judgments in Kant are made without reference to external uses, either idiopathic ones (preferences, market-like judgments) or teleological ones (ends, state-like judgments). In an aesthetic judgment we find something “beautiful”—a term of art in Kant, the coordinates of which are not established with reference to ugliness or difficulty but in opposition to idiopathic and conceptual judgments, along one axis, and to the sublime, on the other—but we are indifferent to its existence. The work of art is, in its being as an artwork, exempted from use value, which is the only way it can be exempted from the economic. In its being as a use value, it for that reason also bears an exchange value—and in a society whose metabolism is the market, exchange value is logically prior as Zweck or purpose. For hammers this is not a problem—Estwing’s purpose (making money) is accomplished by fulfilling mine (having a good hammer); the problems arise out of sight of the market, in the production process. But for the work of art, this is a problem, since the logic of the market is consumer sovereignty. Beech sees this clearly: “One thing we can say about all judgments of value in art is that they are necessarily non-economic” (363). It’s not—on Beech’s submerged account—that art is uncommodified because artistic labor resists subsumption under capital; it is rather that artistic labor is unsubsumed because aesthetic judgment presupposes something in the artwork that is extra-economic. Beech’s understanding of aesthetic judgment, whether he acknowledges it or not, stands in a line that runs from Kant through Schiller through Marx (for whom artistic composition stood in for disalienated labor)—through Adorno and Lukács, who come in for some rough treatment in this book. Adorno understands that in a society like ours nothing is a priori exempt from the logic of the commodity—artworks have cunning, but no resistance—and so the potential commodity-being of the artwork must be confronted rather than denied: a thought Beech might tarry with for a while. But Lukács in particular is Beech’s ally. The work of art in Lukács is not the expression of reified society, as Beech implies without quite saying, but its other.7

The “real subsumption of the work of art under capital” is an ideologeme: if the work of art were really so subsumed, it would cease to be a work of art, and would be no more worth talking about, and no more worth talking about differently, than any other commodity.8 The incoherence of postmodern ideology was to insist explicitly on the commodification of the work of art while insisting implicitly that it was still worth talking about as a work of art. (There were coherent versions as well, but they precisely didn’t talk about the work of art as a work of art but rather as a private good or flattened “culture,” which is indeed ordinary even if artworks are rare). But it can’t function as an ideology without being well-grounded in appearances. Artworks are not private; by their very nature, they have to circulate: in the case of the visual arts, to be “made available to others through exhibition, reproduction, documentation, and other forms of display” (355). Visual art is fortunate to have modes of circulation that have some independence from the market. Other arts–television, if it can support art at all; non-erudite music—are not so lucky. What we need is not “a detailed and accurate economic analysis of art” (256) but rather a study of the medium-specificity of the relationships of the various arts to the market, and of how works in the various arts manage to assert their workness against a market that, by its nature and quite aside from anyone’s intention, insists that they are just commodities.

No less a figure than Jeff Wall has endorsed Beech’s project, and one can see why: when Julian Stallabrass, for example, dismisses Wall’s work as “spectacularly commodified,” the word has lost all meaning: all that remains is a leftish-peevish tonal marker.9 Stallabrass accuses Wall of nursing the ambition of being hung in museums and galleries, and of helping to produce an account of his own work that would legitimate its hanging in museums and galleries. It’s hard to construe this as a scandal. One can produce an entirely cynical, vulgar-Bourdieusian account of Wall’s success (or anyone else’s) in the restricted field of museums, galleries, art journals, and art history departments. But the process this describes is the precise opposite of commodification. If a work of art is displayable, it has display value, a use value, and in a society like ours it therefore has an exchange value and is a commodity—a residually “pre-capitalist” commodity if you like in the sense that it need not feed a process of capital accumulation, but fully a commodity in that circulating as art presupposes the possibility of circulating on a market. But a restricted field is not only not a market, it is structurally and by design the precise opposite of the market; in a society saturated by the ideology and the reality of the market, restricted fields are rare non-state spaces that are not structured like a market. (Of course these spaces are not pure, but they are spaces where market logic is understood to be a problem rather than the norm). One seeks admission to the restricted field, and contributes to it by participating in it, precisely in order to be free from consumer sovereignty, from the aggregrate judgment of the anonymous market. In a restricted field, judgments matter, preferences don’t—which is why Stallabrass’s critique takes the form of an essay rather than that of simply preferring to look at Sekula. (And it is why, as Beech plausibly insists, parameters for market prices are established by critics who, in their capacity as critics, are not market actors at all). Of course, as with any field, there are constraints and barriers to entry, which Wall (or anyone else) must negotiate: only certain kinds of work hang in a museum, just as only certain kinds of work run in NLR. But nobody said entry into the restricted field got you freedom: heteronomy to the restricted field is, in a society like ours, the price that has to be paid for a specific autonomy: a provisional, field-dependent autonomy from the logic of a commodity form that is also, as a displayable thing, the artwork’s material support.

Perhaps the thesis of Stallabrass’s argument is distracting us from his real problem with Wall, which is that his pictures are legibly commodified through and through: the problem is not that they aim at the museum, but that they don’t belong there. Among Stallabrass’s associative remarks about Wall and advertising, one seems like it might bear some critical content. Of Wall’s digital manipulation, Stallabrass writes: “Contingency is not entirely abolished but intention saturates every point of the image, just as it does in the photography of advertising, commerce and the public-relations industries.” This is a bizarre understanding of the concept “intention.” In an advertisement, the only intention that matters is to sell a product. All manner of decisions can and do saturate an advertising image, but these are subordinate to the purpose (Zweck) of selling the product. In a successful work of art, all kinds of decisions are subordinate to a larger intention as well; but that intention is analytically identical with the meaning (Zweckmäßigkeit) of the work, so it makes sense to speak of the work as a whole as saturated with intention. As we saw, art-commodities may well bear the marks of industrial processes. A work of art may, on the other hand, choose to exhibit them, which is a different matter altogether. We can tell the difference between bearing marks and exhibiting marks because works of art tell us how to tell the difference, each time. That is what it means to be a work of art as opposed to some other kind of thing: a work is a thing that calls for close reading, a self-legislating artifact.

Perhaps, then, the intention itself is the problem: perhaps Wall’s pictures are too conformist or comforting and therefore not intentions at all but a kind of pandering: they’re not meanings, but selling points—consumer sovereignty after all. And indeed, Stallabrass finds Wall’s treatment of class too elegiac, too passive, too comfortingly pessimistic: photography as a “monument to the defeated working class.” It seems to me that this is reading between the photographs rather than reading the photographs. “Morning Cleaning” or “A View from an Apartment” would seem to me rather to stage something like a class antagonism that subtends the apparent peace of daily life. One of Wall’s consistent techniques is to juxtapose two uncommunicating and yet related worlds in a single picture: the port of Vancouver—metonymic site both of global trade and of class struggle—and the modest bourgeois apartment that overlooks it; or the Barcelona Pavilion as a site of work on one hand, and as an international design-tourism destination on the other.

The force of these juxtapositions is that they are not presented as allegorical: they are rather presented as just there. A rift yawns and is captured by the camera; passersby carry on with their business. The work of the photographic index, no matter how saturated with intention the image is, is to present meanings like these as if they were not meanings at all. In Martinus Rørbye’s “View from the Artist’s Window” (1825), the receding lines of the open casement lead the eye to a Danish warship, palpably connecting the interior world of the artist’s room to the world of maritime power and trade.10 In Rørbye’s painting, the objects in the foreground—empty sketchbook, plants in various stages of development, a caged bird—comprise an allegory: they do not appear as objects that are just there, but as objects that were placed there to tell a story. If we imagine Wall’s “A View from an Apartment” as a painting, the television in the foreground would function in the same way as Rørbye’s plants.11 Not only is it an imported consumer good—unquestionably a commodity like any other!—that has passed through this harbor or one like it; not only is it a third reflective glass surface and a third, and equally ignored, window; but the light from the harbor and the image of the container cranes is reflected in its surface. The reflected light from the cranes enters from the port (from the back of the picture), crosses the room between the two figures (intersecting but not entering their sightlines) and bounces off the screen out of the picture plane toward the viewer. The painted television would, like the plants in Rørbye’s window, telegraph its intendedness, insisting on being read allegorically: the worlds of production and consumption are hermetically sealed off from one another, but they nonetheless form one totality. This is a lesson one may well find congenial, but in a painting it would pose a political problem (what authority can this lesson have?) and an aesthetic problem (what relation can the immediately allegorical elements have to the form of a whole that does not mediate them?). In the photograph, however, this same meaning is presented as immanent to the just-thereness of the television and the just-thereness of the apartment—not a matter of intention at all—and this presentational immanence is essential to the plausibility of the picture. It is only after considerable time with the picture that we realize that the viewer is placed in the one spot in the room that would capture the image of the harbor in the television screen: in effect, the rhetoric of the photograph insists that the reflection in the television determines the form of the picture as a whole.12

Stallabrass’s smoking gun is Wall’s 2004 revision of his 1988 “Eviction Struggle,” retitled “An Eviction.” “Most significantly” writes Stallabrass,

in line with the change of title, Wall removes two figures who do not merely glance at the scene but watch steadily from a distance, and who may be read as officials or landlords overseeing the eviction. So we move from a piece that was a long landscape view of class conflict, to one that may more easily be read as a meditation on human imperfection, in which power relations are toned down and “struggle” is lost.

One might better understand Wall’s revision in the light of “Morning Cleaning” and “A View from an Apartment.” “Eviction Struggle” was an allegory. It dramatically staged class conflict; but the very staginess of the allegory was a problem, which derived from the fact that the image was wildly implausible in a way that ruined the picture and its politics at the same time. An eviction is a moment of class violence: but it doesn’t look like class violence, it just looks like the law. (Bank officials or landlords petition judges for eviction orders, but they don’t drive across town to watch them being executed). So by staging class struggle rather than producing the plausible fiction of having captured it, the 1988 picture loses the force of the index and turns the picture into a message, which one is free to like or dislike, agree with or not, but which does not carry the force of the actual. The 2004 version doesn’t look like a message; the stagedness of the eviction tableau is contained by its plausibility: we know that things like this happen; in the past decade, we have probably seen them happen. But now the ones who “watch steadily from a distance” are not bankers or owners, but the picture’s viewers: us. So the class antagonism in the picture has not ceased to exist, but it is no longer a personal antagonism between figures in a picture, which we were free to deplore without discomfort, but rather an antagonism between figures in the picture and forces that can’t be in the picture, because they are structural, and in which we are also implicated. Class antagonism has, in effect, been rotated ninety degrees: it now subtends a relationship that appears peaceful, namely that between the evicted and the viewers in the gallery.

Plausibility—a crucial moment of aesthetic judgment since Aristotle, and one that in photography is bound up with the rhetoric of the indexical trace—carries a certain kind of normative force: not the kind that laws have or the kind that mathematical proofs have, but the kind that artworks have. The problem with messages is that they carry no force; you either agree with them or you don’t. Stallabrass is free to prefer the message of “Eviction Struggle” to the one he (in my view mistakenly) finds in “An Eviction.” But preferences are market judgments, not scholarly or aesthetic ones. If Stallabrass is more interested in better messages than in better pictures, then he wants his art not less commodified, but more.

The value of this text requires some comment. There is of course the intrinsic worth of Horkheimer’s essay, and its relevance to one of the monuments of Western Marxism. What draws this text into the space of nonsite.org’s concerns is the intersection of union organization—what Horkheimer critically elaborates here under a general theory of “rackets”—and Marxism. To say unions and Marxism share a tense history is an understatement. Even a passing glance at Lenin’s What is To Be Done? indicates how centrally trade unions figured as an internal enemy to the Marxist cause. Horkheimer follows in this tradition in some large part. By the time Lenin came to write “Left-wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder in 1920, an essay devoted to the strategic art of compromise, he had altered, or substantially inflected, his view of the trade union movement as well as parliamentary politics. At this moment the Supreme Court is poised to offer yet another in a long series of blows against unionization in the United States. To what extent did and do Leftist thinkers contribute to the current assault on unions? To what extent can and should Marxism resist this tendency?

The invited respondents to Horkheimer’s text—James Schmidt, John Lysaker, Chris Cutrone, Nicholas Brown and David Jenemann, whose task is respondent to the above—take up various positions in regards to the ongoing debate around unions and Marxism. We hope that the publication of Horkheimer’s key text, and the responses by contemporaries will encourage further discussion around this problem.

—Todd Cronan, nonsite.org

This essay explores and rejects another prevalent notion of exceptionalism, the underclass myth that has been central to the defeat of welfare statism in the United States, and especially influential in shaping the market-oriented reconstruction of New Orleans. At the heart of the underclass myth is the view that “Negro poverty is not white poverty” to quote President Lyndon B. Johnson.4 In defending his influential 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor under Johnson, argued that it was “necessary to depict, and in terms that would be felt as well as understood, the internal weakness of the Negro community and the need for immense federal efforts if that community was to go beyond opportunity ‘to equality as a fact and as a result.’”5 Moynihan was writing in the aftermath of the 1966 mid-term elections which saw substantial Republican gains in Congress, and his arguments about the distinctiveness of black poverty reflected the accommodation of social liberalism to cynical electoral strategy, an attempt to appease growing reaction to desegregation and angst over black militancy among white voters. By adopting a focus on the cultural pathology of the black family—i.e. the prevalence of single parent, female headed households—he hoped to enlist the support of the “more conservative and tradition-oriented centers of power in American life whose enthusiasm for class legislation is limited indeed.”6 Moynihan’s Cold War political calculus created an opening for the rise of the New Right, and despite his best intentions, his and other Great Society liberals’ view that black poverty was rooted in culture rather than economic structures impacting the working class more generally has cast a long shadow over how many Americans think about inequality. Under this third notion of exceptionalism, it is not the city of New Orleans that is deemed unique, but rather its poorest black denizens, who are seen as a culturally distinct and deficient when compared to the middle class.

As the Katrina crisis unfolded, early sympathetic portraits of survivors in corporate media eventually shifted to familiar tropes of looters, snipers, and welfare cheats.7 While national and international media broadcasted aerial footage of residents calling for help on rooftops, swollen corpses floating in city streets, and throngs of desperate citizens clamoring for relief at the Superdome, some elites like real estate developer and restaurateur Finis Shellnut and Louisiana Congressman Richard Baker were loud and frank about how they hoped this would all end, with the large scale removal of the poor from the metropolitan region. Baker reportedly exclaimed that the catastrophic flooding and mass exodus of the city’s poorest were acts of divine providence: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”8 Shellnut was even more direct in expressing his revanchist vision: “Our party is about to get going again. The storm destroyed a great deal and there’s plenty of space to build houses and sell them for a lot of money . . . Most importantly, the hurricane drove the poor people and criminals out of the city and we hope they don’t come back.”9 Such open contempt for black, poor New Orleanians was not limited to the local power elite, as politicians and residents in other jurisdictions near and far braced themselves for the wave of evacuees, opening shelters and announcing relief programs with mix of fanfare and suspicion. As the media spectacle of the disaster faded into memory, it became all too common in the years after Katrina for locals in the farming towns and fishing villages of the Acadiana countryside, as well as Baton Rouge, Houston and elsewhere to quickly pin real and perceived spikes in property crime, drug arrests, and homicides on “those New Orleans people.”10

Although they expressed concern for the disaster’s victims and the decades of failed attempts to remedy poverty, wealthy do-gooders, volunteers, and liberal anti-poverty scholars continued to abide the same views of the poor as a species apart, lacking the wherewithal, work ethic, and daily habits allegedly possessed by the professional and managerial strata. Scores of renowned liberal sociologists and historians signed the “Moving to Opportunity in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina” petition authored by Xavier Briggs and William Julius Wilson which served as an opening salvo in the push to demolish the city’s remaining public housing complexes and test the widely held liberal hypothesis that breaking up zones of concentrated poverty and dispersing the poor residentially would enhance their access to social networks, jobs, and bourgeois tutelage.11 Philanthropists followed suit, with some like media mogul Oprah Winfrey and Canadian automotive parts maker, Frank Stronach building settlements for evacuees in suburban Houston and rural Louisiana respectively, where they hoped the poor might escape the crime and decay of inner-city New Orleans.12 Actor Brad Pitt created the Make It Right foundation to rebuild homes for residents in the area of the Lower Ninth Ward north of St. Claude Avenue, one of the last sections of the city to see electrical power and water utilities restored.13 Pitt’s project found widespread notoriety and support because it targeted a community with high levels of homeownership. Unlike the public housing tenants who were banished and demonized in public discourse, Lower Ninth Ward residents provided a respectable symbol of black working-class aspiration within an elite-driven recovery context that privileged the interests of property owners.

Aside from the efforts of C3/ Hands Off Iberville and other public housing advocates in the city, the Left beyond Orleans parish seemed either unable or unwilling to mount opposition to the prevailing poverty dispersal agenda.14 No major national demonstrations or campaigns were waged to save public housing in the city, despite the fact that many academics, journalists and activists advocated the right of return for all displaced New Orleanians and expressed concerns about “ethnic cleansing” of the city. Anti-public housing sentiment could be found at the grass roots as well. More than once during the first few years after Katrina, I can recall trying to engage native New Orleanians—black and white, current residents, and expatriates—about the pending demolition of public housing, only to hear most of them insist, often in hushed tones, “Well, those places really needed to be torn down, brother.” Indeed, the fate of public housing and of the city’s K-12 school system, which underwent wholesale privatization, revealed the limitations of racial justice framing as a way of comprehending the Katrina crisis and the complex politics of reconstruction, and the weaknesses of the contemporary Left which has been largely ineffective in challenging the concrete processes of neoliberalization—i.e. the gutting of the liberal welfare state and the promotion of new modes of regulation better suited to capital flows and profit-making—that have been central to the rebirth of New Orleans over the past decade.15 Both Megan French-Marcelin and John Arena offer critical analyses of the role of underclass discourse in advancing rent-intensifying real estate development, and making the contemporary housing crisis. Here I want to complement their work by examining how the prevalence of conservative ideology regarding the poor has impacted the working lives of New Orleanians.

The first part of this essay briefly revisits the Cold War origins of the underclass myth, the belief that chronic urban poverty is caused by the distinctive, dysfunctional culture of the poor. Despite their benevolent intentions, the arguments offered by Moynihan and his devotees obscured social reality and how class works. Since Moynihan, Left political forces in the Crescent City and throughout the U.S. have had difficulty contesting the culturalist arguments proffered by Cold War liberals, Reagan Republicans, and New Democrats that disconnect the working lives and quotidian interests of the black urban poor from those of other Americans. Over the past decade, underclass myths have circulated widely through Katrina-related literature and art, and public policy debates. Such myth making has shaped widely held perceptions of who deserved assistance and support during the immediate crisis, how reconstruction should be funded and carried out, and whose interests should matter in the “new” New Orleans. In response to liberal anti-racism and underclass ideology, the second half of this essay offers an alternative approach to thinking about inequality that draws on Marx’s notion of the industrial reserve army and illuminates the political uses of unemployment and its economic consequences. Against liberal accounts that emphasize the social damage inflicted by racism and exclusion, I examine how racial animus and labor segmentation worked within the process of proletarianization, the continuous reproduction of a compulsory wage labor force, in the city since the 2005 disaster. Labor arbitrage and deregulation, the commodification of formally public goods and services, and mass layoffs of public employees had the immediate impact of inducing vulnerability for workers while creating favorable labor market conditions for capital during the formative context of recovery and reconstruction, and the longer-run restoration of tourism and real estate-driven economic growth.

