Lessons 23-26: Marxism / Materialism

Block Objectives: Review applicable terms, concepts, and tenets commonly associated with Marxism and

Materialism. Study and discuss prominent examples of Marxist and Materialist criticism:

o Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859); “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” (1867); “The Working Day” (1867)

o Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction” (1936-1939)

o Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1944, 1947)

o Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970)o Frederic Jameson. “Cognitive Mapping” (1988)

Apply applicable terms, concepts, and tenets commonly associated with Marxist and Materialist criticism to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899).

Block Overview: After establishing a shared understanding of the commonly accepted critical elements of Marxist and Materialist thought, we will study and discuss seven prominent examples (Marx, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Althusser, Jameson). We will close out the block with a Marxist/Materialist examination of Chopin’s The Awakening. Notes to Consider: HTIL: 220-256:

o Cannot confuse Marxist and Materialist thought with Communism or Socialism – though there is significant overlap between critical tenets and concepts.

o State Capitalism – Totalitarian implementation of socialist ideals in which a dominant political party and/or state leaders concentrate power over political, economic, and social capital.

o Materialist – critical thought that privileges “natural, physical things, including food and shelter, rather than idealistic or spiritual abstractions like beauty, truth, and the supernatural” (221).

“…life shapes consciousness, as opposed to consciousness shaping life” (221).

o Base – “the material, economic world” (221).o Superstructure – everything in the world produced by the base.o Economic Determinism / Economism – Economics causes / drives every

phenomenon in the social, political, and economic spheres of life (221).o Division of Labor – As the “modern” economy developed, people divided labor

requirements to fulfill needs (food, shelter, clothing, etc.). This led to the development of different classes with competing needs/interests.

Subsistence agriculture moves beyond subsistence to create surplus Surplus leads to trade Agricultural economy transforms to trade economy / feudalism Capitalism emerges as merchants / urban centers replace farms / rural estates as centers of social, cultural, and economic power.

This transition leads to the development of the bourgeoisie (capitalist merchants) and the proletariat (exploited class of workers) (221).

Bourgeoisie – relatively small percentage of the population who own and/or control the means of production and, therefore, dominate society.

The bourgeoisie “have capital, use their capital to purchase labor through wages, and exploit the labor to accumulate wealth for themselves” (221).

Proletariat – vast majority of the population, exploited by the dominant classes, who “labor to produce goods and who sell their labor” (221).

o Capital – “For Marx, capital is not simply money that people exchange for goods or labor. It is money that capitalists use to purchase goods or labor for the purpose of making a profit” (222).

Could, therefore, define capital as “money that is used to make more money, which is used again to make more money and on again in continuous circulation” (222).

Capitalists “privilege capital over labor” (222). Marxists privilege “labor over capital” (222).

o Marx interprets history not as a battle between peoples, nations, kings, etc., but “as an ongoing class struggle between those who labor and those who own” (222).

o Marxist Dialectic – not, necessarily, to be confused with the Hegelian Dialectic – “refers to the way that contradictory arguments and economic forces engage with each other…to produce something else. In particular, Marx supposed the back and forth of class conflict and contradictory ideologies, which Marxists call dialectical materialism or historical materialism, would eventually resolve into a socialist future” (222-223).

The critical result of this “socialist future” occurs when the “proletariat…spontaneously rise up in revolution, overthrow capitalism, and establish a socialist state without class divisions or private property” (223).

o Must not forget – Marx was, in many ways, responding to the deplorable living and working conditions of the working class during the Industrial Revolution. (See Victorian Filth, etc. files on class website). Victorian London was struggling (for the first time on such a grand scale) with the second, third, and fourth order effects of the Industrial Revolution. Marx truly believed the titans of industry and the bourgeoisie did not care about the truly horrific lives of the proletariat. While this may, in fact be true, England did pass a number of reforms throughout the nineteenth century to address the deplorable living/working conditions of the working class. This reform was, however, woefully slow. Nevertheless, as Parker notes, “capitalism adapted” – passing “a variety of reforms – increased voting rights (by class, gender, and race), unions, child-labor laws, a limited work week, income taxes, unemployment compensations, welfare, pensions and social security, publicly funded health care, and so on” (223).

