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CULTURA 2016_267935_VOL_13_No1_GR_A5Br.indd 1 CULTURA www.peterlang.com ding thevalues andculturalphenomenainthecontempo­ judged tomake anovelandimportantcontributiontounderstan- the submissionofmanuscriptsbasedonoriginalresearchthatare regional andinternationalcontexts. The editorialboardencourages mote theexplorationofdifferentvalues andculturalphenomenain ted tophilosophyofcultureandthestudyvalue. Itaimstopro Axiology and Culture Founded in2004, ISBN 978-3-631-67935-7 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Philosophy of Journal International Cultura. isasemiannualpeer-reviewed journaldevo- rary world. - 2016

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF 1 CULTURE AND AXIOLOGY CULTURA CULTURA 2016 AND AXIOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHYCULTURE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL Vol XIII 13.06.16 KW 2417:43 No 1 No CULTURA 2016_267935_VOL_13_No1_GR_A5Br.indd 1 CULTURA www.peterlang.com ding thevalues andculturalphenomenainthecontempo judged tomake anovelandimportantcontributiontounderstan- the submissionofmanuscriptsbasedonoriginalresearchthatare regional andinternationalcontexts. The editorialboardencourages mote theexplorationofdifferentvalues andculturalphenomenain ted tophilosophyofcultureandthestudyvalue. Itaimstopro Axiology and Culture Founded in2004, Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Philosophy of Journal International Cultura. isasemiannualpeer-reviewed journaldevo- ­rary world. - 2016

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF 1 CULTURE AND AXIOLOGY CULTURA CULTURA 2016 AND AXIOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHYCULTURE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL Vol XIII 13.06.16 KW 2417:43 No 1 No CULTURA

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND AXIOLOGY Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology E-ISSN (Online): 2065-5002 ISSN (Print): 1584-1057

Advisory Board Prof. Dr. David Altman, Instituto de Ciencia Política, Universidad Catolica de Chile, Chile Prof. Emeritus Dr. Horst Baier, University of Konstanz, Germany Prof. Dr. David Cornberg, University Ming Chuan, Taiwan Prof. Dr. Paul Cruysberghs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Prof. Dr. Nic Gianan, University of the Philippines Los Baños, Philippines Prof. Dr. Marco Ivaldo, Department of Philosophy “A. Aliotta”, University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy Prof. Dr. Michael Jennings, Princeton University, USA Prof. Dr. Maximiliano E. Korstanje, University of Palermo, Argentina Prof. Dr. Richard L. Lanigan, Southern Illinois University, USA Prof. Dr. Christian Lazzeri, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France Prof. Dr. Massimo Leone, University of Torino, Italy Prof. Dr. Asunción López-Varela Azcárate, Complutense University, Madrid, Spain Prof. Dr. Christian Möckel, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany Prof. Dr. Devendra Nath Tiwari, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India Prof. Dr. José María Paz Gago, University of Coruña, Spain Prof. Dr. Mario Perniola, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy Prof. Dr. Traian D. Stănciulescu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Iassy, Romania Prof. Dr. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Purdue University & Ghent University

Editorial Board Editor-in-Chief: Co-Editors: Prof. dr. Nicolae Râmbu Prof. dr. Aldo Marroni Faculty of Philosophy and Social- Dipartimento di Lettere, Arti e Scienze Sociali Political Sciences Università degli Studi G. d’Annunzio Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Via dei Vestini, 31, 66100 Chieti Scalo, Italy B-dul Carol I, nr. 11, 700506 Iasi, Romania [email protected] [email protected] PD Dr. Till Kinzel Englisches Seminar Technische Universität Braunschweig, Bienroder Weg 80, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany [email protected]

Editorial Assistant: Dr. Marius Sidoriuc Designer: Aritia Poenaru Cultura International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology Vol. 13, No. 1 (2016)

Editor-in-Chief Nicolae Râmbu Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Cover Image: © Aritia Poenaru

ISSN 2065-5002 ISBN 978-3-631-67935-7 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-07223-5 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-07223-5 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2016 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

CONTENTS

Ove Skarpenes, Rune Sakslind & Roger Hestholm 7 National Repertoires of Moral Values

Vuk Uskoković 29 Punk Philosophy as a Path to the Summits of Ethos

Devendra Nath Tiwari 49 Spiritual Ecology and Environmental Ethics

Mădălin Onu 69 The Barbarian as Agent of History

Dale Jacquette 89 Marx and Industrial Age of Alienation

Jinghua Guo 107 Marginocentric Hong Kong: Archaeology of Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas

Agnieška Juzefovič 125 The Visual Turn in Academic Research and University Study Programs in Lithuania

Mahdi Dahmardeh, Abbas Parsazadeh & SamanRezaie 137 Culture Matters: the Question of Metaphor and Taarof in Translation

Janina Sombetzki 161 How “Post” Do We Want to Be – Really? The Boon and Bane of Enlightenment Humanism

10.3726/267935_89 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 13(1)/2016: 89–105

Marx and Industrial Age Aesthetics of Alienation

Dale Jacquette Universität Bern Bern 9, CH-3000 Switzerland [email protected]

Abstract. ’s socio-economic analysis of capitalism and the conditions of industrial production are meant to imply the competitive alienation of workers in at least two important senses: (1) Workers are alienated from their tools and materials because under capitalism they generally do not own, develop or cultivate the or market for products themselves; and (2) Workers are alienated from one another in competitive isolation prior to the evolution of assembly-line production in the classical progression of capitalist manufacturing. The present essay develops two main aspects of the art of alienation in this characteristically Marxist aesthetic – directly influenced by Marx, as opposed to existential or atheistic among other kinds of alienation. Focus is placed on Marx’s PhD dissertation and Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, as a reflection of the state of social life, philosophical perspectives on the human condition, in a time of mechanization, consumerism and godless . The history of artistic developments offers independent confirmation of Marx’s thematization of alienation objectifying itself as a sign of the times in artistic production and aesthetic theory. Keywords: Aesthetics, alienation, art, bourgeois aesthetic values, Karl Marx, philosophy of art

ALIENATION, SELF AND OTHER

We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, with fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic.1 (Sergei Pawlovitsch Diaghilev, Oration at Tauride Palace, 1905)

According to Karl Marx, and before him, and Claude Henri de Rouvroy Saint-Simon, among other social thinkers, it is an inevitable part of the modern human condition to experience a sense of alienation, of estrangement from a previously more innocent and typically more wholesome socially integrated way of life. Although Marx’s concept of alienation (Entfremdung, Veräusserung) is interpreted in a variety of ways, it seems incontestable that Marx regards alienation as a threat to individual psychological and social health, to human freedom, dignity and flourishing, primary among his cherished humanitarian values.2

89 Dale Jacquette / Marx and Industrial Age Aesthetics of Alienation

For Marx, there is but one root cause of all alienation, a condition he believes is satisfied necessarily only under capitalist industrialization. That is the fact and full effects of the alienation of wage labor workers from the products of their labor, from the fruit of their own minds and hands, training and time. Wage laborers are just one component in a manufacturing process, and they generally understand this. They know that someone has to buy or rent the machines and tools they use and the space in which they do their work, pay for utilities, marketing and advertising of products, and all other aspects of production. Whatever profits are made as a result of their wage-paid labor their work is only one, albeit an important human factor in a complex economic equation. Workers are not irrationally disappointed when they are dispro- portionately underpaid according to their contributions to profit-making, which is always speculative, but determined according to the lowest denominator for relatively unskilled labor that the market will bear. Private risk-takers who invest in and must now put to use and maintain machines in order to make goods at a profit do not always begin with money originating in their own pockets, but owe it themselves to others who are expecting a turnover. Nor are the machines and the raw materials needed inexpensive, and their availability can vary considerably. If a machine breaks down and no one knows how to fix it, or if the mechanic cannot get an essential part, then many people may be sent home without pay until the device is back up and running, while in the meantime no money is being made. As it is, capitalists can consider their local workers as a natural resource, just as they may feel they have unlimited air and water for use in manufacturing where they are located. Human beings are not like iron, coal and cotton, however indistinguishable from these manufacturing components they may appear in a bookkeeping ledger. Those wanting work in the factories are easily exploited because they are literally waiting in line for the jobs that all of these alienated wage labor workers need as much as they do in order to feed their families. They are waiting in line for the privilege and opportunity of becoming wage labor workers alienated from the products of their labor, and whatever other kind of alienation might be included in the bargain, if only they can bring home some pay. In the long span of human history this has not always been the case. This mad spiral for Marx drives the inevitable social pathology of

