Art, Exception, Subsumption

Art, Exception, Subsumption Thomas Waller University of Campinas, April 2024 In what was originally planned as part seven of Capital, volume 1 but only later published posthumously as “The Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” Marx identified two distinct moments of the capitalization process which he termed “formal” and “real” subsumption. Where the former of these categories alludes to the takeover by capital of pre-existing modes of labor, the second phase is contingent on the first and indexes that process by which capital revolutionises these modes of labor in accordance with the production of relative surplus-value. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1021. Over the past decade or so, debates have raged within communisation circles over whether the categories should be understood in historical terms as a periodising shift that marks the rise and decline of “programmatism” in the nineteenth century labor movement (Théorie Communiste), Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado About Nothing,” 155-161. or whether they might not rather signify an intertwined process that is constitutive of the internal dynamics of capitalism as such (Endnotes). Endnotes, “The History of Subsumption,” 148-152. In literary and cultural studies, an adjacent discussion has unfolded over the possible autonomy of works of art under capitalism, with some critics stressing the political import of autonomy in the age of art’s real subsumption, Brown, Autonomy, 37: “A plausible claim to autonomy […] is the precondition for any politics at all other than the politics of acquiescence to the status quo.” while others have queried the extent to which art’s productive process could be technologically rationalised. See Bernes and Spaulding, “Truly Extraordinary,” 51-52; Brouillette, “On Art and ‘Real Subsumption’,” 171-172; Brouillette and Clover, “On Artistic Autonomy as Bourgeois Fetish,” 203. According to post-war Marxists like Jacques Camatte, Antonio Negri, and Fredric Jameson, the development of capitalism since the 1960s and 70s has seen the process of real subsumption reach a state of near total completion, Camatte, Capital and Community, 45; Negri, “Twenty Theses on Marx,” 159; Jameson, Postmodernism, 48-49. so that one might posit a third category alongside Marx’s famous dyad Strictly speaking, as Patrick Murray has emphasised, Marx did not have two categories of subsumption but rather four: formal, real, ideal, and what he called the “Zwitterform” or hybrid form of subsumption. Furthermore, as Stephen Shapiro has noted, the term subsumption itself is by no means an unproblematic one in the context of Marx’s critique of political economy. There is evidence, for example, that Marx moved to erase the term (in German, Subsumtion) from several foreign language editions of Capital towards the end of his lifetime or else replace it with related terms like “subordination.” It was only after Marx’s death that Engels elected to restore it to the third and fourth German editions, from which it then entered into the various English-language translations. See Murray, “The Social and Material Transformation of Production by Capital,” 250; and Shapiro, “Woke Weird,” 59. — “total subsumption” — which would correspond to the argument that capital’s economic domination is now so complete that it is has become coextensive with society as such. For an account of these narratives of “total subsumption,” see Clover, “Subsumption and Crisis,” 1572; and Endnotes, “The History of Subsumption,” 142-143. It should be noted that neither Clover nor Endnotes subscribe to this type of argument. To take a position in the debate over aesthetic autonomy — the ability of art to resist the market pressures of the commodity form — therefore requires taking a theoretical and historical stance on the subsumption debate, as well. What I want to do over the next half an hour or so is to evaluate one recent approach to the question of artistic autonomy: Dave Beech’s Art and Value. Through a discussion of Marx’s categories of subsumption and the problematic of productive labor, I will reconstruct Beech’s persuasive argument about what he calls art’s “economic exceptionalism”. However, the purpose of this reconstruction is not merely to rehearse Beech’s position; rather, I intend to raise some critical questions regarding the implications of a restrictedly economic focus on art and aesthetics. Ultimately, I will argue that to limit oneself to establishing the qualitative irreducibility of artistic labor is to risk losing sight of what is socially unique about aesthetic production, and offers little guidance when it comes to the task of actually interpreting works of art. The Persistence of Aura Before turning to Beech’s book itself, I have a caveat to make. For while Beech’s discussion takes into account digital art forms like photography and film, the kinds of art objects that I will discuss are, more or less implicitly, those produced by individual artists in traditional media like painting and sculpture. To limit the purview in this way should not be taken as a normative claim for the superiority of some art forms over others, nor is it to say that the following discussion does not also apply to digitised cultural products or to the mechanical reproduction of artworks. But I think the political stakes of aesthetic autonomy are rendered clearer in media like painting and sculpture. Indeed, despite the cultural dominance of digital forms like computerised films, and while painting and sculpture may have become a residual presence in society at large, the old question of the authenticity of traditional artworks, and the supposedly authenticating credentials of the individual artist, stubbornly persist in discussions of the autonomy of the aesthetic. Walter Benjamin famously argued that the authority vested in the “aura” of traditional art forms like painting should be rejected in favour of the progressive politics of mass media like film and photography. “[A]s soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics.” Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” 106, emphasis removed. And yet, despite Benjamin’s laudatory efforts to underscore the emancipatory (and, ultimately, anti-fascist) possibilities of art’s technical reproducibility, history has failed to fully vindicate his prognosis of a future decline in aura’s hold over modern culture. As the art historian Caroline Jones argues in her book on the “industrial aesthetics” of postwar American art, the auratic image of the Romantic artist has been “recuperated endlessly by the market and mass culture, where the construction of authorship is crucial to commodity exchange.” To this extent, Jones speaks of a “regime of auratic authorship” that refers to the persistence of the traditional concept of the artist as an exceptional genius within a cultural economy that is supposed to have done away with such outdated Romanticisms. Jones, Machine in the Studio, 2, 12-13. Another instructive example of the persistence of art’s aura can be found in Winnie Wong’s book Van Gogh on Demand. Wong focuses on the Dafen artists’ village in the Guangdong province of China, where factories are set up in which art workers produce dozens of hand-made copies per day of oil paintings by masters such as Van Gogh and Rembrandt. The fact that global consumers are willing to pay high prices for hand-painted copies of canonical artworks produced with the auratic seal of manual reproduction shows that the industry of authenticity is still big business. Wong, Van Gogh on Demand, 14-16. But these “global readymades” also ask important questions of Marxist theories of the subsumption of art. Has the labor of the Dafen artist been subsumed under capital if its product is made, as Marx said of Milton, “as the expression of his own nature”? Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1044. Are the Dafen copies art if they are so thoroughly subordinated to the logic of commodity exchange? This confusion is mirrored in the contradictory way in which the Dafen artists are perceived by those within China and those outside it. As Wong writes: “Among Chinese elites, Dafen painters are seen as uncultured workers trapped in the Western and neoliberal capitalism that the mercantile south has rampantly embraced. Among Western elites, Dafen painters are seen as victims of a totalitarian communist Chinese state that condemns them to sweatshop imitation and that prevents the expression of their individual and creative selves.” This difference of opinion is closely tied to the ambiguity around whether the Dafen paintings are art or not. Wong, Van Gogh on Demand, 15. Can these paintings really possess an aura of authenticity if they are produced as reproducible commodities for sale on the world market? The fact that this ambiguity surrounding the subsumption of artistic labor is centered on a medium like painting presents a case for limiting one’s discussion of aesthetic autonomy to traditional media of artistic expression. For Adorno, the autonomy which art achieved in the high-bourgeois era is “shattered” by the massification the culture industry, thereby becoming something “irrevocable”. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1. Just as philosophy “lives on because the moment to realize it was missed”, so art “seeks refuge in its own negation, hoping to survive through its death.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 3; Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 430. The spontaneity and romantic self-expression that had formerly characterised art is now registered in reverse by the ever more rarefied experimentalism of the late modernists. In this way, the traditional art object is held up by Adorno as a kind of negative index for what the current era is supposed to have lost. Clearly, this is an historical argument fully as much as an aesthetic one, but what Beech’s book shows is that autonomy is less the referent of a bygone period of history than it is grounded in what is qualitatively exceptional in the process of artistic labor. In what follows, I want to assess the case for Beech’s concept of artistic autonomy, and to question the relevance of economic theories of art for the practice of interpretation. Economic Exception In his 2015 book Art and Value, Dave Beech highlights the difference between the process of artistic production and value-producing labor as such. The provocative assertion of Beech’s book is that “art is bound up with capitalism but does not conform to the capitalist mode of commodity production.” Beech, Art and Value, 28. Presenting the case for art’s “economic exceptionalism,” Beech argues that artists are not subject to the same conditions as wage laborers, for while they are reliant on the capitalist for the circulation and exchange of their product (the artwork), they nonetheless “own the products they produce and their own means of production” and thus, unlike wage laborers, “are capable of working independently of the capitalist.” Beech, Art and Value, 274. Furthermore, whereas most commodities are reproducible, Beech points out that artworks are “inseparable from how and when they were produced.” Even in the case of two apparently identical pieces, for example, artworks are always separated by their sequence in time. Beech, Art and Value, 359. As Benjamin writes in his essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”: In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence—and nothing else—that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”, 