The Enduring Power of the Underclass Myth

Although the practice of characterizing the poor as lazy, immoral, and uncivilized is a long-standing feature of industrial culture, the contemporary American notion of the underclass finds its more immediate foundation in Cold War liberalism, with Moynihan’s 1965 report on the black family serving as a cornerstone.16 Moynihan advanced an analysis that would only grow more powerful and influential, as the New Deal coalition fragmented, and as the visions of social justice generated by interwar labor militancy, popular front communism, and even progressive Keynesianism lost their hold on the popular imagination. Moynihan’s thesis evolved within the context of two overlapping social conflicts. The first, the battle to overthrow Jim Crow segregation, was primarily sectional and openly political. The second, black urban poverty and unemployment, was national and had its roots in peacetime industrial demobilization and changes in the forces of production, namely the increasing use of automation and cybernetic command in manufacturing. The culminating saga of civil rights reform provided the impetus for his work, but Moynihan’s 1965 report spoke more directly to the festering problem of relative surplus population in Northern cities. He explained this problem, not through economics however, but through the alleged cultural deficits of black families that he argued were matriarchal and pathological. His thesis and those of his contemporaries like Oscar Lewis and Kenneth Clark were penned out of a sense of anti-racist commitment and sympathy for the poor, a conscious political attempt to marshal state aid to address urban inequality and immiseration.17 Their arguments emphasized alleged cultural pathology as a legacy of racism and called for anti-discrimination policy and targeted services, but as Touré Reed illustrates here, when addressing the plight of urban blacks, Moynihan rejected the kinds of social democratic measures advocated by labor and civil rights progressives.18

Millions of Americans joined the middle class in the decades after the Second World War, benefitting immensely from a combination of labor protections, broadly redistributive measures, and supply-side stimulus, such as the G.I. Bill, FHA mortgages, Defense Department contracting, strong investments in public schools and higher education, and the construction of the Eisenhower interstate highway system, which literally paved the way for suburban residential and commercial development.19 Moynihan and other Cold War liberals held that blacks had been left behind by such progress primarily because of institutional racism (e.g. redlining, the use of restrictive covenants, and other forms of housing and labor market discrimination), which denied access to growing prosperity, jobs, and housing. This focus on ethnic barriers shifted the terms of debate on the Left from the underlying forces of technological unemployment towards the cultural sphere.  Although Moynihan’s intentions were altruistic, his work was inevitably taken up by Reagan Republicans as justification for dismantling the welfare state and for turning to aggressive policing and hyper-incarceration to manage social inequality. The Cold War liberal tenets expressed in Moynihan’s 1965 report, that poverty is due primarily to institutional racism and the dysfunctional culture of poverty, have only grown more hegemonic with the end of the Cold War and the era of neoliberalization, which has not only marketized public goods and services, but eroded the faith of many Americans that public interventionism might be used to address the mounting social and ecological problems of our times.

The Katrina crisis revived liberal anti-racist and underclass arguments in ways that either misunderstood or willfully obscured the actual class interests at play and political alignments on the ground in the city, and consequentially, such arguments had the effect of empowering those voices within the black population most closely aligned with the interests of the downtown recovery-growth coalition while silencing those of the displaced, public housing residents, city workers, and the working class more generally.20 A year before the Katrina disaster, actor Bill Cosby offered one of the most unvarnished expressions of underclass ideology during an address to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education- Topeka, Kansas case, which overturned the “separate but equal” precedent undergirding Jim Crow segregation.21 Though his star has fallen more recently in light of allegations that he drugged and raped dozens of women, at the time of the 2004 speech, Cosby was one of America’s most beloved public figures, having risen to national prominence through an eponymous television sitcom about black middle-class family life in Brooklyn during the eighties. The fictional Huxtable family, with its idyllic urban lifestyle, successful professional parents, and obedient, upwardly mobile progeny were the antithesis of the impoverished, female-headed households described by Moynihan, and in the eyes of Reagan Republicans and some black elites, they were the solution to the deteriorating inner-city social environment of joblessness, failing schools, gang warfare, and drug trafficking. In addition to his wildly popular television series, Cosby also penned two best-selling books, Fatherhood and Love and Marriage that further cemented his reputation as America’s favorite father figure and doyen of an affable neoconservative politics. His 2004 speech rehearsed many of the familiar Cosby Show themes of parental responsibility and self-help, but they were delivered with a biting contempt for the urban poor.

The victories of the civil rights era had delivered unprecedented recognition and affluence to the black professional class but against such progress, Cosby charged, “the lower economic people are not holding up their part of the deal.” He then proceeded to lampoon and derogate the alleged behaviors, manners of dress, child naming practices and language of the urban black poor, and at one point he even suggested that rising incarceration rates and acts of police violence were justified given these behaviors.22 While some expressed discomfort with his choice of words and harsh tone, few openly criticized the content of his remarks, and others like then Illinois Senator Barack Obama openly endorsed Cosby’s message.23 In fact, as president, Obama has developed his own trademark brand of underclass myth-making, routinely evoking the shiftless figure of “Cousin Pookie” as comic relief when addressing black audiences and as a vehicle for insisting on fatherhood and personal responsibility as solutions to all manner of problems facing the black urban poor. As further evidence of the popularity of Cosby’s underclass riff, after this initial speech for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he was invited to deliver the same sermon at the national gatherings of the Urban League, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH coalition, and the Congressional Black Caucus, some of the central organizations of post-segregation black political elite. In the fall of 2004, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick summoned Cosby to lead an invitation-only “town hall” meeting to address the city’s soaring homicide rate.24

And even after the Katrina disaster when some liberal activists and public figures were emphasizing institutional racism as the central cause for the death and suffering that ensued, Cosby doubled down on his crusade against the underclass. It is worth noting here that the liberal anti-racist framing of the disaster and Cosby’s underclass myth-making are equally wrong-headed as interpretation and as politics. Both arguments root contemporary inequality in earlier historical processes (slavery and segregation) while devaluing the explanatory power of capitalist political-economy in the present. These two contemporary interpretative strands, both descendant from Moynihan, favor culturalist solutions of a slightly different order. Purveyors of the underclass myth call for the rehabilitation of poor blacks, but for those who abide the institutional racism argument, it is whites who need to be transformed, exorcised of their “deep seated” racism and made conscious of “white privilege.” The scores of academics and activists who saw the Katrina disaster as primarily the consequence of slavery and Jim Crow segregation misrepresented the empirical reality of the catastrophe, the fact that the contraflow evacuation worked for middle-class blacks as effectively as it did for middle-class whites, and for those who died or found themselves stranded in the city as it flooded, it was class (and secondarily, age) that was the common denominator, not race.25 Those who perceived institutional racism as the motive force for the disaster also neglected the culpability of a few decades of black political governorship of the city and their role, both in creating the conditions of concentrated risks that produced the disaster’s uneven effects and in presiding over a neoliberal recovery and reconstruction agenda that has subordinated the interests of workers, renters, and the homeless. In the face of these class dynamics, liberal anti-racists can only proffer “internalized racism” and “classism” as explanations of the political choices of powerful black elites, but such concepts fail to identify in any satisfying way how contemporary investor class interests are shared across ethnic, racial, and other affinity categories.

Both institutional racism and underclass arguments have performed the work of legitimating the emergence of this multiracial, corporate-centered recovery-growth coalition. In asserting that all blacks are universally injured by systemic racial discrimination, the former has guaranteed that black political elites retain a place as brokers in the local governing regime, while the latter has insured that the black working class remains largely excluded from the same process of designing and implementing the city’s reconstruction. During the spring of 2006, at a moment when many New Orleanians remained displaced and unsure if they would ever return to their beloved city, Cosby addressed a crowd of around 2000 outside the Morial Convention Center, and without pause, shifted the focus from local and federal government failure towards the very victims of the disaster, citing pre-Katrina problems of homicide, drugs, and teen pregnancy. Cosby represents one of the harshest expressions of underclass thinking, but the same core sentiment was advanced by others after the Katrina disaster.

Only six months after the Katrina crisis, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, in a New York Times essay titled “A Poverty of Mind,” dismissed the liberal explanations of racial inequality and crime that had circulated widely since the Katrina crisis, and attempted to breathe new life into the culturalist thesis descended from Moynihan. “What has happened,” Patterson explained “is that the economic boom years of the 90’s of the most successful policy initiatives in memory—welfare reform—have made it impossible to ignore the effects of culture.”26 He pointed to the employment opportunities taken by immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean as evidence that racism is no longer an adequate explanation for the dismal state of black urban communities. Instead, he argued that the plight of joblessness and crime confronting young black men was due to “cool-pose culture,” which he described as “hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture.”27 Of course, none of these traits are unique to black male adolescents and could just as easily describe the daily habits and preoccupations of affluent New England boarding school students, or for that matter, blue-collar youth living in busted Carolina mill towns, but Patterson claims that unlike black youth, whites (and apparently black and brown immigrants) know “when it is time to turn off [the rapper] Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book.”28

Patterson is able to respond with such simplistic anecdotes because at this historical moment, the underclass myth has achieved commonsensical power within American discussions of race and poverty. After decades of demonization and scapegoating of the black urban poor in television, film, political campaigns, evening news reports, video games, everyday conversations, and social media memes, and the actual criminalization and mass imprisonment of African Americans through the War on Drugs, the causal relationships between blackness and criminality, and between poverty and immorality, sadly no longer need to be proven in the court of public opinion. With the ideas of Cosby and Patterson coursing through public debate, it is not surprising that few contested New Orleans city councilman Oliver Thomas when he said that the city did not need any more “soap opera watchers” returning to public housing. Such depictions of idleness and dependency slander the many public housing tenants who work for living, often taking on multiple jobs to make ends meet, but such rhetoric has acquired an outsized and dangerous social power in the wake of a few decades worth of neoliberal rollback, stagnant real wages, the disarray and limitations of contemporary left politics, a weakened labor movement, and the cumulative effects of all these changes on many Americans’ sense of political possibility.

Such underclass images of the black poor resonated widely after Katrina, due to the media optics of the crisis itself and to the enlarged market and audience for Katrina-related cinema, literature, and artistic production. Many of these post-Katrina works, like the films Trouble the Water and The Whole Gritty City, draw on culturalist explanations of inequality, even as they attempt to inspire sympathy for the most vulnerable New Orleanians.29 Such films, of course, lack the social meanness of right-wing underclass discourse, but instead offer a socially liberal rendition where the harsh conditions endured by the poor are aestheticized, and their tough life choices are mined for dramatic narrative tension.  New Orleans native Lisa D’Amour’s acclaimed Broadway play Airline Highway is indicative of these problems. Her play enters the world of several working-class characters who live in The Hummingbird, an extended-stay motel on the legendary stretch of Crescent City highway. The characters are a hardscrabble bunch. We meet Krista, a homeless stripper, Tanya, a drug addicted prostitute, Terry, an itinerant repairman, Wayne, the property manager, Sissy Na Na, a transgender person who serves as the community’s moral compass, Miss Ruby, a dying burlesque dancer who has been a matriarch to the motherless, and Francis, a roving poet, along with various other unnamed sex workers, Johns, and short-term renters. Their lively banter and storytelling conveys the difficult circumstances of thousands of workers in the underbelly of the New Orleans tourist economy. In a deviation from the black underclass depictions noted above, D’Amour presents us with an interracial lot, which is truer to the demography of the informal sector in many American cities.

D’Amour obviously hopes to inspire compassion for the Hummingbird’s denizens among a middle-class theater-going audience, but what we are left with at the end of the play is yet another ode to the underclass, which does not encourage us to think of our own complicity in a politico-economic system predicated on dispossession and exploitation. The play’s sociological insights do not venture beyond the familiar terrain of cultural relativism and insistence that we respect other individuals’ lifestyle choices. There are moments when D’Amour pokes fun at the bad behavior of tourists and the vapid culture of the middle class. Bait Boy, a former Hummingbird resident who has returned to show off his good fortune, brings along his teenaged stepdaughter, Zoe, who wishes to study the dregs who populate the Hummingbird for a school project on subcultures. Their presence, Bait Boy’s conflicted feelings about the life he left beyond in New Orleans, and Zoe’s naïve assumptions and offensive research questions for the residents, are effective means of juxtaposing the culture of bourgeois strivers with that of the urban servant class, but at times this sharp contrast devolves into caricature.

D’Amour takes us into the lives of these workers, but she presents us with an insular portrait, one that showcases the behaviors of the poor largely disconnected from the class relations that impoverish them. We encounter the effects of oppression, but the motive forces remain safely off-stage and out of view. All of the action unfolds in the Hummingbird’s courtyard and in the characters’ reminiscences. Although the elaborate set replicates the fine details of the aging motel, creating a sense of immersion in their world, this is deceptive. We never encounter any pimps, bosses, enforcers, restaurant managers, bar owners, social service bureaucrats, probation officers, or vice cops. Wayne, the motel’s gregarious manager, provides us with our closest encounter with this intermediary layer of the class structure, but his character may reveal most effectively the soft core of the play’s politics. The social antagonism underlying his class role, that of protecting the interests of the landlord and extracting rent from the tenants, is largely diminished, superseded by his personable character and humility.  He’s deeply sympathetic to the plight of the Hummingbird’s residents, and as we later discover, madly in love with Tanya. He seems to be the only person standing in the way of the owner’s plans to sell the parcel and raze the motel to make way for big-box retail development. At one point Wayne recounts his own fall from grace, revealing how he squandered the inheritance of his industrious immigrant forbears. Despite his middle-class origins, Wayne seems to be the victim of his own poor choices like all the other residents of the Hummingbird.

Airline Highway culminates in a raucous “living funeral” for Miss Ruby. When the bedridden matriarch finally appears, she offers her own eulogy and perhaps an elegy for the Hummingbird as well. She lauds the tenants in her dying moments as “the most beautiful group of fuck-ups I have ever seen . . . .” In the end, this is what D’Amour has to offer us, a lesson in liberal tolerance. We should see the dignity and beauty of the poor despite how far they stray from bourgeois norms. The representations of poverty offered by Cosby and Patterson on the one hand, and by D’Amour on the other, constitute two different modalities of underclass thinking. While the former dismiss outright the economic forces shaping contemporary American life and proffer cultural rehabilitation as the remedy, D’Amour attempts to explore the pan-ethnic experience of New Orleans’ servant class. Her efforts are noble but fall short, neither illuminating the source of their collective predicament nor provoking her audience to think critically about the political and moral issues that the Hummingbird’s inhabitants represent.

Working the Reserve Army

Although media coverage of post-Katrina New Orleans frequently celebrated the boom in cosmopolitan sectors like non-profits, education, film-making and medical research, as Aaron Schneider and Saru Jayaraman note, such accounts typically forget that this economic activity is dependent on the low-wage, hyper-exploited, largely black and brown labor force in the city’s construction and service sectors.30 Post-Katrina reconstruction has entailed large-scale mobilization of undocumented migrant laborers alongside a more secure stratum of un-waged volunteers, and the restoration of the city’s tourism-entertainment complex has relied extensively on largely non-unionized, seasonal, and part time workers as well as on informal and criminalized forms of work. At the level of everyday life, underclass mythology shaped the behaviors and decisions of individual workers and their attitudes towards one another, even as it cordoned off possibilities for meaningful solidarity. On a grander scale, when deployed by public officials and through mass media, underclass myths helped to legitimate these broader, intertwined processes of dispossession and expropriation initiated by ruling elites within the city and beyond, which have been central to the recomposition of the city’s labor force on terms that were most advantageous to capital.

As an antidote to conservative and liberal notions of underclass exceptionalism, a revitalized theory of the industrial reserve army might help to reintegrate the urban black poor into left analysis of American class relations. Contemporary focus on the precariat and precariousness has reoriented public debate towards the destructive implications of neoliberalization and global labor arbitrage. Although much of the debate has centered on the liberal, pro-labor writings of Guy Standing, various left intellectuals and activists have evoked this phrasing, alternately as an analytical placeholder, an analogy, and political slogan, rather than as a fully elaborated theoretical concept.31 Some, including this author, have used the term not as a replacement of older class categories, especially the proletariat, but as a means of historical analysis. The resonance of the “precariat,” even if only as a euphemism, stems from how well it demarcates the contemporary conditions of expendability, disempowerment, and social disruption experienced among wider swaths of the population, including the professional classes amid the decimation of public goods, labor rights, and market regulation of twentieth-century social democracy.32 The precariat is evoked in contrast to the unionized mass worker of the vanished Fordist-Keynesian epoch.

Despite the pangs the term has caused for some leftists, its usage in the streets and in movement organs represents an attempt, however limited, to devise and circulate a class language that names common experiences of workers across different social layers and global latitudes. Some critics charge that contemporary focus on the precariat is politically divisive and that the proletariat, whether in manufacturing or service, formal or informal, employed or unemployed, remains the central protagonist of anti-capitalist struggle.33 Others have pointed out that the term suggests novelty where more durable processes of capital accumulation are at work.  As Bryan Palmer notes, when the longue durée of class formation under capitalism is taken seriously, the novelty of the precariat vanishes, and precariousness is revealed as a central characteristic of proletarianization historically.34

Karl Marx’s notion of the reserve army remains a potent, albeit underappreciated strand of his thinking that may help us to see how exclusion and exploitation work together under capitalism, rather than counterposing them as independent phenomena.  Contrary to those critics who argue that Marxism neglects subject positions, the reserve army—and the demonstrated practice of historical materialism in Marx’s oeuvre—provide us with keen attention to the situated experiences of workers and how difference is mobilized within circuits of capital accumulation. This is especially relevant, given the current impasse within American intellectual and public life, where identitarian sensibility dominates and too often discounts class analysis and anti-capitalist politics. Marx and Friedrich Engels adopted the language of the “industrial army” from the British labor movement of the 1830s, namely the Chartists and Fourier Associationists, and deployed this terminology to address the social and economic role of what would later be termed the “unemployed” within the process of accumulation.35 The reserve army is comprised of different strata—the floating reserve, those who are temporarily unemployed; a latent portion comprising those not actively looking for a job but who may be pulled into the workforce to meet capital’s shifting valorization requirements; the stagnant segment, those whose employment is “extremely irregular” or who may never find work; and finally at the very bottom of the relative surplus population, the sphere of pauperism, “the hospital of active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army.”36 These different strata of the reserve are used by capital at various turns as a weapon against those who are actively working. In moments of labor unrest, the reserve provides a source of strikebreakers or hired guns. During periods of relative stability, their presence as competitors and as dependents (socially and domestically) on wage laborers and their public immiseration compel some more secure workers to accept intolerable conditions and low wages, for fear of unemployment.

This notion of the reserve army may be even more germane to our own times than Marx’s own, given the core contradiction he identifies regarding the general reduction in variable capital, i.e. living labor, that accompanies increasing development and efficiency of the forces of production, the problem of technological unemployment that spurred Moynihan’s and his contemporaries’ respective analyses of black urban life.37 Rather than treating unemployment as standing outside of the normal functioning of the industrial economy, a view borne out of the social-democratic normalization of work in the twentieth century, some theorists have insisted recently, returning to Marx’s insights, that unemployment is a fundamental dimension of capital accumulation.38 Although he contends that the reserve army suffers from a certain “conceptual exhaustion,” Michael Denning’s arguments regarding wageless life as a precondition of capital accumulation are in some ways consonant with Marx’s arguments regarding class relations between the unemployed, active workers, and capital. “Unemployment precedes employment and the informal economy precedes the formal, both historically and conceptually,” Denning declares. “We must insist that ‘proletarian’ is not a synonym for ‘wage labourer’ but for dispossession, expropriation and radical dependence on the market.”39 With these insights in mind, let us briefly revisit the evolution of post-Katrina New Orleans, in a manner that does not treat the plight of the black poor as exceptional, but as symptomatic of the more widely felt, interconnected processes of dispossession and pauperization unleashed by the ruling class after the 2005 Katrina crisis and the decade-long recovery that has transpired since.

After the Katrina disaster, those who wanted to rid the city of “concentrated poverty” got their wish, and yet those who needed vast quantities of low-wage labor to rebuild the city and resurrect its tourist economy got what they wanted as well. Though these developments seem paradoxical, they are in fact complementary, and taken together, the neoliberal measures advanced by local and national elites had the effect of inducing insecurity and, in turn, creating labor market conditions favorable to employers. Mass public sector layoffs, the deregulation of labor markets, the demolition of public housing and creation of a property owner-centered plan for reconstruction, and school closures and charterization, all made a populace which was already socially disrupted by the flooding even more desperate, and weakened the possibility of a popular alternative to the recovery designs crafted by the city’s governing elite.

Little more than a month after Katrina made landfall, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin proceeded to lay off some 3000 “nonessential” public workers. Pink slips were issued primarily to employees in the departments of finance, housing, technology, recreation, parks, and economic development, among others. Nagin’s actions were intended as a show of good faith to Congressional Republicans that he would manage the city in a fiscally conservative manner, but the move was counter-intuitive. Why would he rid the city of its black middle class, largely born out of public sector integration, and make both the recovery process and his own reelection more difficult? Another blow to public sector employees came with the de facto dismantling of the public school system and creation of a charter-only recovery school district. Thousands of unionized public school faculty, many of them African American women, were replaced with less experienced, mostly white, short-term teachers through the non-profit organization Teach for America. The social and economic impacts of these public sector layoffs were manifold. In the most immediate sense, this job loss severed the livelihoods of thousands of middle class residents, and created a tougher road to their return and, by extension, to the economic recovery of the depopulated city. Politically, these layoffs undermined a base of progressive political power, the public employees unions, especially the United Teachers Union of New Orleans, which had ramifications for how the city’s reconstruction would take place as well as for the shape and direction of state-level elections and the tone of public debates. It is no wonder that a neoliberal reformer like Bobby Jindal would ride so forcefully into the governor’s mansion in the aftermath of the Katrina crisis, after the most progressive bases of Democratic Party politics in the city and the state were so effectively occluded.