90 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 13(1)/2016: 89–105 alienation further downward, as each worker is alienated not only, as originally, from (1) the products of his or her labor, but, as a consequence of the alienation of wage labor, further alienated from (2) a natural way of life, (3) humanity and other people, and finally, in the last of Marx’s classic senses of alienation, (4) the worker’s own alienated self and sense of self.3 Whether and how people respond to alienation is largely and in one sense ultimately personal and subjective, psychological. According to Marx, alienation itself is nevertheless an objective phenomenon. It is partly political, philosophical, class-ideological, economically conditioned, materially dialectically transitional, historical, anthropological. And, although Marx does not emphasize this aspect, it is also aesthetic. Art shapes thought, whether in fine masterpieces or popular mass media. It shapes the thought of the artist in the making of the work, and it shapes the thought of those who come to perceive and consider its meaning. An artist should be free in principle to explore the possibilities of concrete media to express any idea. The many languages of many literatures are obvious art-forms for such expression, but the plastic arts with work done in paint and stone, ceramic, wood, fabric, metal and glass, the performance arts of theatre, music, opera and dance, among other categories of objects, genres, or media, are also appropriate vehicles with which to convey an artist’s thoughts. If all it takes to make art is to express ideas, then we are all in this sense artists, to the extent that we are makers in particular of concrete expressions of our ideas. We express our ideas, even if we do not, and, like myself, I rather suspect, practically speaking could not do so commercially as professional or even especially talented amateur artists, and even if no one outside of a philosophy classroom would ever think that what most of us normally do in the course of our daily lives expressing our ideas as occasion arises qualifies as art in a correct sense of the word.

COMPOSITE FOUR MARXIST SENSES OF ALIENATION

In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx speaks of alienation in four progressive degenerating senses, as though they were related to one another like successive stages of a worsening disease. Marx’s does not construe symptoms of alienation as merely metaphorical of individual and social ill health, but as literally a

91 Dale Jacquette / Marx and Industrial Age Aesthetics of Alienation widespread individual mental and in that sense also collective pathology. Alienation in all four senses originating in workers being alienated from the products of their labor is not a matter of subjective impression or attitude toward circumstances, but a materially real condition that can be objectively observed and studied scientifically. We extract from Marx’s 1844 manuscripts the following four senses of alienation as germane to an art and aesthetics of specifically Marxist alienation.

Sense 1: Alienation from the conditions and rewards of productivity:

All these consequences are contained in this characteristic, that the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For it is clear that, according to this premise, the more the worker exerts himself in his work, the more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into being over against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, and the less they belong to him. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains within himself. The worker places his life in the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore, the fewer objects the worker possesses. What the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore, the grater this product, the less is he himself. The externalization [Entäusserung] of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront me as an autonomous power; that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien. (Marx, 1975 [1844]: 324)4

The contagion now spreads from the worker alienated from the product of labor to the worker’s attitude toward all of humanity. The material economic connection by which species alienation is achieved is supposed to be that, having been once alienated from the product of labor, the worker begins to consider other human beings as nothing more than means to the satisfaction of desires, all of which have been commoditized in the general alienation of individual labor from its products, rather than as ends in themselves.5 The ultimate emblematic expression of such depersonalized alienation in fulfilling human needs is perhaps the automat and today on-line shopping, in which contact with another thinking, feeling human being is optional, an inconvenience or nuisance, once we have made our choices and paid our money. For such a momentous conclusion, one nevertheless expects but looks in vain in Marx’s writings for a more detailed explanation and defense. It appears, consequently, and as the sequel

92 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 13(1)/2016: 89–105 shows, to be his firm opinion that alienated wage labor inevitably results also in:

Sense 2: Alienation from life activity:

Estranged labour not only (1) estranges nature from man and (2) estranges man from himself, from his own active function, from his vital activity; because of this it also estranges man from his vital activity... For in the first place labour, life activity, productive life itself appears to man only as a means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to preserve physical existence. But productive life is species-life. It is life- producing life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, resides in the nature of its life activity, and free conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man. Life itself appears only as a means of life. (Marx, 1975 [1844]: 328)6

The argument is compact. Alienated already from the products of labor and humanity in a general sense, Marx now describes a more potent personal alienation from the lives and concerns of other individual persons. He argues:

Sense 3: Alienation from human or species life:

(3) Estranged labour therefore turns man’s species-being – both nature and his intellectual species-powers – into a being alien to him and a means of his individual existence. It estranges man from his own body, from nature as it exists outside him, from his spiritual essence [Wesen], his human essence, (4) An immediate consequence of man’s estrangement from the product of his labour, his life activity, his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he also confronts other men. What is true of man’s relationship to his labour and to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men, and to the labour and the object of the labour of other men. (Marx, 1975 [1844]: 329-330)

The implications of this still deeper sense of alienation are manifestly incompatible with good individual psychological and social well-being. As such, they fall under Marx’s concern for the value of human life. To be alienated from human life or species life as Marx intends the application is to suffer economic conditions under which there is a general breakdown of the social bonds that once connected individuals to one another in community relations. If we are alienated from our life activity, then what basis can there be to forge social interconnections with other equally life activity alienated individuals? Finally, Marx maintains that in this regression of alienation, beginning with the worker’s alienation from the tools and products of labor in the

93 Dale Jacquette / Marx and Industrial Age Aesthetics of Alienation rise of wage labor capitalism, the worker is alienated in a still more profound and remarkable sense from his or her own self.

