Textile display, 1972, Eaton's Department Store
There are, it would seem, two kinds of novelty: the one that breaks from tradition, ushering in a new order, and the one that perpetuates the same under the guise of change. The latter, associated with fads and trends, marks the logic of consumption, whereas the former, querying the new and indeterminate, suggests a revolutionary break from the status quo. Distinguishing the two may, however, prove more difficult than the language suggests. Even for Adorno, the first to really bracket-off the commodity in this fashion, breaks from tradition dangerously compare to the logic of tradition itself:
“It (the concept of Modernism) does not negate earlier artistic exercises as styles have always done; however it negates tradition as such. To that extent, it ratifies the bourgeois principle in art. Its abstractness is linked to the commodity character of art.” (Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. (Frankfurt, 1970), 38; quoted in Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, tr. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 59.)
The “abstractness” common to the negation of tradition and the bourgeois principle of art is the ‘questioning’ integral to tradition itself – which appears, in retrospect, as a succession of fads, styles, aesthetics. Peter Bürger, the philosopher of the avant-garde, so too defers to Adorno’s claim that “In an essentially non-traditionalist society (the bourgeois), esthetic tradition is a priori questionable. The authority of the new is that of the historically ineluctable” (Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 38; quoted in Bürger, 59). Distinguishing the commodity-novelty from the emancipatory-novelty becomes accordingly difficult, if not categorically impossible. Which is to say, if art, too, is driven by a need for “newness”, then the commodity (in this regard at least) may not fundamentally, only substantially, differ from the artwork.
Bürger, for his part, notes this in passing – “It must be remembered that where art does in fact submit to the coercion to bring what is new, it can hardly be distinguished from a fad” – but goes on to accredit the ‘fad effect’ solely to projections of “the person who wants to see it there” (Bürger, 61). Here, in a sharp change of direction, the failing of the artwork is attributed to its apparent over-openness to interpretation, which is to say, the viewer’s appropriation of the work toward ‘whatever’ end. The work as fad – Warhol’s 100 Campbell soup cans, he gives as an example – serves as a projection screen for the subject’s specifically consumerist desires. So, it would seem, novelty is really a function of interpretation and falls squarely on the side of the subject, not the work. (But if it’s only a problem of interpretation, then how is it that certain works are regularly susceptible to this subjective error?)
Bürger moreover attribrutes this form of meaninglessness to the Neo-avant-garde in particular, “which stages for a second time the avant-gardiste break with tradition [and] becomes a manifestation that is void of sense and that permits the positing of any meaning whatever” (61). It is in this sense that the historical avant-garde is perceived as itself sliding into novelty; even the name, neo avant-garde, is designed to mark this empty repetition. The concept of the new, he adds, is “too general and nonspecific [… and] provides no criteria for distinguishing between faddish (arbitrary) and historically necessary newness” (63). Indeed, for Bürger the concept of the new can only fail to adequately “designate what is decisive in such a break with tradition”; it hence remains on the side of “the means of artistic representation” (63).
Bürger’s attitude toward the question of newness in avant-garde works here approaches Gianni Vattimo’s oft-quoted condemnation of the commodity character of the new:
“in a consumer society continual renewal (of clothes, tools, buildings) is already required physiologically for the system simply to survive. What is new is not in the least ‘revolutionary’ or subversive; it is what allows things to stay the same.” (Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 7; quoted in Leslie Paul Thiele, “Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology,” Polity 29, no. 4 (1997): 511.)
Vattimo, in this way, extends something of a ‘traditional’ view of novelty, stressing sameness and continuity across non-revolutionary, non-decisive innovations, thus posing a definite choice between a newness that renews and a newness that breaks. Indeed, it is only on account of novelty’s failure to measure up to the absolute break (which never comes) that it is able to appear as a ruse, simulation, or superficiality. Very much in keeping with the Frankfurt School strain that defines as the “surface” of culture that which, with respect to the “objective structure,” appears only as an “expression” of it (–to the extent where, for instance, Adorno can observe that “Baudelaire’s relationship to Wagner is as dialectical as his association with a prostitute” [1]), Vattimo’s position seems to return us to an absolute distinction between surface and structure, sameness and revolution.