At the national level, George W. Bush’s presidential administration initiated a round of measures that systematically weakened labor protections, insuring strong profit margins for White-House-friendly firms such as Bechtel, Halliburton, the Shaw Group, and others that received lucrative, noncompetitive contracts, and also creating a race to the bottom in terms of wage floors and working conditions in the region. Bush immediately waived those provisions of the New-Deal-era Davis-Bacon Act that required federal contractors to pay a prevailing wage and to provide proof of citizenship for employees, following the precedent of his father, George H. W. Bush, Sr. who took the same deregulatory action after the 1992 Hurricanes Andrew and Iniki.40 The Department of Labor suspended federal wage restrictions for sixty days, as well as Executive Order 11246 that required federal contractors to file affirmative action plans.41 The federal government also temporarily suspended Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards throughout much of the Gulf Coast with the exception of Orleans Parish. With these labor protections suspended, the most vulnerable low-wage laborers were lured to the city, and while the Davis-Bacon provisions, OSHA standards, and other protections noted here were eventually restored, a pro-capital context of deregulation and hyperexploitation was already set in place.42 Such measures enabled the mobilization of a global reserve drawn primarily from Mexico and Central America, but also from as far away as Brazil and India, with the total number of migrants to the region during the immediate years after the disaster estimated to be at least 30,000.43

Without strong enough pro-labor organizations on the ground that might connect the incoming itinerant workers with natives, all manner of race baiting and xenophobia ensued. Nagin stoked nativist fears of job competition when he asked how he might ensure the city is not “overrun with Mexican workers.” Such anti-immigrant fervor drove a wedge between locals and newcomers, isolating an already vulnerable population and diminishing their means for political recourse and support. The documented abuses of migrant laborers during the early years of construction include incidences of gross underpaying and nonpayment, inadequate or nonexistent safety equipment, hazardous working conditions, squalid living accommodations, and the use of coercion and violence. The average workday was 10-12 hours, with some workers reportedly working 15-hour days. Sociologist Nicole Trujillo-Pagan details how popular stereotypes of Latinos as hard workers made them highly sought after by recruiters, and how their invisibility within the immediate disaster-recovery context and constant surveillance and harassment by Border enforcement and local police constrained their capacity to articulate widely felt injustices. Noting the broader problem this created for working New Orleanians, she concludes that Latino workers’ “dual location of being a ‘model minority’ and an ‘illegal alien’ meant that both blacks’ place and Latinos’ right to work within New Orleans were jeopardized.”45 Added to this conflict between newcomers and natives, the presence of legions of volunteer laborers was an under-acknowledged factor contributing to the precarity of migrant workers in the cleanup and reconstruction of the city.

In the first five years after Katrina, over one million volunteers cycled through the New Orleans metropolitan area, and contributed to recovery and reconstruction through debris removal, mucking, gutting, drywalling, painting, and landscaping.46 In her ethnographic examination of the privatized recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans, Vincanne Adams concludes that “the acts of witnessing and the affective surplus” produced during moments of catastrophe “have become themselves part of an economy in which affect circulates as a source of market opportunity for profit . . . . The affect economy we live within today makes use of affective responses to suffering in ways that fuel structural relations of inequality, providing armies of free labor to do the work of recovery while simultaneously producing opportunities for new corporate capitalization on disasters.”47 There are too many problems with voluntaristic approaches to disaster relief and reconstruction to address here, but the particular impacts of unpaid labor on wage laborers are germane.

Although volunteers were typically praised in periodic news coverage commemorating the disaster and marking the city’s progress, the negative consequences of volunteer labor on the prospects of wage-laborers in the construction industry have received scant attention. The presence of a seemingly bottomless reservoir of unwaged labor undoubtedly had the effect of devaluing migrant wage labor in qualitative and relative terms. Why would homeowners want to employ wage laborers if exuberant students and devout church members could complete the same work for free? Donated labor was both low-cost monetarily and free of the relations that might trouble the conscience of homeowners and the ascendant, triumphal narratives of recovery.  In turn, volunteer laborers relished the homeowners’ expressions of gratitude and tales of pluck and resiliency. For both homeowner and volunteer, this relationship holds great, mutually affective rewards, more desirous than the often publicized conditions of hyperexploitation and vulnerability associated with Latino male construction labor. The use of volunteer labor also bore negative consequences for working-class renters, since most NGO- and church-oriented recovery targeted single-family homes, reinforcing the bias towards homeowners reflected in the state of Louisiana’s Road Home program and other property-centered initiatives.

Housing conditions for low-wage workers in the region have worsened in the decade since Katrina. In fact, the city was named the “worst city for renters” in a 2010 CNN/ Money magazine report, and on average, the city’s renters spend 41 percent of their monthly income on housing.48 Casting doubt on the poverty dispersal strategy’s effectiveness, another recent report prepared by the New Orleans-based research organization The Data Center found that the razing of public housing and more expansive use of Section 8 vouchers has resulted in new forms of residential apartheid in the city. The study cites the loss of over 50 percent of rental units as part of the problem, but also and perhaps more ominously, pervasive landlord discrimination against voucher users, with some 82 percent of landlords either refusing to accept Section 8 vouchers outright or placing unreasonable requirements on voucher users.49  Like mass layoffs, the increased commodification of housing in a city like New Orleans produced immediate hardship and desperation that forced many workers to accept whatever they could get in terms of jobs and housing.

The hotels, bars, and restaurants that anchor the French Quarter and Central Business District have benefitted from these processes of enclosure and dispossession, but the greatest potential for workplace organizing and building a more just city may reside in the very heart of the tourism-entertainment complex. Even before Hurricane Katrina, one in every seven residents was employed in some aspect of the tourism industry. As the city has been remade since the 2005 disaster, that economy has expanded and now accounts for 13.7% of the local workforce and some 34,200 jobs.50 New Orleans’s tourism industry and its rapidly growing film and television industry—earning the city’s latest moniker, “Hollywood South”—now comprise a tourism-entertainment complex that valorizes the city’s creole heritage, indigenous culinary and cultural practices, and quaint architecture. Visitors spend upwards of $5 billion per year in the city, and generate over $300 million in tax revenues.51 Between 2002 and 2013, this combined cultural sector experienced 13.3% job growth.52

While the resurgence of the tourist economy has meant the return of good times for millions of visitors, and for the restaurateurs, hoteliers, and stakeholders of various multinationals with profitable investments in the city’s tourist zone, the experiences of workers within this economy has long been defined by low wages, few benefits, and insecurity. The restaurant industry makes up more than half of the jobs in the city’s tourism industry, but on average, restaurant workers made only $16,870.79 in 2008.53 Since 2007, the poverty rate in Orleans Parish has increased from 21% to 29% and in the New Orleans metropolitan area from 15% to 19%.54 More disturbing, child poverty in Orleans parish has increased from 32% in 2007 to 41% in 2012, and from 21% to 28% in the metropolitan area during that same period.55 Workers in the tourism sector achieved a significant victory in late September 2014 with the unionization of Harrah’s casino. The total number of union members in New Orleans’s tourism industry doubled overnight after UNITE HERE and Teamsters Local 270 won a card-check election among 900 hotel and restaurant workers.56 This union victory will hopefully serve as the foundation for more thoroughgoing organizing within the tourism sector, but if it is to create a more just New Orleans, that work must entail building cross-sectoral solidarity and a working class politics that engages those at the bottom of this tourist economy in the informal sector, a realm of partially proletarianized and often criminalized labor.

Within the New Orleans tourist economy, some work straddles the formal, regulated service industry and the informal sector, an intermediary zone of labor that is illegal but socially legitimated within the context of the post-industrial economy. Would the contemporary economies of New Orleans, Miami, or Las Vegas sustain themselves for long without a teeming army of sex workers, drug traffickers and dealers, pirates, hawkers, and buskers who all contribute in manifold ways to the mystique and experience of the tourist city? In the nineteenth century, these same workers might have been deemed the lumpenproletariat, but more socially permissive cultural attitudes and shifting labor market conditions render that term obsolete, as these forms of historically criminalized work have now become central to the reproduction of the contemporary urban identity. Pornographic film stars have surpassed some Hollywood actors in notoriety, and the pole dancing techniques of strippers are now taught in the suburban community center. Moreover, the illicit drug culture, even in the United States, is entering a post-Prohibition era with the normalization and decriminalization of marijuana. Workers in this urban economy, as a result, flow back and forth between formal and informal service sectors as dictated by market conditions and idiosyncratic personal needs and decisions. New Orleans’s niche within the broader national and global economy of tourism is largely predicated on its exceptionality as a zone of libidinal freedom and escape from the strictures of middle-class workaday existence, making the role of the informal and illicit economy more prominent in the reproduction of the city’s imagery and the consumer expectations of visitors. Finally, far from being the “bribed tool of reactionary intrigue” that Marx once denounced, some workers in the informal sector constitute progressive social forces in many places, and are organizing themselves as a class, in the form of unions like Syndicat du Travail Sexual (STRASS) in France, and through advocacy organizations such as the Sex Workers Outreach Project in New Orleans.

During every annual commemoration of the Katrina disaster, politicians and civic boosters trumpet the city’s recovery, and point to the expanding tourism-entertainment complex as evidence of renaissance. As I have briefly sketched out here, dispossession and social misery have, however, been central to the city’s physical reconstruction and the reconstitution of the tourist-entertainment complex’s low-wage, contingent workforce. The privatized recovery-growth coalition has benefitted economically and politically from the prevailing view that poverty is a consequence of cultural deficits rather than economic forces. On one hand, through mass layoffs in the public sector, deregulation of construction labor markets, public housing demolition, and rent-intensifying real estate development, the city’s propertied interests have produced displacement and precarity among the city’s working poor. On the other hand, the pervasive deployment of underclass rhetoric by members of the ruling elite, intellectuals, and other actors beyond the city limits has shifted the blame for worsening social conditions from these structural forces back onto the poor themselves. Some politicians as well have relied on blame labeling of undocumented immigrants, ex-offenders, the homeless, public housing tenants, and activists to divide the city’s working population against itself and encourage commitment to the current reconstruction and economic development trajectory. The poor and dispossessed are not a species apart. Rather, such thinking services the interests of liberal technocrats, NGO entrepreneurs, neoliberal politicians and commercial interests all too well. It is time that we finally dismantle Moynihan‘s culturalist framework of inequality at long last. Without critical left analyses that lay bare the contradictions shaping the working lives of millions of Americans, as well as viable political organizations that connect people across different social layers and builds solidarity around common experiences of precarity, the underclass myth will continue to work against any attempt to create concrete forms of social justice in New Orleans and beyond.

The revolutionary vision of emancipation continued to live on only in the slanders of the counter-revolutionaries.

—Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State” (1940)

The idea that “unions are nothing more than an object-lesson demonstrating in a practical way the uselessness of any action other than revolutionary politics,” was an idea popular when Eduard Bernstein wrote this line in the Preconditions of Socialism (1899).1 For Bernstein, of course, unions were one of the few “indispensable organs of democracy,” but he knew this idea was controversial, especially among Marxists. By the time Max Horkheimer offered his account of “The Impotence of the Working Class” in 1927, unions had become a central target of Marxist criticism.2 As Zamora’s essay makes clear, terminal unemployment, a condition that helped define a new post-proletarian revolutionary subject position, has been a core value of Marxist criticism at least since the 1960s. Here, I want to point out a few “preconditions” of Zamora’s account of the division of the working class in the hopes of a raising a few questions about whether the utopian vision of the precariat is a necessary feature of Marxist analysis or a dispensable one, and if it is dispensable, then what version of Marxism is this. Moreover, I wonder whether these earlier formulations of what we might call “lumpen idealism”—a set of claims that emerges as the theoretical foundations for diversity politics—might alter the general historical picture of neoliberal politics. If it is already the case in 1927 that subject positions—poverty as a mode of being—define a new political reality, then how does that alter our vision of the structural relation between diversity and neoliberal economics? What does the prefiguration of contemporary ideology in the prewar period amount to, if anything? Finally, it seems that the basic problem of Marxist analysis in the later 20th century up to today has been its incapacity to deal with changing political and, especially, economic phenomena. Obviously the word “changing” here is contentious from a Marxist perspective. Fine. Nonetheless, did the tenor or practice of various consumer critics, war critics, champions of the multitude, change a jot during or since the downturn? More like double down on 2007 terms, or 1967 terms.

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When Horkheimer’s “Impotence of the Working Class” appeared in Dämmerung in 1934—his first book, a collection of brief essays written between 1926 and 1931—it was by far the longest entry in the volume. Horkheimer’s text offers an analysis, and suggests revisions for, part 7, chapter 25, of Marx’s Capital, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.”3 Chapter 25 has been crucial to the work of several of us associated with nonsite because it is here that Marx explains the central function of unemployment in a capitalist economy and for that reason offers some important terms for understanding current-day economic facts, especially those associated with the economic downturn. In October of 2009, for instance, the unemployment rate in the United States reached 10% (as of today that number is around 7.3%). And while this is not quite comparable to the unemployment rates in Germany (or the US) when Horkheimer was writing—in 1929 around 1.5 million Germans were unemployed; within a year the figure had more than doubled and by early 1933 unemployment in Germany had reached a staggering six million or around 32%—his analysis provides some of the clearest terms available for understanding the theory of unemployment within Western Marxist thought.

Two things should underscored about the ongoing discourse of unemployment on the Left. First, that Horkheimer was clearly capturing or describing a “new” reality that had not received adequate attention within traditional Marxist theory. For Horkheimer, unemployment was so severe that it seemed to require a shift in the basic terms of political economy, above all a shift in the conceptualization of the so-called “subject-object of history” as Lukács defined it. Second, that the terms by which Horkheimer articulated this “new” subject of hopelessness became, as Zamora has brilliantly shown, the central ones of Leftist politics from the 1960s forward. While I will not be able to fill in the gaps between Horkheimer in 1927 and André Gorz (and Rancière, and Badiou, and Negri, and Zizek, and Butler, and Harvey, and Fraser) in the 1970s, I do want to suggest some larger continuities in the theorization of the unemployed. Once the door had been opened onto the phenomena of the chronically unemployed, it appeared there was no closing it. Which is to say, even though the intervening period—at least between 1945 and 1979—was characterized by something wildly different than rank unemployment, nothing about this fact altered the vision of revolutionary progress centered on the figure of the precariat. It would be fairer to say exactly the opposite. The “affluent society,” as Kenneth Galbraith described it in 1958, was the source of endless lament on the Left (the Right’s attitude toward the growing equality in wealth is another, but related, story).

What should strike us about Horkheimer’s analysis is at once the dissimilarity of the situation he describes and our situation, and the utter identity of the claims made against the (employed) working class throughout a period when the unions and the welfare state were making serious strides in the elimination of unemployment and the suffering associated with it. Of course, for Horkheimer and others, one of the central facts of the Nazi state was its realization of full employment. As I will show, this achievement was not viewed as a contingency, but rather spoke to the identity of capitalist and fascist efforts at eliminating unemployment (there were two forms of “state capitalism”). Moreover, if Horkheimer’s vision was to retain the revolutionary force of the unemployed against those of the owners and the employed (of any class), then, as of 2008, it has become clear that Horkheimer as well as the writers Zamora considers, have achieved their aims with unprecedented success. With one exception of course: high unemployment, low revolutionary force.

* * *

Part of Marx’s argument in chapter 25 of Capital is to show how with the increase in mechanization there is a decrease in employment. The consequence of this, according to Horkheimer, is a modification in the “reciprocal relations of the various strata of the proletariat.” It introduces a change in the “consciousness” of the “respectable employed worker,” including, or perhaps especially those with “temporary” jobs, and the consciousness of the “regularly unemployed strata.” What is at stake for Horkheimer, as it is for Zamora (and myself), is the “solidarity of the proletariat.” Horkheimer’s concern is that as the “community of shared interests [between employed and unemployed] shrinks more and more” so will the solidarity between the two groups. Horkheimer’s basic assumption is that there is a loss of shared interests among the two groups, not that there is a feeling that there is one (a feeling, one might add, that might be—or is—a product of “false consciousness”).

Horkheimer is quick to point out that there have always been various layers of the “reserve army.” In the earliest phases of capitalism there existed a lumpenproletariat—a “relatively insignificant segment from which the criminal element is recruited”—whose character was defined by “obvious qualitative contrast” with the proletariat as a whole. Excepting the lumpen, class division was formerly characterized by a “steady transition between those who worked and those who didn’t.” In the past someone who was out of work “might be hired the next day, and the man who had work was much like his unemployed colleague when he lost it.” High rates of turnover still lent themselves to common cause in the fight to eliminate the rule of capital. By 1927, the period of steady transition—high turnover—was over, and with it the solidarity of the proletariat. Unemployment occurred “from birth on” and it was increasingly tied to one’s basic self-definition.

What had changed? According to Horkheimer, the sheer “wretchedness,” the “utter hopelessness,” of contemporary life was so “unevenly” distributed that it made revolution increasingly a matter of “individual concern.” For the poor, but employed, one didn’t want to risk even the barest forms of revolutionary sentiment, and thereby risk becoming one of the unemployed. “For the employed workers whose wages and long-term membership in unions…assure a certain, albeit small, security for the future, all political acts involve the danger of a tremendous loss.” Alternately, for the unemployed, they have nothing to lose “but their chains.” This is the reason for the historically unprecedented “gulf” between the employed and not employed. The formerly unified proletariat become divided against one another as the unemployed lumpen become the revolutionary force and the employed (poor and rich) emerge as capitalists.

It should be clear that Horkheimer’s aim here is not to show the mistake that generates this vision of class interest, or how this kind of division between layers of the poor is the fulfillment of the most basic of capitalist fantasies. It is not a description at all, but an effort to introduce a shift in Marxist analysis. There is a new agent of history, one Marx could not have imagined: the wretched of the earth, one whose very existence is defined by joblessness.

At the foundations of Horkheimer’s analysis is the belief that “Work and misery no longer come together, people no longer experience both.” Here is the nub of Horkheimer’s account: those who work enjoy a degree of comforts (a tragic situation for revolutionary foment); those who do not, live a life of sheer suffering, a suffering that can only set them free in the long run. And while I will not elaborate this point here, I would argue that it is this claim that grounds the larger Frankfurt School account of political economy. It is the kind of claim Herbert Marcuse will make famous with his vision of “Liberation from the Affluent Society.”4 According to Marcuse, “The insanity of the society…is the degree to which it is capable of conquering poverty and reducing the toil of labor and the time of labor and of raising the standard of living.” It is insane to ease the lives of poor people (at least ones with jobs), or, more important, it is insane to rid society of poor people, because those formerly revolutionary (“wretched”) subjects necessarily find themselves more “integrated” (a word in obsessive circulation) into capitalist society. They won’t risk revolution, because their lives are too “comfortable.”

This is what Horkheimer means when he says (in a later piece of writing) that “Marx’s and Engel’s teaching that the struggle for higher wages and shorter hours of work would finally put an end to the prehistory of mankind is a pathetically secularized Messianism, infinitely inferior to the authentic one.”5 Marx and Engels were duped (like the employed poor) into believing that unions could save them. Beginning in 1940 Horkheimer developed a broad-ranging and influential thesis about unions, what he called “the theory of rackets.”6 In a world defined by rackets “All have become employees, and in the civilization of employees” everyone loses their “dignity.”7 As he put it in the same note on Marx and Engels, “rackets control everything more or less according to plan, the capitalists through conflicts among each other and with the unions.”8 It is important to see that Franz Neumann, at the same moment Horkheimer put forward the “racket theory” responded in detail with his account of Behemoth (1942).9 As Neumann observes in his introductory note to the book, he chose the word Behemoth to explain National Socialism because it described a “non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness and anarchy,” which is to say, it was anything but in “control of everything according to plan.”

In 1927 the separation of work and misery was not yet a matter of political ontology for Horkheimer. Horkheimer still recognized the structural function of the reserve army in the depression of wages. Nonetheless, the misery of the existing order bears “ever more exclusively” on the lower segment of the working class. But there remains a key problem with the “new element” of the excluded: they have “no understanding of theory.” They waver, they are disorganized, they are young, they are violent, they are mostly dumb. They lack those “human qualities” necessary to implement socialism. Those that have a “direct interest” in socialism (the unemployed) and those with a “clear theoretical consciousness” (the employed, but struggling) are found among separate elements of the proletariat.

These separate elements find expression in competing workers’ parties: Communist and National-Socialist. Again, one finds here a root claim of Frankfurt School analysis: the poor (but unionized) found their refuge among the Nazis while the “new element” joined the Communist Party. But there’s little ultimate difference. The “theoretical” expressions of the unemployed result in the “mere repetition” (the “undialectical preservation”) of the slogans of the Communist Party. As Horkehimer explains, the Communists are theoretically bankrupt. Rather than provide reasons for their beliefs, they “refer to authority.” They, like the fascists, use “physical force to make their better informed opponents see reason.” As for the reformists—Bernstein, after all, is still alive—they are no longer aware that “human conditions cannot be effectively improved under capitalism.”