Sense 4: Alienation from self:

Every self-estrangement of man from himself and nature is manifested in the relationship he sets up between other men and himself and nature. Thus, religious self-estrangement is necessarily manifested in the relationship between layman and priest, or, since we are here dealing with the spiritual world, between layman and mediator, etc. In the practical, real world, self-estrangement can manifest itself only in the practical, real relationship to other men… Just as he creates his own production as a loss of reality, a punishment, and his own product as a loss, a product which does not belong to him, so he creates the domination of the non- producer over production and its product. Just as he estranges himself from himself his own activity, so he confers upon the stranger an activity which does not belong to him. (Marx, 1975 [1844]: 331)7

Marx describes a kind of numbness that sets in when the worker becomes habituated to the condition of alienated labor. It begins to seem as though it is all happening to another person or even to something other than oneself, that the person one used to be before being made a cog in the great machinery of industrial manufacture is somehow standing outside the activity in which the worker’s body is physically engaged. It is not by will, it is not as an expression of satisfaction in craftsmanship or the product of mind and hand, it is only the repetitious serving of the input and output orifices to the grinding transforming gullet of the infernal apparatus by which factory-made goods are produced. The self is disengaged from the process, it too becomes superfluous in biological life activity and species life, as Marx adopts these terms. The self is detached, unneeded, where only trained habitual movement of coordinated muscle activity is called upon in earning a wage to buy the things that a skilled worker might otherwise have made or bartered for in social interactions with workers possessing complementary skills. Instead, everyone is drawn into the relentless whirlpool of alienation, beginning with the worker’s alienation from the products of labor, and then breaking apart everything that once made human life precious and worth living, that once made it human. Margaret A. Rose explains, in Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts:

94 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 13(1)/2016: 89–105

In Marx’s refunctioning of the arguments of Saint-Simon and Feuerbach in his 1844 Manuscripts, Feuerbach’s theory of the alienation of man’s sensuous “species-being” by a spiritualistic religion is of course also linked to a materialist interpretation of Hegel’s theory of the “alienation” of Spirit in its “self-objectification” in history, and to Moses Hess’ theory of the alienation of the human essence by the sense of “having”. In this way too, Feuerbach’s own “Saint-Simonian” cry for the liberation of the senses is connected by Marx to a criticism of the alienation of the human senses [which are also understood as the “aesthetic senses”] by a “sense of having” – a new sense which Marx claims has been created by the rule of and the growth of the capitalist . (Rose, 1984: 71-72)

ENGELS’S PORTRAIT OF 19TH CENTURY PRE-INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND

Further insight into Marxist alienation is found in the 1886 English edition of Engels’s 1845 sociological study, The Condition of the in England. Engels offers first a cottage portrait of an idyllic pre- capitalist world:

Before the introduction of machinery, the spinning and weaving of raw materials was carried on in the working man’s home. Wife and daughter spun the yarn that the father wove or that they sold, if he did not work it up himself. These weaver families lived in the country in the neighborhood of the towns, and could get on fairly well with their wages, because the home market was almost the only one, and the crushing power of competition that came later, with the conquest of foreign markets and the extension of trade, did not yet press upon wages… So the workers vegetated throughout a passably comfortable existence, leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their material position was far better than that of their successors. They did not overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet earned what they needed. They had leisure for healthful work in garden or field, work which, in itself, was recreation for them, and they could take part besides in the recreations and games of their neighbours, and all these games – bowling, cricket, football, etc. – contributed to their physical health and vigour. They were, for the most part, strong, well-built people, in whose physique little or no difference from that of their peasant neighbors was discoverable. Their children grew up in the fresh country air, and, if they could help their parents at work, it was only occasionally. (Engels, 1987: 50-51)

What Engels describes is represented, presumably independently, but as though painted to order by commission precisely from this text, by Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac, in his 1895 canvas, Au temps d’harmonie.8 The scene is complete with barefoot picnickers plucking fruit from a