103. An artist may produce a pair of paintings that seem to be totally the same, but if one were to view them side-by-side in an exhibition, one would surely not suggest that the artist should have thrown one of the paintings away. Rather, artworks are born from what Benjamin calls the “here and now” of the process of their production: what we might call, to borrow an image from Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, the Jetztzeit or “now-time” of artistic labor: that enigmatic, charged moment in which an object sculpted by the hands of its producer is constituted as, properly speaking, a work of art. The ideal commodity as theorised by Marx, on the other hand, is endlessly reproducible. Because the value of each commodity in a given circuit of capital is equivalent to the socially average amount of abstract labor that has been expended during its production, every commodity in that particular circuit is identical. With artworks, the inverse is the case: even in the case of two artworks that appear to be identical, every artwork made by an individual artist is qualitatively unique to the “here and now” of its production. There is thus some quality peculiar to artistic labor that differentiates it from the labor-power expended in value production. This argument finds some justification in the work of Marx himself, who famously described Milton as a dealer in commodities when he sold Paradise Lost for £5, but not a productive worker, for he produced the text “in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature”, and was at no point coerced into selling his labor-power to a capitalist. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1044. The quality which constitutes art qua art is therefore the same quality that dissociates it from the circuit of capitalist commodity production. In Beech’s words, “[a]rtistic autonomy appears to have a material basis in the economics of artistic production.” Beech, Art and Value, 274. Total Subsumption The argument of Beech’s book is only strictly applicable to irreproducible works of fine art. Nevertheless, it succeeds in providing a thoughtful counterpoint to narratives of the “total subsumption” of culture under capital, which have become a commonplace of Marxist criticism in the post-war period. Adorno’s remarks on the culture industry, for example, are unambiguous: “cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through.” Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 100. And yet, even within Adorno’s thought, there is a tension between the agonistic recognition of the capitalist subsumption of culture and a more optimistic defence of tributary backwaters within capitalism that have retained “a measure of freedom from the forces of power which dominate the market,” and that have thereby “strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supply and demand.” Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry,” 133. These backwaters were, for Adorno, to be identified with high modernist works of art by figures such as Schoenberg, Proust, Beckett, and Kafka. See, for example, the essays “Arnold Schoenberg, 1874-1951”, “The Valéry Proust Museum”, and “Notes on Kafka” collected in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), and the essay “Trying to Understand Endgame” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rold Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Wever Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press). But these pockets of artistic autonomy are nonetheless conceived by Adorno as under encroaching threat from the logic of subsumption that is operative in the culture industry. As Nicholas Brown has argued, Pierre Bourdieu arrived at a similar conclusion to Adorno with his concept of the “field of restricted production,” which is protected from the unpredictable forces of the capitalist market, and which answers instead to “a public of equals who are also competitors” (read: modernist autonomy, not the heteronomy of the culture industry). Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” 116. After the historical disappearance of these de-commodified zones, however, modernist aesthetics become just as much a part of the culture industry as the old popular forms to which Adorno maintained an opposition. In this way, we are led back into the narrative of total subsumption. As Jameson puts it in his 1977 afterword to Aesthetics and Politics, “modernism and its accompanying techniques of ‘estrangement’ have become the dominant style whereby the consumer is reconciled with capitalism.” To this extent, modernism has effectively “become post-modernism without ceasing to be modern.” Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion,” 211. By the time of Jameson’s book on postmodernism, this argument has taken on a more categorical form: “aesthetic production […] has become integrated into commodity production generally.” Jameson, Postmodernism, 4. See also 48-49, where Jameson writes that “the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity”. Although Jameson does not use the term subsumption per se, what underpins his understanding of postmodern culture is nevertheless a set of assumptions about artistic labor that closely correspond with the narrative of total subsumption: that there is now no outside to capitalist value production; that all artworks are now nothing but commodities; that there is little difference between artistic production and other commodity-producing sectors. Dave Beech’s book calls this narrative into question by taking it seriously, refuting the claim that art could ever be “really subsumed” under capital through a meticulous analysis of the economics of artistic production. The Results of the Immediate Process of Production In order to clarify the economic basis of artistic autonomy, I want to provide a brief review of Marx’s argument in “The Results of the Immediate Process of Production.” Here, Marx argues that formal subsumption indicates “the takeover by capital of a mode of labor developed before the emergence of capitalist relations.” Real subsumption, by contrast, indexes the process by which capital “not only transforms the situations of the various agents of production [but] also revolutionizes their actual mode of labor and the real nature of the labor process as a whole.” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1021. The difference between the two terms— formal and real subsumption—thus lies in the nature of the relationship between labor and capital. In the words of the Endnotes collective, “subsumption remains merely formal precisely in the sense that it does not involve capital’s transformation of a given labor process, but simply its taking hold of it,” while “the subsumption of the labor process becomes ‘real’ insofar as capital does not merely rest with the labor process as it is given, but steps beyond formal possession of that process to transform it in its own image.” Endnotes, “The History of Subsumption,” 138-139. In the case of formal subsumption, capital’s extraction of surplus-value is based on the extension of the working day beyond the time required for the workers to reproduce the value of their own labor. In this sense, it is an absolute extension. A----------B--C A----------B----------C Where line A—B signifies the labor process as it is given, line B—C signifies its extension over and above necessary labor time. As Søren Mau notes, the fact that the labor process here undergoes no significant alteration implies two things: first, that the transition from non-capitalist production to formally subsumed production is principally a matter of property relations, as the capitalist appropriates the surplus product resulting from existing modes of labor; second, and a fortiori, that “a transition from formally subsumed capitalist production to non-capitalist production would not require a reorganization of the production process.” Mau, Mute Compulsion, 235. In real subsumption, by contrast, capital moves beyond mere formal possession by reducing the portion of the working day spent on necessary labor, while at the same time increasing the portion devoted to surplus labor. It does this, for example, through increases in productivity and technological innovations. A---------------B--C A-------------B′--B--C Real subsumption is then coextensive with the production of relative surplus-value, wherein the increase in surplus labor may come about through a decrease in necessary labor. Thus, while the length of the working day A—C is given, surplus-value is produced by reducing the amount of necessary labor A—B. If, under formal subsumption, the relative independence of the labor process still allows for a transition out of capitalism without a fundamentally reorganizing production, real subsumption implements a form of economic power which restricts the possibilities for such a transition via mechanisms of control like deskilling and the specialization of tasks. Mau, Mute Compulsion, 243-249. Art ≠ Value With this technical framework in place, it is difficult to defend the argument for a total identity between aesthetic labor and the production of commodities. Insofar as the categories of formal and real subsumption are to be understood alongside the categories of relative and absolute surplus-value as developed, respectively, in parts 3 and 4 of Capital, vol. 1., the concept of subsumption is closely linked to the sorts of technological innovations enabled by the development of the large-scale modern factory. As subsistence commodities become cheaper to produce through cooperation and increased industrial capacity, downward pressure is exerted on the price of labor-power, with the result that a smaller portion of the working day is given over to necessary labor. This expansion of productive forces is only possible on the basis of the real subsumption of labor, which increases the production of relative surplus-value B′—C through technological developments that restructure the technical composition of capital, as proportionally more value is concentrated in constant rather than variable elements. To defend the thesis of the real subsumption of aesthetic labor under capital would be to locate the process of artistic production within the context of this revolutionization of industry. However, to return to Marx’s example, artistic labor is not subject to the kinds of technological transformations described here, since the artist produces the artwork “in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature.” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1044. In a medium such as painting, for example, changes to the labor-process are limited to more or less insignificant differences like the quality of paper and brushes. Although such changes often do affect the aesthetic of the work, it would be ridiculous to speak of them reducing necessary labor time A—B. Even if some technical developments do allow artists to work faster and produce more paintings, the fact remains that “artists who perform their own artistic labor are not wage laborers employed by capitalists.” Beech, Art and Value, 260. As an example, consider the fact that the reduction by half of the time required to produce a painting does not necessitate a proportional decrease in the value of the painting itself, as is generally the case with commodities. The reason for this is that there is no socially necessary labor-time at stake in the production of artworks. As Daniel Spaulding illustrates with an instructive example: “If someone were to find a way