Modernist art’s totalizing control mirrors monopoly capital’s total organization
Evidence
This new totalitarian organization of things, people, and colonies into a single market-system is now duplicated by the planification of the work of art itself, whether in Joyce or in Schoenberg: the absolute conscious control which modern artists seek to establish over the last remnants of free-floating contingency reflects this increasing autonomy of institutions, this increasing “conquest” of both nature and society that they feel at work in the historical moment around them. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 88
Categorization
- XREF: This is the mediational move par excellence — connects to Lukács’s concept of totality and to Adorno’s claim that art’s formal structure carries social content. — connects to: Modernist art criticizes capitalism by mirroring commodity form rather than denying it — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 230; Capital reabsorbed modernism’s cult of the new as commodity novelty — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 62; Adequate modernist criticism must read the economy both in and from the artwork — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 663 (+8 more)
- SEED: An essay angle: the ‘totalitarian’ appeal of total systems across art and economics — how modernism’s drive for absolute formal control was itself an isomorphic response to an administered world.
Broader Connections
- Modernist art criticizes capitalism by mirroring commodity form rather than denying it
#responds-to(0.95) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 230 - Capital reabsorbed modernism’s cult of the new as commodity novelty
#responds-to(0.90) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 62 - Adequate modernist criticism must read the economy both in and from the artwork
#expands(0.88) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 663 - The market operates as a totalizing logic underlying diverse aesthetic forms
#corroborates(0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 476 - Art’s autonomy paradoxically depends on the very commodity economy it negates
#responds-to(0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 118 - The rationality of art grows as society’s irrationality grows
#corroborates(0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 832 - Modernist art redeems reification’s fragments as Utopian compensation
#responds-to(0.82) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 5942 - Domination in advanced capitalism is masked as neutral administration and objectivity
#expands(0.82) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 186 - Modernism emerged from a specific industrial-capitalist conjuncture that postwar capitalism destroyed
#qualifies(0.80) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 562 - Modernism emerged from a field spanning semi-industrial economy, fresh invention, and open revolt
#qualifies(0.80) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 217 - Early modernists saw industrial city life as demanding a fundamentally new art
#corroborates(0.80) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 143