95 Dale Jacquette / Marx and Industrial Age Aesthetics of Alienation tree, with others sailing in the bay, gardening, tending free range chickens, playing ball sports on the green, just as Engels describes. Families are enjoying the day, encouraging a baby first learning to walk, developing their skill at easel art, as one figure near the river seems to be doing, and who is perhaps Signac himself. This mise-en-scène is contrasted only pages later in Engels’s report with the bleak and personally stultifying capitalist status quo, as he finds it reprehensibly exemplified in English industrialization at the time:

With these inventions, since improved from year to year, the victory of machine- work over hand-work in the chief branches of English industry was won; and the history of the latter from that time forward simply relates how the hand-workers have been driven by machinery from one position to another. The consequences of this were, on the one hand, a rapid fall in price of all manufactured commodities, prosperity of commerce and manufacture, the conquest of nearly all the unprotected foreign markets, the sudden multiplication of and national wealth; on the other hand, a still more rapid multiplication of the , the destruction of all property-holding and of all security of employment for the working class, demoralization, political excitement, and all those facts so highly repugnant to Englishmen in comfortable circumstances, which we shall have to consider in the following pages. (Engels, 1987: 54-55)

Nor is it only the down-trodden under industrial capitalism that suffer the ill effects of alienation. The same is true of the erstwhile lords of business, whose humanity and sense of values stand at risk precisely when to worldly eyes they have become the most successful. Everyone is caught up in the alienating maelstrom of the wage labor economy, speculation and capital investment. As Charles Dickens writes, at about the same time as Engels, in a lighter but equally moralistic vein, in his 1848 novel, Dealings With the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation:

Those three words [“Dombey and Son”] conveyed the one idea of Mr. Dombey’s life. The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre. Common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes, and had sole reference to them. A.D. had no concern with anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei – and Son. (Dickens, 2002 [1848]:12)

96 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 13(1)/2016: 89–105

To such an extent is Dombey alienated from humanity that, in the misogyny prevalent at the time, he takes no interest in his daughter Florence whatsoever throughout the novel, until the very end when he has been ruined in the market, lost his house and virtually everyone has left him, with only Florence to offer him a roof. His son is destined to be a business partner, and until his premature death when still a young boy, his own interests and wishes are never consulted. He is Dombey’s pride and satisfaction only for reasons of honor and profit, which apparently for him amount to the same thing. Here, with no evidence that Dickens read either Marx or Engels, we have independent collaboration of Marx’s most dramatic and advanced sign of alienation, of the commercialization and commoditization of even the most basic of human interrelationships, in an exploration of the theme in the popular literary art of nineteenth century fiction. The kind of life activity and species alienation that Marx describes and Engels illustrates is contrasted with still another kind of alienation of the human species from the life of other animals. Like Sirac, with his oils and brushes, Marx and Engels paint in words a picture of a pre-industrial pre-capitalist Garden of Eden, from which more contemporary humankind has irrevocably fallen, like our mythical ancestors in their disobedience to God’s commands. The author of Genesis, 3:7 presents an original human predecessor pair, a mated man and woman, at the exact moment of their alienation from the world of nature. Alienation from the life of nonhuman animals is predicated for Homo sapiens on human cunning and wisdom, an evolved higher state of consciousness, as reflected in the curious and historically unprecedented revelation to Adam and Eve that they were naked – something that had been true all along, but of which they had no previous conscious awareness: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”9 Immediately after coming to this state of knowledge, the awakened couple, alienated in their uncomfortable discernment of their own and one another’s nakedness, embark upon the first handwork industry, making artifacts to clothe themselves, and thereby to externalize their recently attained understanding that they are distanced from the nonhuman natural world and especially from nonhuman clothing- optional animal kingdom. It is the first step on the path, from a Marxist perspective, prefiguring the course leading irreversibly to the experience

97 Dale Jacquette / Marx and Industrial Age Aesthetics of Alienation of several senses of alienation uniquely attributable to the rise of modern industrial capitalism and its long-term economic impact on the social world.

MARCUSE ON ART’S AESTHETIC ROLE IN TRANSCENDING ALIENATION

With a few early manuscript exceptions concerning what was then a current fascination with classical Greek art and the so-called Nazarene painters, plus an equivocal reference in (1848), Marx has tantalizingly little to say about art and aesthetics.10 Marxist aesthetic theory is accordingly left to Marx-influenced and Marx-suggested principles mentioned or implied elsewhere in his philosophy to cobble together a theory of art in the more generally recognized sense. Consequently, and ironically, perhaps there have been numerous competing efforts to invent a post-Marxist aesthetics with an eye ideally toward better understanding Marx’s aesthetics, in tantalizing hints scattered through some of the early writings. A first step toward answering these vital questions, is best made by considering for historical reasons a sustained effort to develop a Marxist aesthetics specifically motivated by considerations of Marxist alienated labor in the work of , especially in his 1978 treatise, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. By this slender thread, Marcuse, stepping into the fray to outline an authentic Marxist aesthetics related especially to the problems of alienation, proposes to understand the nature of art, and more especially of literature. For it is the world of fiction that stands as Marcuse’s particular concentration, beginning with his Frankfurt years, expressing truths that simultaneously “transcend the socio-cultural arena”, while yet remaining, Marcuse explains:

