Art and play no longer model nonalienated labor under late capitalism

Evidence

Specialization, and everything esoteric that accompanies it (special training, collective division of labor, unique technologies, a guild or professionalist mentality, along with the simple indifference that accompanies activities from which we are excluded), characterizes both high art and mass culture: the whole elaborate machinery of contemporary postelectronic music, on the one hand, and the systems of television production, on the other, are not, for example, environments in which most people feel at home, and in any case they inspire very little optimism about that potential control or mastery over processes, oneself, and nature and collective destiny, which nonalienated labor necessarily includes and projects. Thus the older Romantic analogy tends to remain a dead letter because the very artistic production held up as a Utopian model for alternative social living is itself a closed book. … As for play, it may also no longer mean very much as a reminder and an alternative experience in a situation in which leisure is as commodified as work, free time and vacations as organized and planified as the day in the office, the object of whole new industries of mass diversion of various kinds, outfitted with their own distinct high-tech equipment and commodities and saddled with thoroughgoing and themselves fully organized processes of ideological indoctrination. Play once meant children, who were in an older society the stand-in for those more distant representatives of Nature like the savage. But where children are themselves taken in hand and organized, integrated into consumer society, childhood may have lost its capacity to suggest or project ideas like play, which were thought to convey freedom in motion, as a form of active self-invention and self-determination. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 354

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s goal of tracing how economic conditions determine aesthetic and cultural possibilities — leisure commodified exactly as thoroughly as work is the causal mechanism this chapter will turn against the concept of nonalienated labor. — connects to: Folk art depended on agrarian or simple-commodity social relations that no longer exist; Hemingway’s sentence-craft aestheticizes nonalienated work under industrial capitalism — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 783; Contemporary creative identity no longer opposes commerce to art. — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love:…, 739
• SEED: The commodification of play and childhood as aesthetic-political closures could anchor an essay on how ‘self-care’ and gamified productivity market back the very freedom they claim to restore.