If at the beginning of his account Horkheimer describes a shift in the nature of the proletariat then by the end he is describing the difference between “social groups.” The entire “inhumanity of the capitalist production process” is laid on the unemployed—alienation, poverty, marginalization, intolerance, disenfranchisement—while the worker assumes the “positive capacities acquired through his integration in the production process.” It is the putative task of the social democrats, defined here through a set of philosophical commitments to “relativism,” to make the two groups quarrel. If the two halves of the missing whole don’t add up, it is because the social democrats don’t want them to.

Throughout the 1930s Frankfurt School political economists Friedrich Pollock, Kurt Mandelbaum10 and Gerhard Mayer developed their analyses of “state capitalism” a set of claims then popularized by Marcuse in “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State” (1934)11 and Horkheimer in essays like “The Authoritarian State” (1940)12 and “The End of Reason” (1941)13 and in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). As I am suggesting here, these arguments are well under way with “The Impotence of the Working Class” of 1927, even if the terms are still being worked out in the text. By the time Horkheimer comes to publish his follow up to Dämmerung, the collection called Notizen (the two were published together in 1974 and in 1978 in English), any hedging of terms has been eliminated. Horkheimer’s aim in the later text is clear: it is practical politics of any kind that is at fault. Here is Horkheimer in a note entitled “Philosophy of History, a Speculation”:

Ultimately, everything in politics…adds up to the guaranteed, secure standard of living…. And here we come to the question concerning the substance of mankind, the actual speculation about the philosophy of history. If prehistory comes to an end [as Marx suggested] because food, housing and clothing are no longer and nowhere a problem for anyone, will the higher, the real history, culture as it is called, begin, or do the movies and the stars in the countries that have arrived show the kind of regression that will then set in? I believe that mankind will only have so-called nobler needs, needs beyond the natural ones, if these natural needs remain unsatisfied…. Even the violence which inheres in education really loses its ground when everything is available and misery at an end. It seems that regression is the only goal of progress.14

The total identification of politics with the provision of comforts seals the fate of any thought of this world. True culture (not the one provided by the culture industry) requires lack, requires suffering, to remain culture. And when history begins, learning ends: the “inherency” of violence in education is no longer justified in a world made soft through (false) security.

To preserve culture, one might be tempted to enforce poverty as lack. Or at least this is what Bertolt Brecht said after attending the first “seminar on needs” at Adorno’s home in Los Angeles in June of 1942. The seminar was chaired by Adorno and attended by Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Friedrich Pollock (to say Brecht, along with Hanns Eisler, were the odd men out would be an understatement). Among other things they discussed Vice President Henry Wallace’s “The Price of Free World Victory” from earlier in the year. Wallace spoke of the capacity for capitalism, through scientific advance, to satisfy basic human needs:

Modern science, which is a by-product and an essential part of the people’s revolution, has made it technologically possible to see that all of the people of the world get enough to eat. Half in fun and half seriously, I said the other day to Madame Litvinov: “The object of this war is to make sure that everybody in the world has the privilege of drinking a quart of milk a day.” She replied: “Yes, even half a pint.” The peace must mean a better standard of living for the common man, not merely in the United States and England, but also in India, Russia, China and Latin America—not merely in the United Nations, but also in Germany and Italy and Japan.15

To say that Wallace’s vision of the “century of the common man” was not embraced by the Frankfurt School would put it mildly. It was a deceptive utopia designed by the exploiters, whose purpose was to further integrate the exploited into the system of capitalism. Here is Brecht’s report in his Arbeitsjournal: “horkheimer quotes, with some alarm, a pronouncement of vice-president wallace’s, that after this war every child in the world must get pint of milk daily.”16 What was Horkheimer alarmed about?: the state of culture in a world well fed. Brecht continues: “the institute is already addressing the question of whether it might not be a colossal threat to culture if capitalism dispenses (as it is fully capable of doing, according to the economist Pollock) so much milk (not only of human kindness).” Distribution of basic needs to the poor results in the cessation of striving for difference, for that “qualitative leap out of the dimension of progress.”17 Brecht returned for some further insults two months later, for the second “seminar on needs,” this time the subject was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The thesis of the evening was (yet again) “when physical needs have been satiated…[Wallace’s speech continues to be a theme] spiritual needs suffer.” Pollock spoke of how “capitalism can rid itself of crises simply by means of public works.” (As Brecht quips, “marx could not predict that governments would one day just build roads.”18) Brecht finally took up the question as to whether culture required suffering. Looking around the room Brecht found himself in agreement with the Frankfurt School thesis on need: “the institute need only look around to see that affluence alone does not create culture, for is there not affluence here, and is there any culture?” Then again, “suffering has been created [by this] culture; so is barbarism likely to ensue if they put a stop to suffering?” Brecht’s formula is too neat; he clearly felt provoked. Nonetheless, to say that our culture—the assorted mystics of the unemployed on the Left—creates suffering is truer than Brecht could have imagined. Suffering is the defining trait of a heroic proletariat, the Multitude, that doesn’t know itself yet, but that the Left is helping to discover themselves—by making more of them, or at least providing the theoretical justification for their existence.

Amongst the features of neoliberal ideology that universities have tested and legitimated is the notion that creativity is the work of flexible, self-managing individuals trained to turn an innate capacity for “innovation” into saleable properties. The corollaries of this conception of creative activity have been widely noted. For example, even as universities praise results that lead to saleable intellectual properties or have economically instrumental applications, they show little interest in evaluating the social ramifications of a given innovation. They also attempt to control the intellectual property rights of researchers and students, imagine education as first and foremost a kind of workplace training, and protect an elite roster of scholars from tasks that might impede their “real work,” which usually means the hard work of intellectual property creation that is blocked by menial tasks related to teaching classes and running the university.

Universities have at the same time promoted project-based or “participatory” inquiry in which the flexible individual moves through temporary networks. This means group research in fields accustomed to the solo scholar, and transformation of the classroom into an ostensibly collaborative space in which instructors and students devote themselves to co-creation. Take for instance the university’s vanguard incubation of the management practice of “open innovation,” which assumes that knowledge is “common rather than scarce, widely rather than narrowly distributed in the population, and mobile in ways that even the most powerful corporations cannot control.”1 As incubators of open innovation processes, universities have encouraged researchers to work in teams across institutions and in the community, in the hopes that the significant value potential in those networked moments will be realized and returned to them. Open innovation attempts to source creativity in networks of temporary and flexible workers who are supposedly averse to stable work patterns, and as such, it is the apotheosis of neoliberal management ideology.

These two emphases—on the saleable output of the flexible creative individual and on collaborative project-based models of inquiry—might appear contradictory, but in fact they complement one another. The promotion of the collaborative classroom has tended to delink research expertise from teaching. The collaborative or “decentered” classroom can be run by the students themselves, or managed by adjunct workers with little capacity to conduct research and bring it to bear on their teaching. A roster of elite academics are thereby given time to focus on the business of innovating new ideas. Moreover, though the decentered classroom-cum-network may be premised upon a democratic desire to unsettle the presumption of the individual’s singular authority, this unsettling poses no real threat to the primacy of the individual’s property. The individual’s temporary existence within the network is rather compatible with the valorization of her innovations. She needs unquestioned authority much less than she needs the appearance of identity—that is, of a portable set of traits that are adapted to each new network’s terms, and become more solid only for the purposes of personal branding or IP capture. Indeed insofar as authority is a matter of grounded and unshakable support for particular ideas or values, it is quite undesirable, because it poses a threat to one’s ability move seamlessly from project to project, network to network.

If, then, a more participatory or collaborative model of work is so clearly not the solution to the problem of the sanctification of self-managing individuals assumed and supported by neoliberalism, what is? I suggest in what follows that in answering this question we revive what might seem a nostalgic concern: the problem of aesthetic autonomy. Autonomization, defined as the struggle to develop and secure the means for articulations of creativity that are separable from capital in some authentic measure, is an urgent concern for the university today. It is urgent precisely because neoliberal ideologies and practices draw so much from the history of thought about aesthetic acts and the motives behind them.

Stefano Harney has recently outlined two aspects of the entanglement of aesthetics and economics that are particularly relevant to the university. One is the movement of the language of economics and management into the arts, which creative-economy discourses and frameworks exemplify. The other is the reverse movement of aesthetics into management practice, evident in the idea that management is itself a form of artistic expression that results from an individual leader’s progressive self-development and commitment to post-materialist goals.2 These circumstances have been rightly lamented in a variety of tones. Scholars charge that a once autonomous realm of artistic and cultural expression has been reduced to economic instrumentality; that neoliberal economic rationality is averse to the goals of collective human development that the idea of the aesthetic protects; that there will not be a realm of free aesthetic expression so long as capitalism persists; and so on. I emphasize, however, that our own expert knowledge of the aesthetic terminologies and priorities absorbed by capitalist management also means that scholars are now uniquely placed to reveal the limitations of capitalist markets and to imagine and orchestrate the formation of alternatives.

Neoliberal Aesthetics at Work

As I have already begun to suggest, the creative economy and the university intersect on several levels. The university is a site of production, circulation, and valorization of the intellectual properties that are the creative economy’s core matter. The university also produces and authorizes the policy analysts and social scientists who are willing to take the existence of a vibrant creative economy for granted, to assess its scope and importance, and to make recommendations to government about how to foster and develop it. Less obvious perhaps are the shared formulations of hierarchized labor that the university and the creative industries rely upon and perpetuate. By some accounts there is no distinction to be made: academics are simply members of the creative class. Others interpret creative labor more narrowly, as the work of producing arts and culture, and they do not count most of the research and teaching that take place within the university as forms of this work. What seems indisputable is that the creative worker and the academic equally confront a rhetoric celebrating the self-managing, flexible personality as the engine of economic growth. They tend to be also similarly invested in the idea that they should be committed heart and soul to their work. As scholars have often noted, our faith that our work offers non-material rewards, and is more integral to our identity than a “regular” job would be, makes us ideal employees when the goal of management is to extract our labor’s maximum value at minimum cost. Indeed Marc Bousquet suggests that managers everywhere want to learn how to emulate higher education “in moving from simple exploitation to the vast harvest of bounty represented by super-exploitation.”3 In the case of academics, according to Bousquet, this super-exploitation means the donation of quantities of free labor under the auspices of committed professionalism. Think of the adjunct who works endless hours to attempt to maintain a viable professional research profile while teaching hundreds of students for little pay. Others, such as Andrew Ross and Angela McRobbie, have read the artist, rather than the academic, as the premier model of the ideally flexible worker. Sanitized images of artists at work, highlighting their purported resistance to the constraints of the regimented work day, serve those keen to foster the kind of work that “never ends in space or time […] for which leisure and self-expression are not the antidote but the fuel.”4 In sum, to those who celebrate creative labor, the history of autonomous artistic practice is simply evidence that insecure employment in temporary networks is the key to groundbreaking innovation.

Choose your poison. Whether we are talking about academics or artists, idealized conceptions of their blissful work—work opposed to all things mundane and routine, but in search of the next saleable idea—belong to a longstanding and august romance with mental labor. This romance imagines that knowledge workers will achieve control over the power of their own labor because in owning their own minds they own the means of production. There is a venerable tradition of economic and management thought supporting this belief, encompassing even Karl Marx’s claim that the development of the “general intellect” could produce the conditions for the flourishing of leisured human communities after capitalism. While there is no reason to abandon all features of this romance, it is necessary to stress the great distance between its current terms and the reality of the rise of a contingent workforce of adjunct faculty and the larger permanent underclass of low-level “cognitariat” of which they are part. Christopher Newfield has recently echoed André Gorz’s argument that capitalism attempts to make knowledge, which is definitively proliferating, abundant, and common, a scarce resource. He argues for the university’s strong role here, as enclosure of the knowledge commons by the establishment of proprietary knowledge now appears to be its main drive.5 The academic labor hierarchy performs the crucial function of discouraging the more powerful class of privileged workers from doing anything that might jeopardize an elite status that they know to be protecting them from serious hardships. The academic star system is, in this light, an instance of the broader way in which knowledge management will separate “employees with proprietary knowledge” from “the vast majority of knowledge workers,” and will then set about undermining the majority’s “independence and social protections.”6 It is only the star producers, those who do create appropriately saleable proprietary knowledge, who enable the university or firm to seek rents, so it is only they who are “retained, supported, cultivated, and lavishly paid.”7 Hence while the conditions of the star producers’ work may indeed be quite desirable, these conditions require the relative destitution of others.

Meanwhile, as the worker has been imagined in definitively aesthetic terms, management thought has also become particularly attentive to the aesthetic as a means of addressing the problem of creating the conditions for good work. For decades now, of course, businesses have looked to the arts and culture for a variety of expedient services. Prestige art collections are a good investment; the presence of art and artists in the workplace can foster a contented company culture; and aesthetic experiences can help restore the working self to health and productivity. But the links between business culture and arts culture have become even more intimate in recent years. Management theory will now speak of the experience of work as, just like art, a good in and of itself that can be delinked from any profitmaking enterprise. Work within the firm must of course result in a valuable innovation at some point. Yet before that point is reached, being at work may produce other kinds of non-instrumental value. It may provide the employee with some transcendent pleasure, for example, or allow some insight into her own experiences and desires. Both regular employees and upper ranks of managers are now often asked to perceive these kinds of non-material rewards as more important than the prerogatives imposed by a distant corporate parent for whom profit generation is vital. Indeed, it is precisely when profit generation is not the employee’s first priority, when it is made secondary to the employee’s search for paths to self-expression, self-development, and self-realization, that she is thought to produce the genuine innovations in which the employer is ultimately interested.8

The rise of the Art of Management and Organization group at the University of Essex, with its attendant journal Aesthesis and six international conferences to date is a telling sign of the convergence of management and aesthetics. Here the idea of aesthetic experience is imagined to exist in complex and contradictory relation to the goals of the firm. Affiliated scholars have for instance outlined how to build a leadership workshop around the making of an art object. In one case, participants construct what are called “poem houses,” described as “three-dimensional artefacts combining and representing visual interpretation with poetic text, holding special significance for the maker.” The idea is that making these poem houses might provide a “visual narrative of individual and organizational experiences of leadership,” and thus allow people to reflect on what it means to be a leader and develop their own ideas about how to unlock employees’ creativity.9 In this and many other instances, encountering the aesthetic is at once an end in and of itself and a means of effectively managing workers who need to arrive at ways to innovative products or systems. The result is that a terminology that we might associate with academic inquiry when it is opposed to management—for instance, emphasizing embodied experience versus broad-stroke metanarratives, the inner life of depth, meaning and personal experience versus the outer pressures of corporate enterprise—enters the corporate firm in the image of the artist-manager. The artist-manager is interested in bringing aesthetic experiences to bear on the workplace as an encouragement to introspection, both because introspection is an inherent good and because it is where innovations originate.

A recent Business Strategy Review article, devoted to the seemingly banal task of uncovering “how managers can unleash bold new ideas,” takes German artist Joseph Beuys as its guru precisely because of his “radical” conception of creativity. His words provide the epigraph for the piece: “Only from art can a new concept of economics be formed, in terms of human need, not in the sense of use and consumption, politics and property, but above all in terms of the production of spiritual goods.”10 Accordingly, we are meant to assume that what follows will take spiritual goods, not corporate profits, as the motivation behind strategic recommendations to corporations. Beuys’ famous insistence that “every human being is an artist” is now a mantra for creative-economy enthusiasts like Richard Florida, so it is not surprising that he has been made a poster boy by those interested in “mobilizing everyone’s latent creative abilities—engaging one’s creative thoughts, words and actions and expressing this creativity in meaningful ways wherever it is needed.”11 What is remarkable is how such recognition is positioned in opposition to old school managerial thought, which is said to be insufficiently humane in its commitment to quantification and analytical metrics. The article’s authors imagine their break with the past as a matter of transcendence over the materialistic motivations behind conventional market rationalities. They insist that it is, ultimately, “inspiration, intuition and imagination” that need to be the focus of today’s business culture.12 Aspects of this focus aren’t strictly new. Rather, the history of management theory, since Frederick Winslow Taylor’s stop-watch anyway, has evolved in response to internal critiques of managers’ limited access to the deepest human needs and motivations. It has entailed a complicated and shifting interplay between adaptation to workers’ demands and efforts to construct and shape their needs and motivations so that they will be maximally amenable to management.

A talk given at the 2011 Art of Management and Organization conference presents this interplay as integral to a progressive management style. J. Brian Woodward and Colin Frank begin by describing the contemporary business environment as increasingly complex, ambiguous and uncertain, and suggest that in such a context what effective leaders need is a means to devise persuasive narratives that will help their employees make sense of the world. They perceive this process of meaning-making as definitively aesthetic. Like writers, leaders need to devise “conscious works of fiction that are plausible enough to act as a basis for confident judgment and action by generating aesthetic knowledge and integrating it with empirical and cultural knowledge.”13 They claim that an engagement with aesthetic experiences is a means of confronting the difficulty of having to deal with “dramatically fluid conditions.”14  They thus recommend a “hermeneutic approach,” in which leading is viewed as “largely meaning making”: “An artist-leader, then, can be viewed as a Hermenaut […] a seeker, a questioner and crafter of meaning.”15

Woodward and Frank mention that in 1987 Victor Dégot argued observation of day-to-day management revealed a set of practices that were more “like” an artistic activity than a routine, regulated, rationalistic science, yet he stopped far short of simply stating that management is fundamentally artistic in nature. Writing twenty years later, David Atkinson made the bolder claim that “managing and leading can produce works of art,” if art is understood as the result of pre- or anti-purposive human exploration and innovation.16 In his 2007 study on the art of management Atkinson presents himself as “stepping into Heidegger’s shoes,” by embracing and advancing the legacy of conceiving of the aesthetic as inherently unlike and superior to everything it is not—as, in essence, the realm of the human poised against cold rationality. Atkinson advises business managers to develop their aesthetic sensibilities by exploring the “sensual territories” unmediated by rational knowledge. Their minds must be “not bound by what is already known” in order to be “capable of producing original insights and even new concepts.”17 They must call on “internal capacities, and on qualities of character” to undertake that “exploration of the inner self” that is essential in an artist-leader’s development.18 He suggests, for example, that because managers must deal with the matter “of movement of an organisation and its people from one place-in-time to an ‘other’ place in-time in the achievement of some ‘end’ of economic and/or social value,” their work should be conceived as a form of dance.19

Woodward and Frank embrace Atkinson’s insights, and place aesthetic encounter at the beginning of any attempt to generate new working practices and new products. Little is said about what such an encounter might entail. Instead they outline the vaguest of processes, beginning with the artist-leader being “offered an object (mask, art form, sound, image, activity, etc.) with which there is engagement through a perceptual modality or multiple modalities (sight, hearing, kinetic, etc.).” What is specified is that this encounter should be “disconcerting, enlivening, energizing and enigmatic all at once,” thus generating a “pre-articulated understanding” that will form the basis for construction of a narrative that will eventually inform her work and inspire her team.20  Perhaps they would approve of the way Danish firms are now employing poets to consult with workers and produce poems that might help the company self-reflect and develop. The director of the BG Bank explained that his company’s “bank-poet” wrote a weekly uncensored post for the company intranet, noting that “consultants come from the same environment that we come from, so now we try to bring in the literature instead.”21 He hopes that literature might instigate the kind of penetrating insight that traditional consultants can no longer provide.

In Woodward and Frank’s account, management is dignified and humanized when it is grounded in aesthetic experiences. What the artist-leader does is more important than the work of producing the conditions in which the firm accrues capital. Instead, the process of aesthetic leadership is valuable on its own terms. Artist-leaders “craft their actions through reflective thought and deep self-understanding.” 22 The artist-leader seeks something greater than the firm’s fiscal success: she pursues “personal meaning and expression, the capacity to imagine, invent, conceptualize and reflect internally and the opportunity to act thoughtfully on the world.”23 She is a “hero” on a journey toward self-discovery, and her encounter with an aesthetic experience—an art form, sound, image, et cetera—will be ideally disconcerting, enlivening, energizing, because it encourages pre-articulated understanding and a suspension of reason; it is “pre-symbolic, pre-thematic, pre-ontological and so is very powerful.”24

The complicated introversion of work that is recommended here, in which workplace demands are in some measure inseparable from the self, is a defining feature of neoliberal labor ideology, as it blurs the boundaries between command and self-governance, intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, authenticity and work performance. The flight of aesthetic fancy must inevitably return to earth and encourage the artist-manager’s necessary provision of something more concrete, an “inviting yet defined container for the emergence of creative thought and action.”25 This particular dyad—“inviting yet defined”—is perhaps the telling feature of management theory’s invocation of the aesthetic as a model of activity. Work needs somehow to transcend its own goals—its contribution to the firm’s profits—in order to realize those goals optimally. This dyad is certainly at work within the university, in which the idea that the academic is on a journey involving her inner life and deeper motivations has clear force. University work is “inviting,” in that it allows for a degree of freedom to manage one’s own time, and involves pursuits inseparable from our deepest values. Yet it is also “defined,” in that our dedication joins us to projects and goals—“containers”—to which we may object, or to which we may accede ambivalently, reluctantly, under some strain. Bousquet argues, similarly, that “a delicate balancing act” defines the university, because “management continuously tries to seize control of institutional mission [sic] without killing the academic goose laying its golden eggs.” This balancing act should be conceived as a struggle, because the administration is “pushing to see just how partial or inauthentic it can make the autonomy, integrity, and dignity of academic endeavor without inducing the faculty to fall out of love with their work.”26 Those of us who work within the university system often do so because we believe that our work is important, not because we want to contribute to the university’s valorization. Yet it is in turn hard to perceive how our work would have any kind of significance in the absence of the university system, a system we often oppose precisely because it undermines our ability to value our own labor truly or authentically, but that we operate within because it allows us to turn our objections into opportunities to work.