… committed to that perception of the world which alienates individuals from their functional existence and performance in society – it is committed to an emancipation of sensibility, imagination, and reason in all spheres of subjectivity and objectivity. The aesthetic transformation becomes a vehicle of recognition and indictment. But this achievement presupposes a degree of autonomy which withdraws art from the mystifying power of the given and frees it for the expression of its own truth. (Marcuse, 1978: 9)

98 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 13(1)/2016: 89–105

Art is not merely a luxury in an economy within which requirements for shelter, nourishment, and the like, have already been provided for or are assumed to be normally within reach. Marx seems to have assumed something like this availability in his division between a culture’s economic basis and superstructure, with art and art criticism occurring almost as an afterthought in social, political and legal institutions, grounded on the more fundamental material economy. Malcolm Miles draws the crucial contrast between Marx’s original conception of art and Marcuse’s revisionary Marxist aesthetics, writing insightfully, in Herbert Marcuse: An Aesthetics of Liberation:

For Marx, art is part of the superstructure constructed over the base of economic life. It does not answer basic human needs such as those for clothing, food and shelter, but art still reflects the base from which it is produced even if it answers higher needs. In actually existing it reflects the realised utopia of a . But art does not change reality, though changes to the base cause changes in the superstructure, hence in art. In revising , Marcuse sets aside the division of . Informed by modernist art – the art of the early twentieth century, such as German Expressionism, which draws back from representing reality in order to present an imagined reality – Marcuse reasserts a divide between a not yet existing utopia and an art which exposes that non- realisation in the non-realism of its images. (Miles, 2012: 14-15)

If Marcuse’s suggestion is rightly understood, then social realism anchors literature as seen through a particular later Marxist lens. Marxists, according to Marcuse, must look our alienated condition squarely in the face. There is no more effective mirror than art in which to clearly perceive the nature of our plight. At the same time, imaginative literature in works of fiction has the potential to project something more positive, looking beyond Marx’s identification of four comparably deplorable principal categories of alienation symptomatic of historical material- dialectical social contradictions. The world is in the state it is from a post-Marxist perspective like Marcuse’s because there remain class struggles in which it serves the interests of a ruling class to use an economically dependent majority to its profound personal and social disadvantage, alienating it from its own productivity, from humanity generally, other individuals in society, and finally and most irredeemably also from themselves. We need to see things as they are, justifying the social realism aspect of Marcuse’s aesthetic dimension. However, we also need some basis for

99 Dale Jacquette / Marx and Industrial Age Aesthetics of Alienation hope that the circumstances of alienated wage labor, and by extension alienated modern life at all levels, can (voluntarist, revolutionary) or, for those with the requisite patience, inevitably will (fatalist) resolve itself as human society of historical necessity enters a third dialectical moment in which the contradictions of the first (pastoral) and second (alienated industrial) moments are satisfactorily resolved. As with other utopian historicisms, and more contemporary updates such as Marcuse offers, a Marxist aesthetic must take its point of departure from the assumption that artwork is subject to the same economic forces as other market commodities and specialized labor skills. Fiction, Marcuse’s primary concern among the arts, must not be purely escapist. By virtue of its social realism, imaginative literature can serve a vital function in the service of an updated neo-Marxist . If the artist wants to help things along in the direction toward resolving or transcending alienation, rather than sitting on the sideline bleachers and passively watching class struggles play themselves out, then art can fantasize a world in which the worst abuses of a supposedly self- regulating free market are resolved without police and law courts or the military, which is to say through brute force, even if only in one character’s awakening to the possibility of a better world through a variety of adventures and fictional personal interactions. Marcuse, accordingly, further maintains:

The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e., of those who established it) to define what is real. In this rupture, which is the achievement of the aesthetic form, the fictitious world of art appears as the true reality. (Marcuse, 1978: 9)

Suggesting that for Marcuse the fictionalizing of reality in literature is the key to transcending the power of alienating authoritative forces in a society, if not by escapism, then by resisting oppressive representations of reality with a more agreeable fiction so brilliantly described by talented and politically astute authors that it could the description of a more compassionate because less alienated future reality. A genuine Marxist aesthetic art critic or commentator committed to the normative ideals of Marx’s philosophical critique of industrial capitalism at bottom must be willing to politicize art in precisely this way. As other nominal followers of Marx with the same logic have done in politicizing science and history, after generally beginning first with art, a

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Marxist aesthetic critic needs to be prepared to divide wheat from chaff, to raise and praise whatever art transcends the current dialectical moment of alienation with the prospect of a brighter consciousness in a better future that can be motivated in its contribution and directed in its material dialectical evolution.

