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🪵 The Threshold

The commodity form's ersion of labor extends into art itself

Properties2
tagsja-picks, define, xref, deepthinking, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@jameson_marxism_1971, loc. 777

4 min read

The commodity form’s ersion of labor extends into art itself

Evidence

Yet the terminology of work satisfaction is useful because it fulfills one function for which any other description of such inner form must account in one way or another: it explains the censorship of the work itself, it makes us understand why such an impulse had to be disguised in order to come to artistic satisfaction in the first place. For, particularly in middle-class society, the fact of work and of production—the very key to genuine historical thinking—is also a secret as carefully concealed as anything else in our culture. This is indeed the very meaning of the commodity as a form, to obliterate the signs of work on the product in order to make it easier for us to forget the class structure which is its organizational framework. It would indeed be surprising if such an occultation of work did not leave its mark upon artistic production as well, both in the form and in the content, as Adorno shows us: “Works of art owe their existence to the social division of labor, to the separation of mental and physical work. In such a situation, however, they appear under the guise of independent existence; for their medium is not that of pure and autonomous spirit, but rather that of a spirit which having become object now claims to have surmounted the opposition between the two. Such contradiction obliges the work of art to conceal the fact that it is itself a human construction: its very pretension to meaning, and indeed that of human existence in general along with it, is the more convincingly maintained the less anything in it reminds us of its character as a product, and of the fact that it owes its own existence to spirit as to something outside itself. Art which can no longer in good conscience put up with this deception—its innermost principle—has already dissolved the only element in which it can realize itself…. And if the autonomy of art in general is unthinkable without this concealment of work, the latter nonetheless becomes problematical, itself now a program, in late capitalism, under the domination of the exchange value and the increasing contradictions of such domination.” There is thus given within the very concept of work—either in the form of the division of labor in general or in the more specialized types of production characteristic of capitalism—the principle of a censorship of the work process itself, of a repression of the traces of labor on the product. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 777

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Explains the commodity form as a mechanism that obliterates the signs of work to hide class structure.
  • XREF: Directly channels Adorno’s aesthetics of autonomy vs. concealment — the Frankfurt School lineage the reader is tracing. Also ties to Lukacs reification of labor. — connects to: Art’s autonomy paradoxically depends on the very commodity economy it negates — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 118; When visual appearance is labor, bodily modification raises the commodity’s exchange value. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 157; Modernist art criticizes capitalism by mirroring commodity form rather than denying it — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 230 (+3 more)
  • DEEPTHINKING: The claim that art’s autonomy is constituted by concealment of work — and that late capitalism makes this concealment itself a programmatics problem — is a dense, paradigm-level dialectical move.

Broader Connections

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