Change, however, never comes, and anything that does is, by definition and ‘in advance’, ‘commodified’, ‘absorbed’, ‘appropriated’. This general schema itself seems to have changed very little since Adorno. Nina Power recently summarized Alain Badiou’s opening remarks, for the Communism conference at Birkbeck, as holding-out for just this kind of revolution:
“Nobody represents a party at the conference, everyone is representing his or herself. No party/power. No Kim Jong-Il, no Fidel Castro. There is a collective search for new use of the word communism after terrible experiences of the last century. Collection of phil/pol singularities – we are on the side of novelty, creativity. We are on the side of communism in its newness.” (”on the idea of communism, birkbeck, 13-15 March 2009“, IT 18 March 2009)
This position of course goes hand in hand with a total disavowal of capitalism, the ’surface’ of culture, the actual, day to day events (with a small ‘e’) ’sustaining’ the ’system’. Steven Shaviro captures well this pseudo-libertarian denunciation – of ‘the State’, political economy, economics — that continues to paralyze this region of the Left.
In particular, not only did Badiou leave out political economy from his descriptions of how the revolutionary event might challenge the capitalist status quo; but also, when questioned on this score, he explicitly denounced any attention to political economy as being the sin of “economism”. All this is caaptured in the video here. Badiou claims that economics can only be part of “the situation” which it is the business of a new “truth,” produced in an event and by fidelity to that event, to disrupt. Badiou shows his Maoist pedigree (as Ken Wark remarked to me) in this insistence on politics as the ultimate ruling instance. Instead of engaging in the critique of political economy, and seeing the political as so intimately intertwined with the economic as to makie any separation of them impossible, Badiou relegates economy, in a nearly Gnostic sort of way, to the realm of the irretrievably fallen. His notion of a pure politics (and a pure philosophy) unsullied by any contact with, or ‘contamination’ by, the economic, is really the mirror image of today’s neoclassical economics which imagines itself to be value-neutral and apolitical. What this comes down to is that Badiou is a Maoist without the Marxism — a stance that I find rather terrifying.
At his best, Badiou is a kind of no-Kantian — this is an appelation that he would reject, of course, and one that most contemporary philosophers would find damning (though I mean it as a sort of praise). What I mean by Badiou’s neo-Kantianism is that his whole notion of the event, and of the ethics of remaining loyal to the event, is something like a late-modernist version of the categorical imperative. The event is singular, and yet of absolutely universal import — it commands our obedience, regardless of our merely personal, “pathological” implications. Badiou even defines the event, and the way we are called to be faithful to it, in entirely “formalist” terms — we are commanded by the very form of the event, rather than by anything having to do with its specific content. (Steven Shaviro, “Communism at Birkbeck“, The Pinocchio Theory 17 March 2009)
This attitude would be harmless enough on its own, but to the extent that it necessitates a kind of blanket rejection of, and accompanying disdain for, the world, its effects can be drastic, sweeping. Alex of Splintering Bone Ashes for his part takes the Badiouean line to its conclusion. Since everything that comes into existence is ‘new’, and since there is no intrinsic worth to ‘newness’ per se, everything under the sun is a pointed agent of specifically-capitalist subjectivation — even Badiou’s Event, it would seem.
“But this has further implications, that there is no necessary reason that music for example should change at such rates, that there is no intrinsic moral worth in “the new” per se in the slightest. Pop music is entirely a creature made possible by capitalism. For many thousands of years folk and Art musics likewise changed only very slowly, but since the economic systems built around them (localist minstrels or music for ritual, or the institutional support of wealthy patrons) did not demand endless novelty this was entirely unproblematic. This is a point upon which I believe we might wish to take Badiou to task, (and perhaps modernism as a whole). The valorisation of the new seems to be an artifact of a certain kind of capitalistic subjectivation, and as Nick Srnicek of Accursed Share pointed out here, why change at all? Why not slow emergence instead of rapid revolutionary change? Why not absolute stasis? Why valorise the new? Capitalism’s endless turn-over of products and services serves an obvious purpose within its own terms, but the claim towards inherent worth (whether capitalistic or modernist) is on shaky ground (i.e.- is a massively under-theorized discursive a priori).” (Alex, “Rupturing as foundation“, Splintering Bone Ashes 20 February 2009)
"Ads" (Antje Peters, 2008) refers to typical advertisement compositions. "Through not showing actual brands the focus is on stereotypic style elements and color."