AESTHETICS UNDER MARXIST ÆGIS

The contradiction naturally leads an objective, neither Marxist nor anti- Marxist, observer to ask of any Marxist aesthetics that is supposed to play its part in resolving , enabling art to transcend alienating pressures at all strata of the economy under industrial capitalism: What happens then to art? Suppose that the Marxist revolution succeeds as anticipated by its advocates, and that the social and individual psychological evils of alienated labor and its consequent forms of alienation are overcome in part through the agency of a revolutionary art and revolutionary aesthetics. Will art then, having fulfilled its purpose, also wither away like the state in a Marxist apotheosis? Will it resubmerge into the decorative arts, catering now instead to a distinctively proletariat taste? A radical chic, featuring T-shirts and fashion accessories? If so, would that be a good or bad thing? Would art merely have exchanged one set of patrons, masters and market pressures, in order to satisfy another? Or in that event would art as a have already made itself obsolete, a matter of supreme cultural indifference? Would it be sound Marxist practice or not to consider the art market as a barometer of a culture’s economic health, given that art is sold at unthinkably exorbitant prices among a relatively small number of wealthy individual and institutional collectors? When art’s job is done, we can expect it to fade first into nostalgia and historical interest. By then it will no longer have contemporary cultural significance, and finally to disappear altogether. Why would anyone want art on top of utopia and nirvana? In such a state of world, Picasso as the painter of Guernica could not exist, if only because there would supposedly be no such events as the use of air bombardment against civilians to occasion his despair, moral outrage and sense of lost innocence. If a Picasso after the resolution of all alienating forces in a future society becomes infuriated, this utopian picture implies, it can only occur as a reaction to the blind forces of

101 Dale Jacquette / Marx and Industrial Age Aesthetics of Alienation nature itself, and not in response to the deeds of no longer mutually alienated human beings. The stubborn question that remains is whether or not this is in fact a correct understanding of the nature of art, even from a Marxist perspective, let alone whether a favored Marxist perspective on historical and cultural events more generally turns out to be philosophically acceptable. We learn from Marcuse’s neo-Marxist aesthetic theory that eventually art through the weight of its own social irrelevance must slowly melt away. There will be increasingly less interest in artworks. Art will have accomplished its historical purpose, and eventually and incrementally is fated to disappear altogether from whatever remains of what by then will have been the legacy of fine art. It will vanish along with the demise of fine-art-sponsoring elitist feudal aristocratic and finally its successor in the additively still wealthier class culture of investment capital. Maybe that end result could and is even likely to happen, whether or not a socialist revolution succeeds worldwide, to the best of Marx’s hopes and optimistic expectations. In an ideologically successful Marxist utopia, the evaporation of fine art could be expected to happen. Under an economically successful continuation of industrial capitalism, art could also die a slow death withering on the vine, through increasing commercialism and an accompanying culture of crass Massenmensch aesthetic preferences, that might incrementally undermine serious interest in artistic expression. Capitalist or communist economic powers historically are alike no longtime reliable friends of cultivated tastes in the arts, and we would not be the first to propose that art should point the way for politics rather than the other way around. Aesthetics, independent aesthetic preference and judgment, are often viscerally opposed to economic powers of whatever form, as a more ultimate transcendence of the kinds of alienation that are supposed to be at issue in collisions of capitalist and communist . It is not as though a socialist or communist government cannot also alienate its people from their land and world and culture, as the history of these regimes reliably demonstrates, even more brutally than capitalist regimes. Art in and of itself does not favor either the dictatorship of the or the proletariat, but more often stands opposed to dictatorship of any kind. What is wanted perhaps is an art and aesthetics of liberation from any potentially regressive political-economic ideology. If we seek reprieve from alienation