In sum, the language of “individual creativity, expression, and opinion,” a language that continues to be rampant within the university even as it marches toward rationalized capture of knowledge-for-profit, is scarcely incompatible with the language of business. The opposite appears to be true. Individual expressivity and meaning-making are integral to entrepreneurial innovation in the current marketplace, and may be at present even more relevant to corporations than they are to the humanities curriculum. Hence Harney’s argument that the idea of the creative industries serves to reassure management that insofar as corporations are creative they are also laudable. In particular, he claims, the creative-industries concept assures scholars within the business school—those whom common sense tells us are most beholden to industry—that their work too is not just work, but rather an expression of deeper and more authentic drives. It seems that nobody wants to be “just working,” and, ironically, this negative desire is welcome by administrations turning from the language of excellence to that of entrepreneurship. To “just work” is utterly routine, whereas to innovate entrepreneurial ideas is to be authentically incomparable. Excellence is about measure. Entrepreneurship is about the “truly unfamiliar, surprising, said to be unique, unrepeatable, even uncomfortable.”27 It is about uncovering the authentic difference required by IP law. In this context, for the purposes of management, arts and culture, however codified by their positioning within creative-industries frameworks, are first and foremost potential instigators of the pre-cognitive discomforts, the shaking up of one’s routine ways of thinking, from which true innovations and new forms of value are understood to flow.

Weak Subject/Strong Consumer

Another way of saying this is that aesthetic traditions that have been of such concern to artists, and to scholars of arts and culture, are now used to constitute and legitimate conceptions of the self that are transforming our working lives: conceptions emphasizing a self-referencing interiority and creativity, self-expression and self-invention, freedom from constraint of any kind, and the ideal of autonomous artwork, expressive of individual genius and innovation, that has proven so useful to neoliberal capital. In these conditions, in which humanistic critiques of the market are so integral to the market’s functioning, it may be foolish to suggest that the humanities necessarily provide a privileged vantage from which to critique the incursion of market logic into the university system.

Indeed, it may even be true that currents within the study of arts and culture have quite directly encouraged the development of neoliberal conceptions of creativity, while discouraging effective critique of the privatization of higher education. Newfield argues that, by not sufficiently cultivating “nonmarket understandings of the value and mode of life,” arts and culture scholars have missed an important opportunity to stress the history of “anti-determinist” thought in their own fields. When after WWII a university education became a possibility for more people, there was a sense of promise that a liberal curriculum pivoting on exposure to the arts would produce a new class, the professional managerial class, whose work would unfold within a marketplace that it would also actively shape. Newfield remarks that this class was meant to “manage markets with its expertise” in order to effect “society’s general development,” and his work is largely a lament that this promise was never realized.28 Scholars are now most likely to disavow the very idea that they should be involved in attempting to create or delimit markets, even when the markets in questions are academic ones in which they are directly involved. Instead, the extensive literature describing the privatization of the university appears to have encouraged a kind of market fatalism in which what dominates is the necessity of meeting existing conditions rather than attempting to change them.29 In short, Newfield claims, in looking at the world of business—especially as it impinges upon the work of the universities—the lesson that scholars of arts and culture took away was that they had to adapt to its terms.

What they seem to have observed insufficiently, in turn, was just how much energy corporations devote to efforts to determine the nature and extent of demand. This, then, is another way in which a rationale for the study of culture—a respect for its shaping force in the world, or for its existence as a series of agential acts of assertion of how things should and could be—is realized more in the business world than in the arts and culture faculties. We have seen that corporate firms imagine themselves as sites for the production of art, and that they accommodate research findings that might seem at odds with a “bottom-line orientation.”30 Firms also assume it is possible to use culture to influence consumers and create the conditions for the flourishing of their own products. They assume they can understand people well enough to tap into their hidden desires, create demand, and adapt the market to what one thinks should be valorized. Scholars of arts and culture, on the other hand, acknowledged the pressures of commercialism but, for the most part, prove reluctant to try to influence them. What, we might ask, produces this stance? Two processes, discussed at greater length below, appear particularly relevant and worrying

First is the way that we have come to inhabit what Newfield calls a “weak subjectivity,” produced by a steady erosion of any sense that there is such a thing as significant and legitimate autonomy, autonomy that might serve as the basis for evaluative judgments of cultural objects and market realities alike. It is important to note that this erosion leaves intact the self as the key site of human capital development, as an engine generating plausible copyrightable theories, as the “you” celebrated by consumer culture. The weak subject, insistent on the impossibility and even the undesirability of attaining any authority, unconvinced that autonomy from the market is even a worthwhile goal, is entirely compatible with the neoliberal self that is outlined above—the self as engine of production of intellectual properties, as brand manager of one’s own human capital, as committed to self-realization through work. What has been undermined, rather, is desire for and faith in collective attempts to form, manage and shape the institutions within which our creativity unfolds. Threatened in turn is the foundation of academic freedom in the idea that the prerogatives of market and government should not determine how the knowledge arising from scholarly inquiry is valued. Part of what needs to be questioned, then, is the idea that the claim to accurate knowledge is itself too universalizing or imperialistic a gesture—an imposition of a normative stance that is insufficiently attuned to the heterogeneity of voices and micro-narratives. Timothy Brennan has suggested that in the face of neoliberal capitalism humanities scholars have in effect positioned themselves as the subalterns whose powerlessness postcolonial scholars once eloquently explored. Effective resistance now tends to be imagined as necessarily “a perpetually splintered, ineffective, heroic, invisible, desperate plenitude,” while “any larger ambition than the self”—the ambition to establish models for the nonmarket valuation of creativity, for instance—“risks an imposition on others, a transgression on alterity itself.”31

Second is the attendant move toward celebration of the consumer as the central agent in the production of value. In “resisting” the inauthentic and oppressive culture of producers, primarily through cognitive acts, this consumer contributes to the creation and circulation of the object’s (albeit recoded) value. The history of study of cultural production is particularly telling here, because so much of the scholarship in this tradition has been interested in the relationship between culture and economics, and in the possibility and delimitation of an aesthetic realm of autonomous production. I can only touch upon a few moments below. My goal in highlighting them is not to suggest that scholars have somehow orchestrated—or at least permitted—a wholesale concession to neoliberal reason. I want rather to suggest that certain limited currents within the tradition of the study of cultural production, tending to affirm the agency of consumers and deny the authority and autonomy of producers, have been mainstreamed just as neoliberal policies have become dominant. I suggest that privileging this focus of inquiry on consumer power has partially displaced the historical materialist emphases that characterized cultural studies’ first moments. There is within the tradition of cultural studies a recurring, countering insistence on the power held by those in a position to produce mainstream culture, and thus on the necessity of acting to regulate and shape that production. This countervailing tradition draws upon legacies of thinking about the dialectical interplay of economy and culture, structure and agency, and has room not only for consumers who appropriate objects, but for relatively autonomous cultural producers who work to intervene within and shape the capitalist conditions for the production of culture.

We can consider, to start with, the tradition of study of the political economy of culture, which aimed to demonstrate how the ownership and financing of cultural production, supported by government (de)regulation of markets and business conduct, both impact the diversity of what is communicated to the public and structure how audiences are able to access and use what is available. The political economy of culture was a combative response to the growth, consolidation and global expansion of the industries of cultural production, which it claimed to have begun in the early twentieth century under market capitalism, leading by the 1970s to a situation in which a handful of powerful corporations controlled cultural commodity production and circulation. Scholars suggested that this domination limited the range of cultural options available to the public, and affected artists who were asked to accede to the prerogatives of cultural management if they wished to be successful. Frankfurt School theory—in particular, the work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer on the “culture industry”—was, of course, a significant precursor to the political economy of culture in this respect. It argued that, with the expansion and consolidation of large cultural corporations, the drive to secure profits had led to rationalization procedures and thus to the standardization of cultural output, and had encouraged a “pseudo individuality” in which people were enjoined to express their ostensibly unique identities and values through their utterly routine consumer practices. Horkheimer and Adorno saw these practices as signs of a desire to escape from trying circumstances— circumstances that would never be altered via consumption of mass culture. At the same time, Adorno maintained a vision of the possibility that culture could be something better; indeed, the culture industries thesis involves an historical argument that there had once been an authentically avant-garde culture more genuinely separable from the market economy and capable of some critical purchase on it. It had been subsumed within the culture industry, however, and was threatened by its operations. Adorno argued that true art-work needed to resist these operations by refusing to be readily and passively consumed.

The work of the Frankfurt School was a polemical contribution to a broader debate about the coming of mass culture. It imagined that the relationship between base and superstructure was shifting rather than fixed, and that with the rise of the culture industry the relative autonomy of the superstructure was being threatened by the dynamism of the base. These claims resonated with political economists of cultural production who, in the 1970s and 80s, feared that if a corporation oligopoly manufactured and distributed cultural products, and owned the rights to the profits that resulted, then standardized generic forms and homogenous content would be inevitable. Indeed scholars like Herb Schiller and Nicholas Garnham, and organizations like UNESCO, claimed that corporate domination was already jeopardizing the diversity of human culture, along with the critical thinking that results from exposure to a variety of perspectives, while the concentration of mass media conglomerates in the Western world was undermining the ability of non-Western people to tell their own stories and see their experiences expressed in cultural form. I am reprising these well-known details in order to stress the emphasis that political economy approaches—which tended to have a Marxist cast—placed on the production side of the equation. Their approach to culture was more or less epiphenomenal: they saw it as a by-product of the base, or as subsumed within objective and observable economic relations. What matters, then, is that while this approach was viable in the 1970s and 1980s, it was already at times at odds with scholarship emphasizing culture’s constitutive or mediating role and its relative power to overcome and exceed the conditions that determine its emergence.

The fate of Raymond Williams’s work, which was so formative for British cultural studies, has been perhaps most influential in this respect. Friendly to Marxism but eager to critique its terms, Williams defined his own practice of “cultural materialism” as “a theory of the specificities of material cultural and literary production within historical materialism.”32 He came to assert that culture can in fact shape how history unfolds as it achieves some modicum of separation from material forces in order to reflect upon those forces and influence their future constitution. He tended to present his work as more attentive to Marx’s own impulses than to much of what claimed a Marxist pedigree. What he saw in Marx was an avowedly social emphasis on the worker as his own “productive force”: he is not produced as a worker, as a deterministic theory might hold, but rather retains an integral freedom to produce himself as a radical subject and to join up with other people producing themselves as the collective agents of social change. If there is a “base” in Williams’ theory, it is not what appears in what he calls “degenerate” arguments about “primary production within the terms of capitalist economic relationships.”33 It is, rather, harkening back to Marx’s “social being,” all of those practices that make up the production and reproduction of society itself.

Williams thus claims that those interested in cultural production must emphasize that it does not simply result from an existing social order, but is rather an element in the constitution of that order. As the whole “signifying system through which a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored,” culture cannot but be taken as constitutive or fixed.34 Cultural production is a set of social practices and social relations that also mediates those practices and relations. Culture thus does more than reproduce a particular ideology; instead, it is dynamic and conflictual, not only instantiating determinations but also tensions and conflicts, innovation and change.35 Williams’s influential theory about the co-existence within a given social situation of residual, dominant, and emergent cultural forms complements his insistence on the possibility of authentic conflict. No single cultural dominant truly “exhausts human practice, human energy, human intention”; historical change occurs because humanly willed emergent forms arrive to unsettle things.36

Williams’s work contributes in these terms to an emerging focus, strongly identified with the birth of cultural studies, on the ability of the individual to use culture to intervene actively within her social situation rather than passively reproducing its values. For some scholars, this kind of materialism is so insufficiently interested in the extent to which the economy plays a determining role that it should probably not be deemed materialist at all. Malcolm Daly reads Williams, for example, as working in a post-Marxist tradition because he appears to deny any “sense of priority in determination.”37 The base/superstructure model, despite all its faults, at least tries to understand and to question a hierarchy of determination, and even the more dialectical materialisms accept the basic fact of hierarchy while permitting “elements of the superstructure a reciprocal (though often weak) effect.”38 According to Daly Williams’s materialism, in contrast, seems to entirely collapse any sense of hierarchy, and to reject the necessity of establishing a theory of determination, a necessity Daly sees as integral to any materialist treatment of culture.

Daly’s critique is more accurately applied to the next generation of cultural studies scholars who picked up Williams work. Williams claimed that his focus on culture was a necessary corrective to the failure of the base/superstructure model to account for the constitutive role that ostensibly superstructural elements, like legal systems and prevalent ideologies, play in maintaining a particular class’s domination. In a sense, then, studying the constitutive potential of the superstructure was for him another way of critiquing the power of the base to which it was beholden. In his later years, Williams was attracted to Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as a replacement for base/superstructure formulae for this reason. The notion of hegemony seemed to get at the reality of social experience more effectively. It accounted at once for the lived experience of power and the delimitation of common sense by a dominant order. This order was infused in culture and economics, self and society, but it was not a totality impervious to critique. Instead, it could be reformed by the productive force of its subjects.

In any case, Williams’s interest in culture’s highly delimited—but nevertheless viable—protagonism proved useful to those keen to argue for the ability of the average person to “recode” dominant messages, and eventually fed into an abandonment of any substantial emphasis on the determinative force of the economy. This occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, just as many were observing culture’s increasing importance to the “advanced” economies. Production was shifting from manufacture of material goods to the creation of immaterial content, and even the most resolutely non-cultural economic sectors were falling under the influence of sign systems like advertising and marketing. The cultural industries were evidently rich and growing and increasingly global in scope, and marketers were turning all products into cultural artefacts by associating their consumption with desirable values and aspirations. These changes belong to a broader shift from Fordist to post-Fordist production, or from an industrial to a knowledge economy. Whereas production had once been dominated by mass production techniques, with assembly lines mass-producing commodities in hugely capitalized plants, it was now becoming flexible, driven by a digital automation that allowed for the specialization in small-batch production to serve niche interests. The technical possibility of flexible specialization and the culturalization of products are mutually constitutive. Under post-Fordist conditions, featuring “customized production for customized markets,”39 industry is ever more attuned to the minute cultural distinctions between niche consumer groups, and increasingly invested in the culturalization or aestheticization of all consumer products and acts of consumption. Post-Fordist production thus encouraged a marked aestheticization of identity, a focus on the individual as a productive consumer of available media materials who was able to assemble a unique self from the various possibilities on offer. Meanwhile, identity politics displaced what was now perceived as an outmoded class struggle over material resources, insisting that real change could be negotiated in and through cultural representation and the performance of the self.

It is not surprising, then, that it became exceedingly difficult to maintain any strict divide between culture and its determining contexts. The economic and the cultural appeared rather as hybrids interpenetrating one another in a variety of important ways. It is hard not to read the shift in cultural production scholarship away from a sense of the economy’s determining force and toward an emphasis on culture’s mediating power as a response to these large-scale changes. What came to dominate—though not without challenge, of course—was a new focus on the politics of consumption, and a tendency to treat the aesthetic not as the space in which artists yearn for freedom from economic rationalities but, instead, as the process of stylizing one’s life in a way that intervenes in and engages with the dominant order. The fate of reference to the culture industry is telling: gradually divorced from its Frankfurt School origins, it began to appear most often in social science and policy work that claimed a neutral interest in studying the growth of the cultural sector of the economy. Before it was displaced by reference to the creative industries, it was also turned into the plural form—“the cultural industries”—a grammatical shift that aptly symbolized the rejection of an all-encompassing culture-industry thesis as insufficiently interested in the sheer variety of industrial cultural production and reception by diverse and interactive audiences.

These developments motivated some scholars to debate whether the economy was itself becoming, as Jean Baudrillard would have it, just another sign system, another semi-autonomous “superstructural discourse” with no material base worth studying, or whether in fact the superstructure was being “invaded by the base,” such that the apparent power and autonomy of culture should be read as a structural feature of its functioning within market capitalism.40 If the distinction between base and superstructure was breaking down, which was collapsing into which? Or did this particular manner of discourse simply need to be abandoned? Scott Lash and Celia Lury claim that, at one time, the language of base and superstructure did make sense. It was a fine way of thinking about the relative homogeneity of Fordist cultural production. However, they argue, this era has been displaced by a post-Fordist age built on a “design-intensive production of difference” that spans the globe.41 According to their analysis, culture is now so rich, diverse, and ubiquitous that, on a global scale, it “seeps out of the superstructure and comes to infiltrate, and then take over, the infrastructure,”42 or “collapses into” the material base, as “goods become informational, work becomes affective, property becomes intellectual and the economy more generally becomes cultural.”43 Recall that Adorno and Horkheimer saw the one-time heterogeneity of the cultural superstructure reduced to the deeply troubling capitalist rationalities of the base. For Lash and Lury that trend is now reversed by a shift from identity to difference: from the production of homogenous objects with fixed meanings to the circulation of indeterminate objects defined by the heterogeneous ways in which they are used; from standardized commodity goods whose value is determined by commercial exchange to diverse brand properties which acquire their value through mediated events; from culture as something to be isolated and interpreted to culture as something to be used selectively and interchangeably as one fashions oneself.

Though they claim as their subject the “global culture industry,” Lash and Lury offer this analysis not in a spirit of Frankfurt School critique, but instead as a neutral description of the services that cultural objects render to knowing consumers. Their claims thus seem a perfect instance of the shift in focus in cultural production work from production’s determining priority to the agential force of the ubiquitously cultural—a shift that at once reflects and takes up a broader movement of the advanced economies toward post-Fordist production models. Yet it also must be noted that in recent years the realities that interest Lash and Lury have also prompted a return to political economy approaches, particularly evident in studies of labor. Political economists have argued, for instance, that whereas at one time television producers would work to cultivate mass audiences for mass-produced goods, now they work to build “programs that create customized audiences,” and, in the case of “reality” shows for instance, they use those audiences to reduce their own costs by replacing paid unionized labor with audience performers.44 Moreover, just as a skilled, professional, developed-world workforce demands higher wages and more creative control, their tasks are shipped overseas while, as in the case of film special effects and animation, development of the technological content of programming reduces labor costs even more.45

These kinds of tactics can be seen as the latest in a long history of attempts to manage the risks inherent to an industry dependent on the most notoriously recalcitrant kind of worker: the artist. In the early 1980s, political-economic studies complicated their own habitual focus on the determinative priority of productive forces by stressing the particularity of cultural work and cultural products. Bill Ryan notably challenged the Frankfurt School theory of the standardization of production by arguing that what structured the corporate management of culture was precisely the uniqueness of the things from which it attempted to extract profits. Ryan pointed out that, while capitalist relations are defined by a distinctive form of anonymous labor, the artist is historically constituted as a named individual with talent and a claim to original creativity. For these reasons “the artist […] represents a valorisation problem in the capitalist labor process,”46 and certain structures within the cultural industries can be explained as a response to the situation of the artist’s unusual work. For example, Ryan argues that as corporations have struggled to realize culture’s potential value, they have made recourse to formatting (emphasizing generic links between products), as well as to marketing, in their attempts to overcome the inherent risks that come with the attempt to valorize so many diverse and distinct products. The production of the cultural commodity is thus structured around the simple assumption of the artist’s autonomous labor; many cultural products—but literary works are a primary example—circulate within the market on the grounds that they are attached to a unique individual irreducible to her own capitalist valorization.

This kind of argument from culture’s particularity has proven useful to the more recent scholarship I draw upon earlier in this essay, which addresses the transformation of workers’ sense of their own distinction into an asset for managers. Corporations and universities benefit from the artistic surplus—the extra engagement and effort of those with a passion for their work—and easily correlate the artist’s desire for uniqueness with the market demand for non-replicable cultural expressions and experiences. In a situation in which more and more work appears to resemble cultural work, because it is meant to be done out of passion and conviction, and as an expression of one’s real self and personal development, scholars have considered how exactly the artist’s oppositional impulse has come to support what it once seemed—sometimes still seems—to oppose. In addition to studies of the mainstream appropriation of artistic conceptions of work, there has been an important extension of political economy’s concept of the cultural producer to include the users of culture, users who are increasingly asked to contribute their own free labor to the production of cultural commodities. While a participatory culture’s “prosumers” appear to have a notable power to influence the culture they receive, scholars have studied the shifts in corporate structure that reflect and encourage the contribution that users of products and services will make to marketing and development. In both of these cases—the study of culture-sector producers as ideal flexible workers, and the study of use of cultural consumers as a ready pool of free labor—emphasis is placed on the affective investments that people make in culture because they believe it offers them something other than economic reward. They thus reveal to us the continuing relevance of the tension between culture and capital, freedom and constraint, superstructure and base.