The commodity, in this view, is but a form or function whose content by definition lacks importance or revolutionary relevance. Which brings to the fore a number of easily-debunked assumptions about the commodity, the first being that the folk arts, by contrast, ”changed only very slowly”. No matter that this assertion is, for all intents and purposes, immeasurable, not to mention speculative, it is a myth necessary for the Badiouean blanket rejection to operate. But if the folk arts could be shown to change rapidly all the same, the thesis that capitalism is at heart an engine of constant change, for change’s sake, would begin to fall apart. After all, isn’t the ‘demand for endless novelty’ a feature of art, and culture, that literally predates capitalism? (To take just one example, Francis Bacon wrote of this problem well before capitalism, much less commodity capitalism, existed.) Which is why, to prevent these kinds of objections from being raised, the ’surface’ of culture must be constantly separated-out from the structure beneath it, lest the ‘contents’ of the commodity, or the actual succession of changes, start to matter. Nick of The Accursed Share expresses this necessity succinctly:
“It is a common place today to note that capitalism is more than capable of integrating any culturally revolutionary subjects - in many cases, it even produces them, or at least actively incites novelty. So a resistance to capitalism and a viable alternative can’t be found on a cultural level — it needs to operate on the economic structures of modern capitalism.” (Nick, “Crisis and Change“, The Accursed Share 26 September 2008)
Voidmanufacturing, for their part, breaks-down the Platonic assumptions lurking behind this surface-structure binary, which is indeed derived from Adorno. Though the structure is supposed to be invisible or non-manifest (otherwise it would just be part of the surface), for the culture industry to be described or assigned some kind of a power dynamic, the structure must eventually be associated with a real-world practice, with authorities and institutions. And when this is invariably achieved through a characterization of the corporation, a strictly top-down, hierarchical process is described, one in which a “smooth supply” runs downward, with total determination.
“A constant sameness governs the relationship to the past as well. What is new about the phase of mass culture compared with the late liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the same spot. While determining consumption it excludes the untried as a risk. The movie-makers distrust any manuscript which is not reassuringly backed by a bestseller. Yet for this very reason there is never-ending talk of ideas, novelty, and surprise, of what is taken for granted but has never existed. Tempo and dynamics serve this trend. Nothing remains as of old; everything has to run incessantly, to keep moving. For only the universal triumph of the rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction promises that nothing changes, and nothing unsuitable will appear. Any additions to the well-proven culture inventory are too much of a speculation. The ossified forms – such as the sketch, short story, problem film, or hit song – are the standardised average of late liberal taste, dictated with threats from above. The people at the top in the culture agencies, who work in harmony as only one manager can with another, whether he comes from the rag trade or from college, have long since reorganised and rationalised the objective spirit. One might think that an omnipresent authority had sifted the material and drawn up an official catalogue of cultural commodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass-produced lines. The ideas are written in the cultural firmament where they had already been numbered by Plato – and were indeed numbers, incapable of increase and immutable.” (voidmanufacturing, “Adorno and Horkheimer’s classic essay on bullshit“, Void Manufacturing 8 September 2008)
Though Adorno’s (and Badiou’s) model is problematic at best, paralyzing at worst, we are still left with the problem of capitalist appropriation, the general theoretical contours of which I remain largely unconvinced. Or, to put it differently, I don’t see this phenomena as by any means exclusive to capitalism. Is it heightened through a certain market logic? Probably. But, again, I don’t see how ‘appropriation’ is not a constant, and therefore highly ambiguous (perhaps unhelpful), dynamic of history in general. Pre-capitalist medieval art, for example, could easily be described in terms of aesthetic appropriations governed by various cultural dominances. Resistances of all kinds — heretical sects, say, throughout the pre-Protestant era – have always been strategically, and unstrategically, incorporated into the institution resisted, be it through deliberate tactics or sustained interaction. To describe capitalist appropriation is only to describe a species thereof, provided that we even want to maintain the theoretical predominance of this concept. Why is this distinction so important? Because without it resistance to capitalist systems in particular would seem dramatically, perhaps programmatically, futile. Furthermore, to confine the powers of ‘appropriation’ to late capitalism alone would give it an almost metaphysical power – according to which everything in resistance is ‘absorbed’ ‘in advance’ – that inflates its already formidable capacity to crush opposition.