102 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 13(1)/2016: 89–105 in Marx’s sense, deriving from the alienation of wage labor from its productions, then, ironically, socialism and as they have historically developed are not obviously pointing the way. Art enables an appreciator to assimilate the facts of the social world, to portray them realistically, and with no effort to disguise the injustices and economic misery that a certain way of life historically entails. While indicating, as Marcuse suggests, an improved future when economically- originating alienating pressures are dampened. There is much for art to do, and much for aesthetic criticism also, before alienation ceases to prevail. Art can wallow in the facts of alienation (existentialism; exploitation), disguised as juvenile Angst, in works like J. D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, or Edvard Munch’s painting of the unfortunate colorful pear-headed shrieker crossing a bridge and emitting that terrible eternally frozen outburst, The Scream. Why should it not do so, at least some of the time? Anything in principle is a legitimate subject for artistic expression, and art can never be addressed to a universal standard of taste. It follows that no artwork should reasonably be expected to appeal equally to all potential readers or audience. Art can call attention to the predicament of alienation, among countless other troubles people would doubtless be better off without. It can project and approve for its intended admirers an enhanced consciousness inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer’s besseres Bewußtsein, pointing toward improved economic realities and an evolved moral stance toward social interactions at all levels that is alienation-transcending at the same time that is class- conflict defying. Art is nevertheless a two-edged sword. Art can mask and mystify the causes of alienation and the economic realities by which the members of a privileged class benefit personally and socially from the alienation of an underprivileged social class that is considered useful only economically for the profits to be made in exploiting its muscle, training, time, and seemingly insuperable lack of access to accumulating any investment capital for its own participation in industrial competition. Art can equally disappoint expectations of a practical solution in the service of an anti- alienation or alienation-transcending “better” consciousness. Art is whatever we choose to make of it, an artifact of will, of whatever it is we want. Art as such is a dangerous social force, as Plato in the Republic with its recommendations for severe artistic censorship in the supposedly ideal city-state recognized. Art is a tool. It can be an instrument of

103 Dale Jacquette / Marx and Industrial Age Aesthetics of Alienation pleasure or for the display of prestige, if that is how we decide to use it. Art celebrates our leisure. It can overcome social injustices and raising humanity to new heights of cultural achievements. Art teaches invaluable lessons, if only to better understand what it is like to be ecstatic and what it is like to be blue. That is why we rightly call it art.11

References Billington, James H. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. New York: Vintage Books (Random House), 1966 [1970]. Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son [Dealings With the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation]. Edited by Andrew Sanders. London: Penguin Books, 2002 [1848]. Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Edited with a foreword by Victor Kiernan. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987 [1845] English edition 1886]. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals [Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785]. Translated with an introduction by Lewis White Beck. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1959. Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1978. Marx, Karl. : Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Translated with a Foreword by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books Ltd. in association with The Review, 1973. Marx, Karl. Early Writings. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton; introduction by Lucio Colletti. London: Penguin Books, 1974. Miles, Malcolm. Herbert Marcuse: An Aesthetics of Liberation. London: Pluto Press (Palgrave Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press LLC), 2012. Rose, Margaret A. Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Notes

1 Cited in Billington 1966 [1970]: 505. See his note 109 for this section for original references. 2 Marx, 1973, pp. 50. 162, 196, 225, 452-455, 515, 831-832. 3 As explained in Marx, 1975 [1844], especially pp. 322-332. See text attached to notes 6, 8-10 below. 4 See also, Marx, 1975 [1844]: 326: “What constitutes the alienation of labour? Firstly, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e. does not belong to his essential being; that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working he does not feel himself. He is at

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home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. His labour is therefore not voluntary but forced, it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists it is shunned like the plague.” 5 See Kant, 1959 [1785]: 46: “Now I say man and, in general, every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will.” Also pp. 46-50. 6 Marx [1975] further writes, in his extensive commentary on “Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy”, p. 278: “My labour would be the free expression and hence the enjoyment of life. In the framework of private property it is the alienation of life since I work in order to live, in order to procure for myself the means of life. My labour is not life.” 7 See also Marx, 1975, [1844]: 326: “Up to now we have considered the estrangement, the alienation of the worker only from one aspect, i.e. his relationship to the products of his labour. But estrangement manifests itself not only in the result, but also in the act of production, within the activity of production itself. How could the product of the worker’s activity confront him as something alien if it were not for the fact that in the act of production he was estranging himself from himself? After all, the product is simply the résumé of the activity, of the production. So if the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. The estrangement of the object of labour merely summarizes the estrangement, the alienation in the activity of labour itself.” 8 Collection Mairie de Montreuil. 9 King James translation. 10 See especially Rose, 1984: 5-33. Marx, 1973: 110-111. 11 A version of this essay was presented as an illustrated talk with artwork slides at the Conference on Marx and the Aesthetic, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, NL, May 10-13, 2012. I am grateful to participants for questions and comments.

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