The realities of digital cultural production have perhaps most occasioned a renewed interest in thinking about cultural production as a political-economic matter of power and domination. Expansion of the web in the 1990s, decreased costs of media capture and playback, and the growing consumer economies of countries entering the neoliberal order after the 1990s have all lead to the proliferation of online, user-generated content. Our creative writing, photos, videos, music, tweets and more sustained musings occasioned—and are now surely occasioned by—the web 2.0 companies that capitalize by hosting all of this “content” (Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube amongst them). It matters a great deal that the dominant mainstream scholarship on digital culture, best represented by Henry Jenkins’s work, celebrates the productive consumer as its premier agent, and indeed works with corporations to find ways to turn her tendencies into new wealth. It is the individual who is understood as co-producing culture, whether because she actively processes and reimages what she consumes or because she creates her own content and posts it online. The mass consumption of commercial culture is said to have been cheerfully replaced, most notably with the help of user-generated digital content, by the mass production of cultural objects by users.

For those in the political economy of culture tradition, however, these developments are evidence of a further consolidation of the power of the corporate cultural industries. That the internet is an immaterial medium free from constraint is of course a myth. It is regulated and owned, and the hardware behind it is made by workers in industrial factories whose scope Henry Ford could scarcely have imagined, though their numbing assembly lines owe as much to his models as they do to any flexible just-in-time techniques. The imaginations of digital culture consumers might appear, moreover, to have been colonized by the commercial entertainment industries, as these consumers “make their own cultural products that follow the templates established by the professionals and/or rely on professional content.”47 Companies are designed with this active consumer in mind, and “have developed strategies that mimic people’s tactics of bricolage, reassembly, and remix,” which means that the subcultures that themselves appropriate and remix commercial culture find their practices turned into corporate strategy. Hence as the internet unleashed a “collective potential for creative expression”48—the platform for consolidation of the new “multitude” poised against capital—it was rapidly apparent that the forms of expression that resulted were quite immediately valorized and captured by the mainstream corporate cultural commodity producers.

In a recent take on the relation between neoliberal ideologies and the history of cultural studies, Stefano Harney makes the familiar point that “populations today are more deeply involved in creativity, judgment, opinion, aesthetics, and social and cultural re-evaluation that at any time in history,” that “there is a massive daily register of judgment, critique, attention, and taste” to which cultural studies responds.49 However he departs from existing analyses in claiming that, as a discipline, cultural studies in turn serves to bring into focus the forms of cultural value essential to the creative industries. The habitual focus by cultural studies scholars on “matters of circulation, consumption and distribution,” on consumption as a site of struggle in which cultural commodities are appropriated or recoded, proves the latent value in cultural production, and identifies new sites of valorization in “communities, clubs, homes, and subcultures (and away from workplaces, schools, factories and offices that had occupied their predecessors in Marxist literary studies or industrial sociology).”50 Thus, the ambition of cultural studies to find resistance everywhere is for him a symptom of a “new condition of value” or a “new kind of labor process characterized by the unfinished quality and condition of the cultural commodity that is the object and objective of this labor process.”51 This labor takes place in the social factory, a concept posited by Italian Marxists but “first felt, explored, lived by British cultural studies.”52 It is the labor of the freely consuming user that changes the commodity, adds to it, and develops its value along with “the value of its own laboring subjectivity.”53 He concludes, thus, that the creative industries are—if anything coherent at all—a sinister means of turning society itself, “in all its morals, tastes, attentions and opinions,” into “the site not only of control but of direct expropriation.”54

Harney’s position echoes a venerable claim about capital’s need to channel and subdue some of culture’s most unique features. It is hardly the case that only the artist, conventionally defined, has an interest in autonomy and creativity. Cultural production—and the story goes that, by now, all production has been culturalized as the innovative result of ever new forms of “creative destruction”—requires the maintenance of spaces in which creativity is able to flourish; this includes, now, internet platforms in which collective creativity is called forth and developed. But when people are given opportunity and means to actually engage in creative acts, together or alone, it is impossible to ensure that what they come up with will be something from which a profit can be drawn. Instead, their creativity has to be managed into some kind of consumable commodity form, and the work of making it so is uncertain and open to challenge. I have been suggesting that is in light of this process, which is made particularly perceptible by digital cultural production, that scholars in the historical materialist, political-economic tradition have been re-imaging the productive work of the “user” as well. In Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s well-known argument about the possibility of a rising “multitude,” the user is less the heroic agent of productive self-making, and more a carrier of the supremely constrained—but nonetheless potentially transformative—universal creativity that can never be reduced to sales. Their celebration of the multitude is nothing short of an assertion, once again, that there is such a thing as culture whose apparent autonomy from capital deserves crucial and repeated emphasis. Even as we ask what forms of material relation have made it possible, have mediated it, and have even sometimes determined it, this appearance of autonomy is palpably real to many people, which means that the desires that it represents are evidently not being met by capitalist cultural production.

The Neoliberal Aesthetic and the Return to Autonomy

At the close of his book, Unmaking the Public University, Christopher Newfield indicates some ways that the study of arts and culture can counter neoliberalism:

To the disregard of experience of abstract economic and political discourse, the liberal arts have offered detailed descriptions of people’s everyday lives. To the constant endangerment of good work in neoliberal economies, the humanities have displayed the innovation that comes from the self-managed craft labor we call art, and the spillover effects that always exceed their market value.55

My own sense is that the businessperson will now reference everyday life, art, and craft labor as quickly as the academic. The point, then, is not to state that as scholars we know that all the values associated with the rise of neoliberal work are perverse or wrong, but rather that neoliberal ideology uses a terminology quite familiar to us, a terminology whose historical promises it fails to meet every day. It is probably safe to say that most scholars of the arts and culture would prefer to be conceived less as originators of intellectual property, and facilitators of their student-customers’ consumer transactions, and more as artist-leaders charged with forming and disseminating a new common sense against neoliberal ideologies. Yet, since so many corporate managers would express related preferences, there seems to be some need first to reclaim from corporate application terms integral to our disciplines’ own histories.

Amongst these terms are creativity and its close associate, autonomy, which I have been highlighting here. We need to stress that neoliberal investment in the ideal of autonomous labor is integrally limited by the valorization of intellectual property as the necessary end of all acts of creation. The history of cultural production studies suggests that the idea of autonomy should be retained not under the sign of personal freedom to invent, but rather as a measure of a persistent consciousness of the limits of capitalist markets and of the contradictory ways in which opposition to capital can be useful to it. Autonomy has a fundamentally contradictory resonance, because investment in autonomy, both affective and practical, is at once an integral feature of capitalist cultural production and an expression of the desire to be free from its constraints. The ideal of autonomy is built into attempts to imagine new working arrangements as the fruit of post-materialist values, and into the assumption that high-level cultural producers are able to transcend the marketplace upon which they rely. Conditioned by a sense of the importance of autonomy, we confront with unease our lack of substantive independence, our incorporation into economic projects and vocabularies. In Mark Banks’s terms, “[w]orkers routinely fail to demonstrate […] a clear commitment to capitalist norms such as profit maximization, disinterested exchange or wealth accumulation.”56 All the same, when this failure serves as inspiration to their ongoing cultural production, and is a means by which their work is sold as the product of their authentic inner selves, it is at once an opportunity and a problem. Hence, as Banks claims, the autonomy that cultural workers experience is best read as something “socially embedded, compromised or ‘negotiated’” as they engage the “quotidian ‘struggle within’ to try to mediate, manage or reconcile the varied opportunities and constraints of the art-commerce relation.”57

Recognition of the ideal of aesthetic autonomy as an ongoing locus of struggle seems especially necessary today precisely because faith in a cultural realm liberated from the constraints of the capitalist market has merged with the new vocabulary of creativity and its political and economic uses. The artist’s vaunted ability to contest bureaucratic management and other forms of regimentation is no longer at all unique. They may be “disaffected and morally unhappy,” “sell[ing] their minds to people they don’t like for purposes they don’t feel at home with,”61 but in this they are now more like than unlike other kinds of workers. There is a widespread embrace of aesthetic conceptions of the working self as a work in progress, searching for meaning as an imperative internal quest and as a means to tap into and augment one’s inherent potential in the service of career development. Ceaseless self-scrutiny has become a general management protocol, a marker of one’s commitment to one’s work, as a spirit of opposition to assigned roles and an openness to change have become crucial facets of the ability to labor successfully. As Bousquet argues, “choosing as much integrity and dignity as our circumstances permit over the false rationality of the highest possible price for our labor-time,” and “giving up wages to ‘do what we love’,” are markers of a broader refusal of capitalist inhumanity that unites us with countless others.62

Thus, if artists are useful models here, it is not because they prove that precarious labor leads to innovation, but because they—like many other workers now—often see themselves as part of an embattled and precarious workforce poised against an instrumentality that can turn even art’s legacies of “negation, disruption and antagonism” to its own purposes.63 It is against this very backdrop of the marketable anti-market gesture—of recognition of the service art can provide to what it wants to contest—that the ideal of aesthetic autonomy becomes not a dead issue, not a mere relic of an outmoded modernism, but rather, as Nicholas Brown has claimed, a vital concern for cultural producers all over again.64 In other words, it is precisely when people and their activities are reduced to mere utility that insisting upon the “uselessness of the aesthetic,” what Imre Szeman has called a “Kantian counterpoint to the brute utilitarian insistence of every other mode of cognition and social interaction,” becomes all the more necessary.65 This revitalized interest in the contradictory ideal of autonomous aesthetic action and experience is important to the university as a site of study—an activity which is so often non-purposive, open-ended, and in which students and teachers are equally engaged. The history I have drawn upon here, the history of thought about the tensions and accommodations between culture and its material production, suggests the value in emphasizing not study without ends, but rather study premised upon the knowledge that not all ends are capitalist ends. The point is not to promote a limitless realm of free inquiry, but rather to abandon the habit of weak subjectivity to embrace the challenge of forming institutions. This challenge is being taken up now by groups like the Edufactory collective, the KLF (the Knowledge Liberation Front), and Universidad Nomada.66 An insistence on autonomy, here, is not about continuing to valorize the self as a site of all meaning and value. The opposite is true. Autonomization is a fundamentally social process. It is a matter of vigorously and loudly arguing for the necessary existence of modes of inquiry, styles of life, and ways of organizing creative and scholarly activity that reveal the limitations of the neoliberal market as an arbiter of what is valuable to know and do.

Reprinted here is a review by Todd Cronan of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Towards a New Manifesto. The review solicited a number of responses. Those responses appear here alongside Cronan’s response to critics (and sympathizers).

Review of Towards a New Manifesto by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Verso 2011.

Special thanks to the editors of Radical Philosophy for allowing me to reprint my review from issue 174 (July/August 2012): 31-33.

“We are all proletarians”

According to J. M. Bernstein, “the point of [Horkheimer and Adorno’s] Dialectic of Enlightenment was to explain why the dialectic of class had come to a standstill.” The “conflictual dialectic of proletariat and bourgeoisie,” Bernstein writes, “is unavailable for interpretive purposes” (31). It bears noting that this is the only appearance of the term “class conflict” in the 428 pages of The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (2004). Bernstein’s point is made again by Simon Jarvis in the same volume when he writes that the “concept of class…designates not a real entity but a real illusion” (94). “There is,” he insists, “no such thing as a ‘class.’” Because to “classify a diverse group of people under a single concept inevitably misleadingly identifies them” (94). What real or potential use could emerge from this rereading of Marx? It’s a matter of understanding the sea change in Marxist analysis that Adorno initiated when he criticized the basic Marxist tenet that “economics has priority over domination; domination may not be deduced otherwise than economically” (Negative Dialectics). That domination exists without private property was presumed to point to a more basic fact about civilization than any economic analysis could explain. For Adorno the fact that “human beings…are always being humiliated” has absolute priority over any economic analysis (48). At stake is nothing less than a vision of Marxism as an analysis of humiliation, of shame, not exploitation.

The stakes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s influential revision of Marxism emerges in the new translation of their dialogue Towards a New Manifesto. The title is an inspired misnomer; it is hard to see how “Discussion on Theory and Praxis”—the original title in Horkheimer’s Nachlass—would attract any but the most dedicated readers. But what makes the brief volume—113 generously spaced pages—so engaging and what partially legitimates the English title, is the space devoted to a reassessment of key Marxist concepts. We should “write a manifesto that will do justice to the current situation,” Adorno says (92) and he adds a surprising addendum: it should be “a strictly Leninist manifesto” (94). Despite Adorno’s thoroughgoing use of Marxist terminology, his explicit engagement with Marx is slim (roughly four essays in an extensive body of writing are devoted to class analysis). In the twelve discussions that make up Towards a New Manifesto nearly half revolve around the problem of work and “political concreteness.” But as Adorno and Horkheimer make clear, their theory “no longer has anything in common with Marx, with the most advanced class consciousness; our thoughts are no longer a function of the proletariat” (99).

Horkheimer formulates the basic problem for any contemporary Marxism: “in whose interest do we write, now that there is no longer a party and the revolution has become such an unlikely prospect?” (49) Horkheimer’s answer is striking and central to all Frankfurt School analyses, class struggle has shifted to the superstructure: “It is in language that the idea that all should be well can be articulated” (50). More tersely still: “All hope lies in thought” (39-40). To which Adorno replies: “In Marx language plays no role, he is a positivist.” Kant, rather than Marx, saw how “the concept of freedom…can be grasped only in relation to the constitution of mankind as a whole” (50). That language retains in itself the universal claims denied by the particular interests of individuals stands at the foundation of Adorno’s lifelong commitment to the work of art as a form of dialectical overcoming, through a mode of mimetic exacerbation, of capitalist contradictions. Works of art can perform a kind of “second reflection” of capitalist modes of production (93). Put another way, the political power of the work of art is fully predicated on the unreflective modes of work embodied in wage labor. Horkheimer clarifies the problem: “Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings” (31). He later puts it in Marxist terms, “classes must be abolished because the time is ripe for it, the forces of production are strong enough” (87). For Adorno, this new prospect for freedom is in fact a path to “catastrophe” (87). Whenever workers are given “free time” they are discovered to be “obsessively repeating the rituals of the efforts that have been demanded of them” (32). Adorno describes all the newly won freedoms, the sense that “everything seems to be improving” (35), as “a kind of false classless society” (33). The “perfect classless society” is “in reality the very opposite.” Horkheimer blasts back: “That’s too reactionary” (33). But Adorno is unrelenting: “this entire question of spare time is so unfortunate” because “people unconsciously mimic the work process” (33-34). What could it mean to say “people,” not owners or workers, mime the work process at home? Adorno further broadens the point when he explains how “the appeal to class won’t work any more, since today [we] are really all proletarians” (34). Owner and worker mime labor in their “relaxed” moments. The new manifesto is tailored to bourgeois and proletarian alike.

At their worst, Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of identity thinking is blandly reductive: “All [that self-determination] means [in German idealism] is that the work my master formerly ordered me to do is the same as the work I now seek to carry out of my own free will”; Kant’s “transcendental apperception: labor made absolute” (25-26). And speaking of exchange value: “People like advertisements. They do what the ads tell them and they know that they are doing so” (54). Along this sweeping line of thought Horkheimer remarks that “The USA is the country of argument.” Adorno picks up the (banal) idea: “Argument is consistently bourgeois” (73). Adorno goes on to confuse the matter when he also insists that the “mistrust of argument is at bottom what has inspired the Husserls and Heideggers” (72) and their fall into “pure irrationalism” (67).

Horkheimer, the more pessimistic and less historicist of the two, suggests “we have to reject both Marxism and ontology” (21). Or rather, it is the ontological and theological roots of Marxism—a “faith in progress” (19-20), something Adorno suggests when he speaks of “a new political authority [that] will emerge” at the limits of despair (60; my emphasis)—that Horkheimer rejects. Horkheimer blanches, for instance, at Adorno’s literalist attempts to identify theory and practice. “Even the most rarefied form of mental activity contains an element of the practical,” Adorno contends (75). There’s no difference, he says, between “thinking” and “eating roast goose” (80). Horkheimer rejects the identification and observes how thinking “must have a connection to a world set to rights” (80-81) and must be “targeting true practice” (96).

Although Horkheimer is far more pessimistic than Adorno—“today we have to declare ourselves defeatists…There is nothing we can do. We…have to declare that basically we cannot bring about change” (90)—he is also more practical. He places his diminishing hopes on a “more or less worn-out version of the American system” (21); “planning,” he suggests, “would offer the best prospect” (21). The view of planning is broadly redistributive: “Automation. We should take greater care to help others, to export the right goods to the right people, to seek cures for the sick” (53). Along these lines Horkheimer announces the second thesis of the new manifesto: “If there is so much affluence…we must give to those who have nothing” (106). But this is a fleeting thought within the general tenor of the manifesto, and it stands in tension with his more determined insistence on “the notion of difference” (78). He is “in favor of the chaotic” (27); one “should think differently and act differently” (79). But even here Horkheimer’s scruples are evident. He fears that the use of vague words like “change” and “otherness” are simply “metaphysical gilding for bourgeois desires” (83) and prefers instead the “animal qualities” of “a not-too-strenuous life, having enough to eat, not having to work from morning to night” (86-87).

The conversations conclude on a brief discussion of “Individualism.” It is here, in the most concise terms, that the larger problems of the manifesto project are revealed. It was Marx’s mistake, Horkheimer declares, to be “concerned to ensure that all men would be equal”! (111) Rather than equal, Horkheimer affirms that “human beings should be subtly different” (111; my emphasis). Adorno picks up the thought insisting that “Marx was too harmless,” “he did not concern himself with subjectivity” (111). And it is subjectivity or “difference” that lies at the center of the new manifesto. Adorno’s most surprising assertion, and his most misguided, appears with his concluding thought. The “idea that people are products of society down to the innermost fiber of their being” was dismissed by Marx as “milieu theory.” The future of Marxism lies in the reinstitution of this idea “first articulated by Lenin” (112). The battle that Marx fought against “milieu theory” was against the idea that culture determined consciousness. His great achievement was to see that economics was not a matter of culture but of exploitation. Which is to say Adorno’s emphasis on domination and difference (how bourgeois culture shapes being), rather than exploitation and the proletariat, is pre-Marxist in orientation. Post-Marxism is pre-Marxism redux.

Special thanks to the editors of Radical Philosophy for allowing me to reprint my review from issue 174 (July/August 2012): 31-33.

According to J. M. Bernstein, “the point of [Horkheimer and Adorno’s] Dialectic of Enlightenment was to explain why the dialectic of class had come to a standstill.” The “conflictual dialectic of proletariat and bourgeoisie,” Bernstein writes, “is unavailable for interpretive purposes” (31). It bears noting that this is the only appearance of the term “class conflict” in the 428 pages of The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (2004). Bernstein’s point is made again by Simon Jarvis in the same volume when he writes that the “concept of class…designates not a real entity but a real illusion” (94). “There is,” he insists, “no such thing as a ‘class.’” Because to “classify a diverse group of people under a single concept inevitably misleadingly identifies them” (94). What real or potential use could emerge from this rereading of Marx? It’s a matter of understanding the sea change in Marxist analysis that Adorno initiated when he criticized the basic Marxist tenet that “economics has priority over domination; domination may not be deduced otherwise than economically” (Negative Dialectics). That domination exists without private property was presumed to point to a more basic fact about civilization than any economic analysis could explain. For Adorno the fact that “human beings…are always being humiliated” has absolute priority over any economic analysis (48). At stake is nothing less than a vision of Marxism as an analysis of humiliation, of shame, not exploitation.

The stakes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s influential revision of Marxism emerges in the new translation of their dialogue Towards a New Manifesto. The title is an inspired misnomer; it is hard to see how “Discussion on Theory and Praxis”—the original title in Horkheimer’s Nachlass—would attract any but the most dedicated readers. But what makes the brief volume—113 generously spaced pages—so engaging and what partially legitimates the English title, is the space devoted to a reassessment of key Marxist concepts. We should “write a manifesto that will do justice to the current situation,” Adorno says (92) and he adds a surprising addendum: it should be “a strictly Leninist manifesto” (94). Despite Adorno’s thoroughgoing use of Marxist terminology, his explicit engagement with Marx is slim (roughly four essays in an extensive body of writing are devoted to class analysis). In the twelve discussions that make up Towards a New Manifesto nearly half revolve around the problem of work and “political concreteness.” But as Adorno and Horkheimer make clear, their theory “no longer has anything in common with Marx, with the most advanced class consciousness; our thoughts are no longer a function of the proletariat” (99).