to make Gerhard Richter-type paintings twice as efficiently as the artist himself, this will not necessarily force Richter to sell his own works for half as much in order to compete, because what they actually sell for has little to no relation to their production time to begin with.” Spaulding, “A Clarification on Art and Value”. While the argument becomes more complicated (though not indefensible) with digitized culture products like video games or computer-generated films, the economic fact remains that artistic labor is not productive in the Marxist sense of participating in the circuit of capitalist value production. As Beech asks rhetorically: What would the real subsumption of artistic labor under capital look like? […] Would artistic labor be broken down into Fordist chunks of unskilled labor? Would the studio be reorganised according to Taylorist principles? Would the means of production be constantly revolutionised, employing the latest technology and scientific knowledge? Beech, Art and Value, 255. If the suggestion that the artist’s atelier could be organised in accordance with Taylorist principles is absurd, then it makes no more sense to speak of the extension of the working day of the artist to produce absolute surplus-value B—C. Thus, while real subsumption does not apply to artistic labor, nor can it strictly speaking be formally subsumed under capital, either. Stably Unusual Without wanting to disagree with Beech — and, indeed, as Jasper Bernes and Daniel Spaulding point out, the argument of Art and Value is so airtight that it is hard to imagine anyone who would not agree with it Bernes and Spaulding, “Truly Extraordinary,” 51. — it seems to me that the focus on the material conditions that distinguish art from other forms of commodity-producing labor nevertheless risks losing sight of those non-material, more specifically aesthetic qualities that contribute to art’s social uniqueness. For while it is indisputable that artworks do not produce value, the aesthetic claim of the “total subsumption” narrative still holds: namely, that where modernism was able to maintain some degree of opposition to the heteronomous logic of the culture industry, the dissolution of modernism’s restricted field led to a shift in the dominant forms of artistic production that Jameson famously described as the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” If subsumption is not the right category with which to account for this integration of modernist autonomy into the culture industry, then how does one make sense of the situation of aesthetics today? Beech’s book engages with key Marxian concepts like subsumption, wage labor, and value in order to delimit art’s economic exceptionalism with respect to the circuit of productive capital. However, the tenor of his argument is largely refutational: it is developed from within the Marxian problematic of productive/unproductive labor with the aim of highlighting art’s incompatibility with the categories of the critique of political economy. The artistic sphere is hereby defined otherwise, yet, as was argued above, for all his meticulousness in demonstrating what is discordant in the economics of artistic production, Beech is less forthcoming on what those qualities are that positively constitute art in its economic uniqueness: he focuses on what art is not, rather than on what art is. For this reason, while Beech is useful to the extent that he exposes the standard argument about the “real subsumption” of aesthetic labor under capital as a misapplication of Marx’s categories, he is notably less helpful when it comes to task of actually interpreting works of art. While one may grant that, from the standpoint of production, art is economically exceptional, production is still but one moment of the artistic process. To restrict oneself to this moment threatens to diminish one’s understanding of the aesthetic means by which art may mediate the impersonal domination of capital and the mute compulsions of the value-form — phenomena which are registered by artworks despite, or rather, through their non-integration into capitalist production. In a review of Beech’s book, Sarah Brouillette develops this critique further: Beech describes artworks as in important ways “non-economic,” but what if we were to argue rather that artworks are not “non-economic” so much as defined fundamentally by their unusual relation to the economic sphere? Instead of anchoring analysis only in the conditions of production exclusive to unique fine art, we could also claim that, well beyond such works, much of what aesthetic production is — from what we can for simplicity’s sake call its content or message, to claims for its ontological distinction from other kinds of expression — emerges in some way from the shifting but ultimately stably unusual position of many aesthetic practices vis-à-vis the capitalist dominant. Brouillette, “On Art and ‘Real Subsumption’,” 170-171. The salutary emphasis on art’s “stably unusual” character is a dialectical one: the point is not only that the materiality of art conditions its production, which any philistine empiricist could tell you, but rather how this materiality is itself taken up in aesthetics as a moment in the form. Adorno drives home this point over and over again in Aesthetic Theory: “what is essential in art is that which in it is not the case, that which is incommensurable with the empirical measure of all things.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 426. The question for the critic of artistic autonomy is then: how might one account for the strategies by which artworks aesthetically resist identification with the capitalist market after the argument about the peculiarly non-economic aspects of the process of artistic labor has been accepted? 1