The ongoing debates over the difference between immaterial production and classic industrial capitalism have in many ways made these conclusions inevitable, if only because ‘continual structural features’ have to be discerned across more and more diverse historical periods, which can suggest that perhaps some of the features we thought were strictly capitalist are in fact more general. Steven Shaviro thus finds the language of ‘novelty or reversion’ somewhat inappropriate, if only because neither can account for ’structural features’ that persist across each:
“Now, I am largely in agreement with Hardt (and Negri, and some of the economists associated with their position, like Marazzi and even to some extent Moulier Boutang) about the transformations in capitalism over the last fifty years, and especially since the 1970s. But I am not sure I entirely accept the framework through which Hardt interprets these developments. In particular, I do not think that immaterial production involves a more “direct” expropriation of the common than was the case when industrial capitalism extracted value. It is true, as I have already said, that a lot of this new source of capital appropriation comes from a kind of “primitive accumulation” — corporations are now appropriating the commons in the form of things like genomes and songs and procedures of working, in the same way that landlords appropriated the commons of land at the time of the enclosures. But I don’t think that this is either a novelty or a reversion. It is rather the case that “primitive accumulation” never went away; it is a continual structural feature of capitalism, and was at work in the industrial age as much as it was in the agricultural stage, and as much as it is still today. Capitalism always both appropriates to itself things that it didn’t produce — and this precisely by “privatizing” them — and extracts a surplus from the processes of production that it directly initiates and supervises” (Steven Shaviro, “Communism conference — Michael Hardt,” The Pinochio Theory 16 march 2009)
In this regard, the ‘direct expropriation of the common’ starts to seem a lot more diverse in site and mechanism than current theories of capitalist appropriation allow. To be sure, the market’s absorption of presumably revolutionary practices goes hand in hand with its opposite: the political redressing of the same in the guise of the new, which is by no means a strictly capitalist mechanism. Maximilian Forte’s cutting analysis of the rhetoric of novelty where there is none is just one certain example:
“On what basis do we call it a “radical new experiment,” when there is a long history of anthropological service to imperialism, a fact promoted by Montgomery McFate in her own writing? Anyone who knows anything at all about anthropology in the last 30 years would know that we have had these debates before, and anthropologists have served in counterinsurgency programs long before now. So why feign such ignorance, or is it real ignorance? Why the preposterous claims to “novelty” when there is nothing new here? Why the foolish appropriation of the term “radical” in connection with an ideologically reactionary stance and imperial militarism? How many more times will the degraded salesmen pitch their product in such hackneyed terms? Why not just stand for what you mean to say, and what you mean to think, instead of couching it in such awfully banal language of “NEW!”, “experimental!”, “applied!” and “radical!”?” (Maximilian Forte, “A ‘Radical New Experiment’ in ‘Anthropology’? What HTS is NOT“, Open Anthropology 27 August 2008)
The goal here isn’t to argue for some kind of universal notion of appropriation, novelty, absorption, and so forth, though I do find the current theory of the commodity just as totalizing (across geographies, markets, populations, and objects). One proof of this is to be found not in Badiou’s books, but in their market existence. Surely even he must consider the ‘contents’ of his own published commodities relevant, if not transcendent of their commercial ‘form’. This is no small matter. If his works are not just commodities, then perhaps similar things could be said for other commodities or for the revolutionary possibilities for the commodity. And this is precisely where I would like this argument to take us: to the commodity, not away from it. Still reeling from a Marxism that privleges the ‘moment’ of production over consumption, leftist thought is now discernibly lagging behind shifts in other domains — design, for instance.
Along these lines, the most obvious short-coming of the recent Communism conference (aside from its non-representation of the Global South) is its complete lack of interest in environmentalism and the green movement. Which is perhaps no coincidence, in that the green movement is consolidated largely around the commodity form, theoretically and practically. Green design and sustainability in general takes as its locus precisely what the Badiouean rejects — namely, the object, its construction, and its relation to the production process. Though it’s true that rethinking the commodity alone won’t do much for labor conditions or the distribution of wealth, at least not directly, it is nonetheless increasingly clear that a thorough reform of objects would entail the most fundamental, revolutionary reorganization of society. But to begin to tackle these questions, in a philosophical as well as practical manner, would require an interest in the very ‘contents’ of the forms we have been led to disavow.
Notes
[1] Theodor Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin,” in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (New York: Verso, 2007), 119.
* CFP: “Novelty, Transformation and Change” Pli 21 [conference website]