Horkheimer formulates the basic problem for any contemporary Marxism: “in whose interest do we write, now that there is no longer a party and the revolution has become such an unlikely prospect?” (49) Horkheimer’s answer is striking and central to all Frankfurt School analyses, class struggle has shifted to the superstructure: “It is in language that the idea that all should be well can be articulated” (50). More tersely still: “All hope lies in thought” (39-40). To which Adorno replies: “In Marx language plays no role, he is a positivist.” Kant, rather than Marx, saw how “the concept of freedom…can be grasped only in relation to the constitution of mankind as a whole” (50). That language retains in itself the universal claims denied by the particular interests of individuals stands at the foundation of Adorno’s lifelong commitment to the work of art as a form of dialectical overcoming, through a mode of mimetic exacerbation, of capitalist contradictions. Works of art can perform a kind of “second reflection” of capitalist modes of production (93). Put another way, the political power of the work of art is fully predicated on the unreflective modes of work embodied in wage labor. Horkheimer clarifies the problem: “Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings” (31). He later puts it in Marxist terms, “classes must be abolished because the time is ripe for it, the forces of production are strong enough” (87). For Adorno, this new prospect for freedom is in fact a path to “catastrophe” (87). Whenever workers are given “free time” they are discovered to be “obsessively repeating the rituals of the efforts that have been demanded of them” (32). Adorno describes all the newly won freedoms, the sense that “everything seems to be improving” (35), as “a kind of false classless society” (33). The “perfect classless society” is “in reality the very opposite.” Horkheimer blasts back: “That’s too reactionary” (33). But Adorno is unrelenting: “this entire question of spare time is so unfortunate” because “people unconsciously mimic the work process” (33-34). What could it mean to say “people,” not owners or workers, mime the work process at home? Adorno further broadens the point when he explains how “the appeal to class won’t work any more, since today [we] are really all proletarians” (34). Owner and worker mime labor in their “relaxed” moments. The new manifesto is tailored to bourgeois and proletarian alike.

At their worst, Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of identity thinking is blandly reductive: “All [that self-determination] means [in German idealism] is that the work my master formerly ordered me to do is the same as the work I now seek to carry out of my own free will”; Kant’s “transcendental apperception: labor made absolute” (25-26). And speaking of exchange value: “People like advertisements. They do what the ads tell them and they know that they are doing so” (54). Along this sweeping line of thought Horkheimer remarks that “The USA is the country of argument.” Adorno picks up the (banal) idea: “Argument is consistently bourgeois” (73). Adorno goes on to confuse the matter when he also insists that the “mistrust of argument is at bottom what has inspired the Husserls and Heideggers” (72) and their fall into “pure irrationalism” (67).

Horkheimer, the more pessimistic and less historicist of the two, suggests “we have to reject both Marxism and ontology” (21). Or rather, it is the ontological and theological roots of Marxism—a “faith in progress” (19-20), something Adorno suggests when he speaks of “a new political authority [that] will emerge” at the limits of despair (60; my emphasis)—that Horkheimer rejects. Horkheimer blanches, for instance, at Adorno’s literalist attempts to identify theory and practice. “Even the most rarefied form of mental activity contains an element of the practical,” Adorno contends (75). There’s no difference, he says, between “thinking” and “eating roast goose” (80). Horkheimer rejects the identification and observes how thinking “must have a connection to a world set to rights” (80-81) and must be “targeting true practice” (96).

Although Horkheimer is far more pessimistic than Adorno—“today we have to declare ourselves defeatists…There is nothing we can do. We…have to declare that basically we cannot bring about change” (90)—he is also more practical. He places his diminishing hopes on a “more or less worn-out version of the American system” (21); “planning,” he suggests, “would offer the best prospect” (21). The view of planning is broadly redistributive: “Automation. We should take greater care to help others, to export the right goods to the right people, to seek cures for the sick” (53). Along these lines Horkheimer announces the second thesis of the new manifesto: “If there is so much affluence…we must give to those who have nothing” (106). But this is a fleeting thought within the general tenor of the manifesto, and it stands in tension with his more determined insistence on “the notion of difference” (78). He is “in favor of the chaotic” (27); one “should think differently and act differently” (79). But even here Horkheimer’s scruples are evident. He fears that the use of vague words like “change” and “otherness” are simply “metaphysical gilding for bourgeois desires” (83) and prefers instead the “animal qualities” of “a not-too-strenuous life, having enough to eat, not having to work from morning to night” (86-87).

The conversations conclude on a brief discussion of “Individualism.” It is here, in the most concise terms, that the larger problems of the manifesto project are revealed. It was Marx’s mistake, Horkheimer declares, to be “concerned to ensure that all men would be equal”! (111) Rather than equal, Horkheimer affirms that “human beings should be subtly different” (111; my emphasis). Adorno picks up the thought insisting that “Marx was too harmless,” “he did not concern himself with subjectivity” (111). And it is subjectivity or “difference” that lies at the center of the new manifesto. Adorno’s most surprising assertion, and his most misguided, appears with his concluding thought. The “idea that people are products of society down to the innermost fiber of their being” was dismissed by Marx as “milieu theory.” The future of Marxism lies in the reinstitution of this idea “first articulated by Lenin” (112). The battle that Marx fought against “milieu theory” was against the idea that culture determined consciousness. His great achievement was to see that economics was not a matter of culture but of exploitation. Which is to say Adorno’s emphasis on domination and difference (how bourgeois culture shapes being), rather than exploitation and the proletariat, is pre-Marxist in orientation. Post-Marxism is pre-Marxism redux.

What chiefly distinguishes the commodity-owner from the commodity is the circumstance that the latter treats every other commodity as nothing more than the form of appearance of its own value. Born leveler and cynic, it is therefore always on the jump to exchange not only soul but body with any other commodity, be it plagued by more deformities than Maritornes herself. With his five and more senses, the owner of the commodity makes up for the latter’s lack of a feel for the concrete in other commodities. His commodity has for him no unmediated use value. Otherwise he would not bring it to market. It has use value for others. For him its only unmediated use value is to be the bearer of exchange value, and so to be a medium of exchange. That is why he wants to dispose of it in exchange for commodities whose use values appeal to him. All commodities are non-use-values for their owners, use values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change hands. But this change of hands constitutes their exchange, and their exchange relates them to one another as values and realizes them as values. Commodities must be realized as values before they can be realized as use values. (K 100 / C 179).1

This is a knotty passage (and one whose gender politics are thankfully not entirely legible in English). Its difficulty and indeed “literariness” seem all out of proportion to the matter in hand. Should it not be among the easiest things in the world to distinguish commodity-owner from commodity? Is it not rather an odd flourish to stack the deck by personifying the commodity, and then to feign perplexity in distinguishing the personification from the person? But the operation is the opposite of this: we have been told in the previous paragraph that “the characters who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations” (K 100 / C 179). So it is not only that the commodity is personified, but rather, it proving easier to talk of the commodity as a “she” than the owner as an “it,” that the owner is. The distinction is therefore between two logical standpoints—something which the fact that one of them is occupied by a consciousness tends to obscure—and the distinction is simply this: from the standpoint of the commodity, all commodities are qualitatively indifferent. If you imagine a market without buyers and sellers, you are left with a mass of commodities that are exchangeable in various ratios, but none of which is not exchangeable, which is to say none of which possesses any qualities that cannot be expressed as quantity. (The basis of this qualitative indifference, established in Marx’s previous chapter, does not concern us at the moment.) But from the standpoint of the commodity owner—who, because he owns a commodity and not some other kind of thing, is both buyer and seller—his commodity is qualitatively different from all the others in that his alone has no qualities. To be more precise, his has only one quality that matters, which is its lack of qualities: that is, its qualitative equality with other commodities: its exchangeability.2

All other commodities—that is, the commodities he encounters as a buyer rather than a seller—are, for his “five and more senses” full of qualities. Quality, use value, counts for him as a buyer: otherwise he would not want to buy. Quality, use value, counts nothing for him as a seller: otherwise he would not be willing to sell. Of course, as a seller, he knows that the commodities he brings to market must “stand the test as use-values before they can be realized as values” (K 100 / C 179). “But”—and this is a Hegelian “but,” the conjunction which changes everything—“only the act of exchange can prove whether or not [the human labor expended in them] is useful for others, whether the product of such labor can therefore satisfy alien needs” (K 100-101 / C 180). We thus find ourselves in a chicken-and-egg loop—exchange value precedes use value precedes exchange value precedes use value—that Marx’s imaginary commodity owner wants no part of: “he wants to realize his commodity as value…whether or not his own commodity has any use value for the owner of the other commodity” (K 101 / C 180). The problem can only be resolved—for the time being, for it will reemerge in several forms, including what our contemporary Keynesians will call a liquidity trap—by giving the contradiction “room to move” (K 118 / C 198). Marx is preparing the ground for the appearance of money, which turns the relationship to a single buyer into a relationship with the market, and provides a practical basis for the radical exchangeability of the commodity.

For our present purposes, however, what is important is that even in the case of the individual buyer, and therefore also in the case of the market, it is only the exchangeability that matters to the commodity owner, as frustrated as he might be by the fact that its use value is from one angle prior. If he sells you a salad bowl and you use it as a chamber pot, that is strictly your business. As far as the seller is concerned, the use value of “his” commodity only makes its appearance as exchange value: “only the act of exchange can prove whether that labor is useful to others.” The commodity owner wants to realize the exchange value of his commodity by producing something that is a use-value for others. But he isn’t in the business of legislating or even knowing what that use-value should be; he doesn’t even know it has a use value until it sells. Indeed, the more potential uses it has—it slices, it dices, it’s a typewriter and a shoe store and a status symbol and a peepshow—the less he legislates what its actual use-value should be, and the happier he is.

If this were the only possible state of affairs, there would be no reason to demonstrate its peculiarity. So what is the other of “a society of commodity producers” (K 93 / C 172)?  We are given several options in the previous chapter: Robinson Crusoe, the medieval corvée, the peasant family, hints of various historical non-capitalist societies, and finally the famous “association of free people, working with the means of production held in common, and, in full self-awareness, expending their many individual labor powers as one social labor power” (K 92 / C 171). These are all others of commodity production, but its determinate other, the other that the capitalist market produces as its own internal frame, is Hegel’s image of collective labor, which Marx here and there explicitly recalls. This image appears most explicitly in Hegel’s idealized evocation of Greek ethical life, an evocation which refers not to the Greek polis as it actually was or as Hegel imagined it actually was, but rather to its own immanent horizon, an ideal Greek customary life must presuppose but can only realize in an unsatisfactory, contradictory and unstable way:

The individual’s labor to satisfy his own needs is as much a satisfaction of the needs of others as his own, and the satisfaction of his own needs is achieved only through the labor of others. As the individual in his individual labor already unconsciously accomplishes a common labor, so again he also produces the common as his conscious object; the whole becomes, as whole, his work, for which he sacrifices himself, and precisely thus is himself restored by it. (265 / §351).3

The problem—the satisfaction of “universal” or social needs through individual labor, irreducibly particular talents and drives—is the same in Marx and Hegel, though for Marx “full self-awareness” will mark a crucial difference. Marx, however, considers this problem by means of a different social formation, namely capitalism, one in which there is nothing customary about what is produced or who produces it; one in which, as we have seen, exchange precedes use. In Marx’s version—“only the act of exchange can prove whether or not [such labor] is useful for others, whether the product of such labor can therefore satisfy alien needs”—the two subordinate clauses appear to say the same thing. The function of the second clause is to emphasize the shift from the neutral “other” to “alien” (fremde); that is, to point out the peculiarity of commodity exchange in which “the needs of others,” taken for granted in the Hegelian version of customary life, are reduced to a cipher whose index is exchangeability. As Fredric Jameson has recently reminded us, the logic of alienation (Entfremdung) in Marx is intimately related to that of Hegelian externalization (Entäusserung, though neither Hegel nor Marx adheres rigorously to the linguistic distinction).4 The other or negative horizon of commodity exchange is what Hegel calls die Kraft der Entäusserung, “the power of externalization, the power to make oneself into a thing” (483 / §658).

Let us then take a moment to establish the precise contours of this negative, Hegelian horizon of commodity exchange. Plenty has been said about the lordship and bondage theme in Phenomenology of Spirit, and we have no interest in revisiting it here, even if the relation of buyer to seller—logically encompassing the two moments of indifference and petulance—does, in its utter failure to produce anything like subjectivity (it produces instead a market where the parties can safely face one another in the aggregate rather than as antagonists) ironically recall it. What is important here is how we get out of this dialectic. As is well known, this is through the labor of the bondsman who, in forming and shaping the thing, in externalizing himself in the production of the lifeworld of both himself and his master, comes to find in that world not the master’s power but his own:

Thus the form [of the product of labor], set outside himself, is not an other to him, for this form is precisely his own pure being-for-self, which to him becomes the truth. What he rediscovers, precisely through labor which appears to harbor only an alien purpose, is nothing other than his own purpose, arrived at through his own means. (154 / §196)

This is Hegel’s materialism—the exact opposite, it might be said in passing, of causal or vulgar materialism—and indeed it represents a kind of ideological core to Phenomenology of Spirit. But the point to be made here is that the object the bondsman shapes is not just made—Marx’s commodity will also be the product of labor—but intended: a purpose arrived at by his own means. The thing is not a cipher whose use is indexed by its exchange, but rather a use whose purpose is legible, which is to say normative. The master can and presumably does find another purpose in it; but that will now be an occasion for conflict. The owner of commodities, on the other hand, doesn’t care what purpose a buyer finds in his commodity, as long as someone will buy it.

What we have arrived at is the distinction between the exchange-formula C-M-C (Commodity-Money-Commodity or Hegelian Sittlichkeit, the satisfaction of individual needs as the universal satisfaction of needs through the social metabolism, as use-values are exchanged through the medium of money) and M-C-M, the same relation but now understood as the kernel of capitalism itself, where use-value is only a vanishing moment in the valorization of capital. What we have arrived at is the distinction between an object whose use (or purpose or meaning) is normatively inscribed in the object itself—a meaning that is in Hegel’s terms universal, which is simply “allgemein,” available for everyone and not therefore a private matter—and an object whose use is a matter of indifference from one position, and a matter of possibly intense but necessarily private concern from another. What we have arrived at is the distinction between an object that embodies, and must seek to compel, conviction, and one that seeks to provoke interest in its beholder—or perhaps all kinds of different interest from different beholders. What we have arrived at, no doubt through an unusual route, is the distinction between art and objecthood.5

The distinction is of course Michael Fried’s, but it has become central to the debate over the dominant strand in contemporary cultural production, or, more likely, the dominant strand in the cultural production of the very recent past, a period for which the term “postmodernism” will do as well as any other. Everything Fried finds objectionable in the “object” is on the other hand perfectly legitimate for a certain class of objects we are already familiar with, namely commodities. Or, to put this another way, Fried’s “formalist” account of the distinction between art and non-art is also an historicist one, fully derivable from the Marxian problematic of the “real subsumption of labor under capital,” or the closure of the world market.

To return, then, to Capital. As we just saw, one way of understanding Marx’s analysis is to say that in commodity exchange, the site of purpose or intention shifts. If I make a bowl for myself, it is a bowl because I wanted to make a bowl, and I will be concerned about all kinds of concrete attributes the bowl might have. If it is shallow rather than deep, wood rather than metal, these attributes are as they are because I intend them to be that way, and we are in the world of Hegelian externalization. If I make a bowl for the market, I am primarily concerned only with one attribute, its exchangeability: that is, the demand for bowls. And that demand, and therefore all of the concrete attributes that factor into that demand, are decided elsewhere, namely on the market. So while I might still make decisions about my bowls, those decisions no longer matter as intentions even for me, because they are entirely subordinated to more or less informed guesses about other people’s desires. This has obvious repercussions for cultural interpretation. If a work of art is not a commodity—or if it is not only a commodity, which is to say that a moment of externality to the commodity form is analytically isolable, which is to say that there is something in the work that is not a commodity—then it makes entirely good sense to approach it with interpretive tools, since it can plausibly be intended to mean something. (In the passage from Hegel cited above—“his own purpose, arrived at through his own means”—“Sinn,” a multivalent word translated here as “purpose,” could also be translated as “meaning,” and indeed the conflict immanent in the normativity of the formed object will, in Phenomenology of Spirit, devolve in skepticism and stoicism to a mere conflict of interpretation. But that is another story.) If a work of art is only a commodity, interpretive tools suddenly make no sense at all, since the form the object takes is determined elsewhere than where it is made, namely on the market. So it is not really that interpretation as such no longer makes any sense, so much as that interpreting the artwork no longer makes any sense. It is rather the desires represented by the market that are subject to analysis and elucidation.

It might seem absurd to say the art commodity is uninterpretable, but think for a moment of an industrial spectacle like James Cameron’s Avatar. The sight of critics producing a welter of completely incompatible (but also generally plausible) interpretations was an amusing one that did not go unnoticed by the critics themselves. This empirical profusion is insignificant in itself: all of these interpretations could be wrong. But it is also possible that since the film is only concerned with producing a set of marketable effects, it cannot at the same time be concerned with producing the minimal internal consistency required to produce a meaning. And in fact, James Cameron himself is pretty clear that this is the case. When asked why female Na’vi have breasts, Cameron replies: “Right from the beginning I said, ‘She’s got to have tits,’ even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals.”6 Cameron is more precise than he probably means to be when he says that “makes no sense.” Pressed in a different interview, Cameron responds that the female Na’vi have breasts “because this is a movie for human people.”7 In other words, people—enough of them anyway—will pay to see breasts, so the breasts go in. But this “makes no sense”: there is no point in interpreting it, because the salient fact is not that Cameron wanted them there but that he thought a lot of other people would want them there, and the wildly inconsistent ideology of the film is likewise composed of saleable ideologemes that together make no sense. This is not to say that all art commodities are similarly inconsistent: some audiences will pay for ideological or narrative or aesthetic consistency, so we have Michael Moore, middlebrow cinema, and independent film. But this consistency doesn’t add up to a meaning, since what looks like meaning is only an appeal to a market niche.

But this is nothing new but rather a very old line, essentially Adorno’s critique of the culture industry.8 The lineaments of that critique are well known; it will be enough for the present to remind ourselves that in that essay Adorno has no interest in explicating works because in commercial culture there are no works to critique and no meanings to be found. The culture industry as it appears in Adorno is simpler than ours, seemingly only differentiated vertically rather than splintered into potentially infinite socio-aesthetico-cultural niches, but the essential situation is the one we are attempting to understand. “The varying production values in the culture industry have nothing to do with content, nothing to do with the meaning of the product” (DA 132 / DE 124) because the varying production values are aimed at different markets rather than different purposes, and this principle is “the meaningful content of all film, whatever plot the production team may have selected” (DA 132 / DE 124). So while one can ask sociological questions about art commodities—Why do people like violent movies?—interpretive questions—Why is there a love scene in the middle of Three Days of the Condor?—do not have interesting answers.

It will not have escaped notice that, under conditions of Hegelian externalization, meaning is equated with intention, while under market conditions, “meaning” is simply what can be said about the appropriation of commodities. Sociological questions have answers without necessarily involving intentions; interpretive questions, if they have answers, require intentions. It may be worth taking a moment to emphasize the fact that this equation is deeply Hegelian, and that there is nothing in it that is threatening to Marxist interpretation as such. The strong claim for the identity of intention and meaning (very briefly, the claim that meaning includes neither causes nor effects of the meaning in question) already implies the social.9 The medium of meaning is (always in the Hegelian sense) a universal, which is to say a social machine, be it language as such or a particular signifying network like literature or the royal court. (Meaning is necessarily a socially symbolic act.) While meanings exist sub specie aeternitatis, the media or social machines in which they mean are, it seems almost too obvious to point out, historical: if one insists on understanding meaning proper as externalization, one must begin with an account of the social machine. (Always historicize.) Further, nothing in the reduction of meaning to intention prevents us from chasing down what a meaning might entail as a logically necessary consequence (as opposed to an effect) or condition of possibility (as opposed to a cause), even if these are not intended. Indeed, this is Marx’s procedure in the chapter we have been discussing. The future capitalist, for now simply an owner of commodities, wants to sell his goods. That is all. “In their confusion, the commodity owners think like Faust: In the beginning was the deed. They have already acted before thinking” (K 101 / C 180). The logical contortions embodied in the act of exchange (the confusion or embarrassment, Verlegenheit, of the commodity-owners—indeed, their ideology) are nowhere in the mind of the capitalist, but are rather the logical preconditions of the act of exchange itself. In this Hegelian-Marxian sense, the unconscious is simply everything entailed or presupposed by an action that is not present to consciousness in that action: in Phenomenology of Spirit, the ignorance of the provincial type at court, which necessarily turns every attempt at sincerity into its opposite, or the politics of the “beautiful soul,” who imagines himself to be beyond politics but whose very aloofness from politics is itself a politics. An intention includes such necessary presuppositions or entailments. (The identity of intention and meaning insists upon a political unconscious.)10

Finally, the identity of meaning and intention does not entail any position on the desirability of something like cultural studies, if the latter is taken to mean the sociological study of cultural production, distribution, and consumption. What it does entail is the distinction between such study—which will be crucial in what follows, in the form of a sociological understanding of the universal in which contemporary artworks make their way—and interpretation. And indeed, this last position can also be derived from Hegel. In the section in the Phenomenology on “the matter in hand,” the relation between sociological motivation (ambition) and scientific purpose (die Sache selbst, the matter in hand) is, as it is in Bourdieu, undecidable: it is always possible that a given intervention is attempted for money or fame or position. But this very undecidability means that nothing concrete can be said about the relation of ambition to work, which is to say that, as regards what is in the work (as opposed to what caused it or what effect it may have) nothing useful can be divined from sociological research.

To return, then, to the art-commodity and its other. For Adorno the art-commodity had a plausible other or negative horizon, namely modernism (even if this is usually referred to collectively in the essay as “bourgeois artworks,” and usually in the past tense), where Hegelian externalization—compensatory, tragic, but an externalization nonetheless—holds. Adorno accounts for this possibility by the residual phenomenon of tributary backwaters within capitalism, spaces left behind by the expansion of capital. The persistence of such spaces “strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supply and demand, and increased its resistance far beyond the actual degree of protection” (DA 141 / DE 133). What differentiates Adorno’s culture industry from the self-representation of our contemporary moment is that the art-commodity now has no other. Fredric Jameson, bringing the problem up to the day before yesterday, simply says, matter-of-factly, that “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally.”11 From this, everything follows.

The logic of this transition is already available in Marx, in a draft chapter for Capital I that was not available in the West until the 1960s. What we have is often fragmentary, but the basic distinction in the “Results of the Immediate Process of Production” between the “formal subsumption” and the “real subsumption of labor under capital” is clear.12 Under conditions of formal subsumption, an industry or production process is drawn into a capitalist economy, but “there is no change as yet in the mode of production itself” (R 106 / C 1026). Under conditions of “real subsumption,” on the other hand, the production process itself is altered, such that the producers are no longer selling their surplus product to the capitalist, but are instead selling their labor to the capitalist, who will eventually be compelled to reorganize the production process altogether. (Production, as well as exchange, has both a C-M-C or “customary” in the Hegelian sense and an M-C-M or capitalist form. The latter haunts the former until the phase change to capitalism proper, when the former haunts the latter.) Logically speaking, the distance between formal and real subsumption is vanishingly small (just as C-M-C and M-C-M are the same process, examined from different standpoints); but the status of the product of labor, and eventually the work process itself, is fundamentally different under each. Indeed, as will no doubt already be apparent, “formal subsumption” allows for Hegelian externalization to continue under capitalism, since it is, for example, only accidental surplus that is sold: “Milton produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as the manifestation of his own nature. He later sold the product for £5 and thus became a dealer in commodities” (R 128 / C 1044). Under “real subsumption,” on the other hand, we are already in the world of Marxian separation, where the whole production process is oriented towards exchange. But what this logical proximity means is that directly “capitalist production has a tendency to take over all branches of industry… where only formal subsumption obtains” (R 118 / C 1036). In order for formal subsumption in a given corner of industry to obtain with any permanence, it must be afforded some degree of protection: professional guilds, research-based tenure, Adorno’s well-funded state cultural institutions, or, as we shall consider shortly, something like Bourdieu’s concept of a field of restricted production.

For once underestimating capitalism, Marx seems to think in these fragments that the arts are, by their very nature, unsuitable candidates for real subsumption (see R 133 / C 1048). Little did he imagine that once the means of distribution were fully subsumed, whatever is genuinely inassimilable in artistic labor would cease to make any difference; that the artist, when not genuinely a cultural worker, would be forced to conceive of herself, in true neoliberal fashion, as an entrepreneur of herself; that any remaining pockets of autonomy would effectively cease to exist by lacking access to distribution and, once granted access, would cease to function as meaningfully autonomous. Adorno has no trouble imagining a still-incomplete real subsumption, which is the culture industry, with modernism as the last holdout of merely formal subsumption.13 For Jameson, finally, the real subsumption of cultural labor under capital is an established fact. The result is a “dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture” that is at the same time “a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm” (48).

This end of autonomy directly implies the end of modernism. If canonical modernism conceived of itself as autonomous—as producing the “critical distance” (48) that Jameson sees as having been “abolished,” along with any “autonomous sphere of culture…in the new space of postmodernism” (48)—then today we tend to understand this critical distance as nothing more than modernism’s aesthetic ideology; modernist artworks are and were commodities after all.14 So far we have done no more than reconstruct the logic that lends the contemporary common sense we began with its plausibility.

Nobody could be more skeptical of modernism’s self-representation than Pierre Bourdieu. And yet Bourdieu produced, in his two-field theory of aesthetic production, an account of the real referent of modernism’s self-representation in the development of a “field of restricted production,” which lies behind the ability of artists to “affirm, both in their practice and their representation of it, the irreducibility of the work of art to the status of a simple commodity.”15 This dual affirmation is key, for the ideological representation of autonomy has its basis in the real autonomization of aesthetic practice in the struggle by artists to institute a “field of restricted production,” which forcibly substitutes for the “unpredictable verdicts of an anonymous public” (54)—the problem of the seller of commodities—a “public of equals who are also competitors” (58). In other words, the establishment of a field of restricted production forcibly carves a zone of formal subsumption out of the field of large-scale production which is really and entirely subsumed under capital. (It is worth pointing out that such a restricted field is not a market in any meaningful sense: judgments by peers, struggles over the significance of particular interventions, are precisely the opposite of purchases on a market, which cannot provoke disagreement because, as we have seen, no agreement is presupposed.) Adorno’s more ad hoc version of the two-field hypothesis conceives of its restricted zone as a residual rather than an emergent space; but he and Bourdieu share an understanding of the essentiality of such a zone to meaning as such, as well as a sense of its precariousness.

In Bourdieu’s account, the establishment of such a zone directly implies the tendency of art produced in a restricted field to gravitate toward formal concerns, toward the progressive working-out of problems specific to individual media. What a restricted public of (for example) painters, critics of painting, and connoisseurs of painting share is nothing other than expertise in painting. “Painting was thus set on the road towards a conscious and explicit implementation or setting-into-work of the most specifically pictorial principles of painting, which already equals a questioning of these principles, and hence a questioning, within painting itself, of painting itself” (66). In other words, modernism: “Especially since the middle of the nineteenth century, art finds the principle of change within itself, as though history were internal to the system and as though the development of forms of representation and expression were nothing more than the product of the logical development of systems of axioms specific to the various arts” (126). But for the characteristic “as though,” which marks this as an imaginary relation whose real referent is the logic of the restricted field, the words could have been written by Clement Greenberg.16 Indeed, the Bourdieusian restricted field is the condition of possibility of modernism as such, the condition of possibility of a Hegelian concern for “the matter in hand” under full-blown capitalism.

With the collapse of an autonomous field, with the real subsumption of aesthetic labor under capital, the possibility of something bearing a family resemblance to modernism abruptly disappears. What had been central was a problem to be addressed—a problem in which the general market, because it is a market, has no interest—and all the old solutions had been ruled out of bounds not because they were not nice to hang on a wall or to read, but because they had been absorbed into the game of producing new ones. For this reason, what appears as loss from the perspective of autonomy is at the same time a tremendous liberation of formal energies. The leapfrogging, dialectical modernist game—in which every attempt to solve the central problem represented by a medium becomes, for every other producer, a new version of the problem—becomes more hermetic and difficult to play over time. One can immediately see that the isolation of an autonomous field is not only the necessary condition of possibility (within market society) for the production of any meaning whatsoever, it is also a condition that leads to the increasing difficulty of producing meaning or, more accurately, the increasing formalization of meaning itself. Meanings are made possible by autonomization, but these meanings themselves are increasingly only formally meanings—that is, they are legible as intentions, but the only meanings they convey are specifically painterly, musical, writerly, etcetera. The very dynamic that makes modernism possible tends at the same time to restrict its movement to an increasingly narrow ambit.

With the real subsumption of art under capital and the end of the modernist game, then, all of the old “solutions,” each one of which had been invalidated by subsequent solutions, suddenly become available for use. A certain historicism—Jamesonian postmodern pastiche—becomes possible. Such a historicism is null as historicism, since what it doesn’t produce is precisely anything like history; but on the other hand it is practically bursting with the excitement at being allowed to apply its galvanic fluid to the great gallery of dead forms, which are suddenly candidates for resuscitation. Friedian “objecthood” is also liberated at this same moment: the reaction of the spectator, or customer, assumes importance in precise correlation to the recession of the formal problem confronted by the artist.

But, as is probably obvious by now, liberation from the strictures of the old modernist games is at the same time subjection to something else, namely the “anonymous market” from which the autonomous field had wrested a degree of autonomy. If artworks can now make use of all the old styles (or become objects), it is not clear why one would call them artworks at all, since the honest old art-commodity, precisely because it was more interested in the appeal to a market (the effect on an audience) than on formal problems, was able to make use of the old styles (or be an object) all along. In other words, there is nothing new in unabashedly borrowing indiscriminately from the great gallery of dead forms, or in appealing theatrically to consumer desires. These procedures are in fact the norm. The innovation of postmodern pastiche is—by definition—not formal, but in the collapse of art into what was already the status quo of the culture at large. Postmodernism’s innovation is precisely in evacuating the distinction between industrial spectacle—Cameron’s ideological mishmash—and the Jamesonian postmodern art-object, assembled from its “grab bag or lumber room of disjointed subsystems and raw materials and impulses of all kinds” (31).

Of course, this is the point. And indeed there is nothing implausible about a scenario in which artworks as such disappear, to be entirely replaced by art-commodities, and in which the study of artworks would have to be replaced with the study of reception, of desires legible in the market, and so on. There is a deeply egalitarian promise in such a scenario, precisely because the formal concerns addressed by artworks are in general the province of a few—in the absence of a strong public education system, are necessarily the province of a few. The problem is that a world where the work of art is a commodity like any other is the world neoliberalism claims we already live in and have always lived in, a world where everything is (and if it isn’t, should be) a market. The old vanguardist horizon of equivalence between art and life—which only made sense as a progressive impulse when “life” was understood as something other than the status quo—reverses meaning and becomes deeply conformist. Against this market conformism the assertion of autonomy—even as its very plausibility now seems in doubt—becomes vital once again.

A host of consequences follows from this reversal. The assertion of autonomy means that an artwork must contain its own interpretation; that is, the artwork must be a theory of itself. The assertion of autonomy, in other words, demands a return to immanent critique, to the notion of self-legislating form; in other words, to the conception of literature formulated by the German Romantics at the turn of the 19^th century: “Poetry should represent itself in every representation, and be at every point at once poetry and the poetry of poetry” (Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment 238 [1798]).17 In fact, the Romantic reinvention of literature and the other arts undergirds more contemporary critical practice than we like to imagine, and indeed alone justifies a practice like close reading. The assertion of aesthetic autonomy returns the discipline of literary studies, which, absent such an assertion, can only flounder in search of a relevance it lacks by definition, to theoretical coherence.

A more substantial consequence is that the charge of “elitism,” or the class stratification of aesthetic response, accrues to the claim to universal heteronomy rather than to autonomous art. For if nothing essential distinguishes between art and non-art, the only distinction left—and some distinction is necessary in order for the word “art” to have any referent, not to mention in order to populate the institutions that still exist to preserve, transmit, and consecrate it—is between expensive art and cheap art, or art whose means of appropriation are expensive or cheap to acquire. Indeed, rather than affirm emphatically the status of the work of art as nothing more than the luxury good that it undoubtedly also is, it would be prettier to claim heteronomy as a critique of autonomy. But this would mean affirming a meaning, and as we have seen this would necessarily entail a claim to autonomy from the market even as that claim is disavowed.

Under contemporary conditions, the assertion of aesthetic autonomy is, in itself, a political assertion. (A minimal one, to be sure.) This was not always the case. In the modernist period, for example, the convincing assertion of autonomy produced, as it does now, a peculiar non-market space within the capitalist social field. But there is no natural political valence to modernism’s distance from the market, since modernism does not make its way under anything like the dominance of market ideology that we experience today.18 (It was also easier to confuse personal with aesthetic autonomy. Today their opposition is clear. Personal autonomy—choice—takes place in the market. Aesthetic autonomy—meaning—can take place only in a non-market. Outside of the work, the assertion of autonomy is advertising copy.) Modernism tends to be hostile to the culture market, but all kinds of politics (Heidegger as much as Adorno) are hostile to the market. Indeed, Lisa Siraganian has suggested that underlying the panoply of modernist radicalisms is nothing other than a deeper commitment to classical political liberalism, to a zone of deliberative autonomy.19 Modernist hostility to the market only acquires a definite political valence after modernism: when the claim of the universality of the market is, as it is today, the primary ideological weapon wielded in the class violence that is the redistribution of wealth upwards. The upwards redistribution of wealth in the current conjuncture would be unthinkable without this weapon: the entire ideology of neoliberalism hinges on the assertion that this redistribution is what a competitive market both produces and requires as a precondition. If the claim to autonomy is today a minimal political claim, it is not for all that a trivial one. A plausible claim to autonomy is in fact the precondition for any politics at all other than the politics of acquiescence to the dictates of the market.

In the new dispensation, in other words, the assertion of autonomy is no longer a commitment to liberalism. The horizon of the liberal commitment to disagreement is agreement. Aesthetic autonomy today is, on the other hand, locked in a life or death struggle with the market. Our social machine is not the market itself but rather capitalism, which requires (among other things, like exploitation) both markets and institutions autonomous of them. There is then nothing archaic about the institution of art, nothing rear-guard about the assertion of autonomy. As with the enlightenment in Hegel (who referred rather to “the struggle of Enlightenment with Supersition”), capitalism is not one thing but rather the struggle between two things. (To be more precise, it is many such struggles, or one such struggle with many forms of appearance). Autonomous institutions, “matters in hand,” are, in other words, not mere spaces of critique, somehow removed from the social machine; they are rather integral to it. The assertion of autonomy is the assertion that, rather than in the heat-death of the closure of the market, or in the static symbiosis of markets and regulation, history lies in the struggle between autonomy and the market.

But how to make the claim to autonomy plausible? Haven’t we, in outlining the collapse of modernism, done no more than confirm the wisdom that the work of art is a commodity like any other? In fact, it is the claim to universal heteronomy that is implausible. Markets—and this was recognized in some of the precursors to neoliberal discourse—depend on a host of non-market actors and institutions, even as these are always at the same time under threat from the market itself.20 And a major consequence of Bourdieu’s discovery of the restricted field was the demonstration that the field of large-scale cultural production, the culture industry as such, is utterly dependent on the persistence of the restricted field.21 If the old modernist autonomy has been revealed to be an aesthetic ideology, there is no reason to believe that the new heteronomy therefore represents the truth. Like modernist autonomy, it is a productive ideology: it frees artists to do something other than the old modernist games, and it allows them to work in the culture industry without facing the accusation of selling out, which now seems like an anachronistic accusation indeed. But that doesn’t mean that aesthetic heteronomy corresponds to the actual state of affairs, though it must refer to something real in order to be effective. And at any rate, it takes half a second to realize that both heteronomy and autonomy are, taken separately, deeply contradictory positions that could not be occupied by any actual cultural production worth talking about. Pure autonomy would have no relation to the world; pure heteronomy would be indistinguishable from it. Rather, the question is: how and where is autonomy asserted, what are the mechanisms that make it possible? How, in short, does heteronomy produce or presume the autonomous?

Two answers suggest themselves, though both Fried and Jameson have their own solutions with which readers will already be familiar. The first is what one might call, in search of a better term, positive historicism, as a necessary logical advance from null historicism or pastiche. As long as an artwork is making a claim to be an artwork, the very heteronomy proclaimed by historicism can only be the appearance of heteronomy. The “grab bag or lumber room” is only an apparent grab-bag or lumber-room; it is in fact governed by a principle of selection. If it is an actual grab bag or lumber room, it is the internet or an archive or a mall or simply everyday experience itself, and we don’t need artists for those. As a disavowed principle of selection it may be weak or inconsistent; but from disavowed principle to conscious principle is but a tiny Hegelian step, and weak or null historicism turns into strong or positive historicism. So in this case the legible element of form, its meaning—the moment of intention—is not so much in the formal reduction of an art into the problem of its medium as it is in the process of framing: in the selection a particular formal or thematic problem as central, and the rewriting of the history of the medium or genre or even socio-cultural aesthetic field as the history of that problem. Possibly because of the one-time dominance of the album form, this solution is most abundantly audible in popular music. (Meanwhile, in large-format photography, precisely because it does open up an entirely new arena to be formally reduced to the problem of medium, and because this arena can be explored on the basis of an already existing restricted field, this solution is less urgent.)22

One of the best examples in music is the Brazilian Tropicália movement, one of the first pastiche postmodernisms. But it becomes obvious almost immediately that Tropicália’s “lumber room” is a national lumber room, and that the materials it cobbles together are only those materials that register what had been the thematic center of Brazilian modernism. Brazilian modernism had been concerned with the perverse coexistence of the archaic and the hypermodern typical of Brazil’s insertion into the world economy as a relatively wealthy peripheral economy. Tropicália, rather than search for a form adequate to express this content, will scour the cultural landscape for forms that already embody it: for example, slave culture electrified in trio eléctrico or submitted to modernist compositional technique in bossa nova.23 The two musical forms—a street music invented for Carnaval in Salvador and a chamber music invented for bourgeois living rooms in Rio—would seem to have nothing to do with each other until Tropicália asserts their identity, at which point they can only be understood as forms of appearance of the same essential contradiction. And indeed now purely commercial forms like iê-iê-iê (from “yeah, yeah, yeah”: derivative pop) can be seen, properly framed, to take part of this same contradiction from the other direction, since the attempt to keep up with the metropolitan culture industry is already the failure to keep up with it. A more formalized version of the historicist solution can be seen in the U.S. in, for example, the White Stripes project, which was essentially a theory of rock in musical form, and Cee-Lo Green’s most recent album The Lady Killer, which produces a history of that sliver of black music that for a time assumed a dominant presence in the mass market, from the girl groups of the early 1960s to Prince and Michael Jackson even Lionel Richie in the early 1980s.24

A second possibility, which bears a family resemblance to the first but is closer in structure to Fried’s version of the problem than to Jameson’s, is the aestheticization of genre. In a recent discussion, David Simon, the creator of the television show The Wire, points to genre fiction as the one place where stories other than the now-standard, character-driven family narratives of contemporary high populism can be reliably found.25 But why should genre fiction be a zone of autonomy? Isn’t genre fiction the quintessential art commodity? In an interview, this time with Nick Hornby, Simon repeatedly says, in various ways, “Fuck the average reader.”26 This is a completely modernist statement, an assertion of autonomy from the culture market.27 But how can someone who writes for TV possibly imagine his work as autonomous from the culture market? Because a genre, already marketable or it wouldn’t be a genre, is also governed by rules. The very thing that invalidates genre fiction in relation to modernist autonomy—“formulas,” Adorno called them—opens up a zone of autonomy within the heteronomous space of cultural commodities. The requirements are rigid enough to pose a problem, which can now be thought of as a formal problem like the problem of the flatness of the canvas or the pull of harmonic resolution. “Subverting the genre” means doing the genre better, just as every modernist painting had to assume the posture of sublating all the previous modernisms. Simon’s only concession to the market is to the genre itself: Simon has to “solve the problem” of the police procedural—in other words, to produce a new way of satisfying the requirements of the genre—and he is free within that genre to use what narrative materials he likes. Ultimately, he is free to orient the entire work towards a plausible left project, namely a classically realist mapping of social space.

The assertion of autonomy implied in positive historicism, above, can lead to an attractive politics, as it does (not without ambivalence) in Tropicália, but it can also produce no legible politics at all beyond the minimal one entailed in the claim to autonomy (The White Stripes, Cee-Lo). Similarly, even when the aestheticization of genre doesn’t lead to an obviously attractive politics, it does lead to better art, or rather to the possibility of art as such—a possibility which, I have tried to show, today itself entails a minimal politics. A time-travel narrative can only have one of two endings: either history can be changed, or it can’t: Back to the Future or La jetée. So the problem of the time-travel flick is how to keep these two incompatible possibilities in play until the end, and if possible even beyond the end, so you can have a sequel. And James Cameron can, within this genre, make all kinds of intentional choices that can only be read as intentional choices, because they can only be understood as manipulations of a formal problem. And Terminator II can be a work of art, while Avatar is only an art commodity.