In many ways, these “reforms” helped stave off Marx’s “revolution.”o Contemporary Marxist criticism “is often less about provoking social change than

about using Marxist ideas to interpret culture” (223).o Alienation of Labor – Marx believed that industrial-revolution era workers suffered

“alienation” from their work because, unlike their predecessors who “saw the process

[of production] through from beginning to end and could see and take pride in the completed product without feeling alienated from their own labor,” industrial workers “work on only one small part of a product and may never see the finished product, let alone use it themselves” (223).

o Use Value – “In precapitalist times, workers used the objects they produced” – in other words, the “value” of these objects was in their direct use (224).

o Exchange Value – In capitalist times, “workers produce objects for sale on the market” – called commodities (224). Their value, therefore, comes from what a person (usually not the worker) can get in exchange for the product – hence – exchange value. Marx considered this an unnatural progression, as it distanced the worker from his/her labor. In this situation, the “value” of the worker’s labor is, therefore, abstract and distant. Consequently, Marx argues, “laboring for exchange value redoubles the alienation of labor” (224).

o Commodity Fetish – Social and economic and political (because they are all connected) condition whereby “commodities provoke a desire for yet more commodities” (224).

For “an object to be a commodity, it has to be bought and sold” (224). And, remember, Marx identified this in the middle of the nineteenth century!

What would he think today?!?o Sign Exchange Value – Commodities desired less for their use value than the status

they afford the owner. o Commodification / Commodity Economy / Commodity Culture – “…takes us

steadily further from practical, unalienated labor and use value, leading people to value each other mainly as producers and purchasers of commodities. Eventually, in a process that Marx called commodification, people themselves are commodified, valued not as people but instead as numbers, statistics, and cogs in an abstract economic machine” (225).

o Given the “realities” of the Great Depression, the rise of Communism, and global warfare (based largely upon ideology – free market capitalism and democracy vs. Soviet communism) – socialist realism and proletarian literature briefly emerged in the mid-1930s:

Socialist realism – literature that emerged in the mid-1930s in the Soviet Union sphere of influence that “explicitly endorsed a romantic vision of the common people and a Communist vision of their future” (225).

Proletarian literature – reflected socialist realism – called for “people to think critically about capitalist assumptions or socialist possibilities without necessarily speaking to readers didactically or idealizing the proletariat” (225).

o Georg Lukács – Hungarian Marxist theorist Reification – Thingification – “refers to the way that commodification

reduces social relations, ideas, and even people to things, thus intensifying alienation. Things take on their own momentum, independent of human life, evoking the bewildering fragmentation of alienated, capitalist modernity” (226).

Criticized modernist literature (Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, Beckett, etc.) because he believed “the fragmentation of modernist form decadently and uncritically

reproduced the alienated reification of modern life. He saw the modernists as writing for form and technique rather than for social representation, and he saw their form, as in modernist stream of consciousness, as swept up in individualist virtuosity” (226).

Privileged realism because, “though produced by bourgeois writers, [it] represented not modernist fragmentation but, rather, the totality of society, including history and dialectical class conflict, which can lead readers beyond reification to revolutionary class consciousness” (226).

o Antonio Gramsci – Italian Communist Party leader. Criticizes “the classical Marxist notion of economic determinism” (227). Distinguished “between what he called the state (government and politics) and

civil society (culture)” (227). Tried to “understand why the masses [in Mussolini’s Italy], for the most part,

not only held back from revolution but actually supported the far right, against what Gramsci saw as their own interests” (227).

This is important because “Marxists need to understand why the masses do not overthrow capitalism to set up the socialist system that, according to Marxists, would make the world a far better place for the masses” (228).

Hegemony – “dominating cultural influence and power” (228). Postulates that “cultural leadership” more effective than coercion or violence

to maintain hegemony this allows us to understand the broad appeal (and power) of consumerism AND bourgeois hegemonic influence.

Also allows greater understanding of how we are manipulated by “marketing and peer pressure [that] create a demand that was not there before [for a mass-produced product], even when the products pollute the environment and come from factories that help prop up antidemocratic, misogynist, repressive, corrupt governments” (228).

Gramsci dismissed a “spontaneous proletarian revolution” as the means to “change bourgeois cultural dominance” (228). Instead, he argued, the proletariat could do so “by changing people’s cultural assumptions, a gradual process of making alliances with other groups to form a ‘historic bloc” that can eventually achieve its own hegemony” (228).

Gramsci believed “organic intellectuals” would lead this process of cultural change. Organic intellectuals differ from traditional intellectuals in that they are not “ivory tower” intellectuals who consider themselves society’s intellectual elite. Rather, organic intellectuals are “leaders who arise from within the people and can use civil society – education and the media – to express the people’s ideas that the people might not be ready to express for themselves” (229).

Gramsci, then, privileged “praxis (practice) a sense that the future will come through the doing of it, through alliances and contingencies, rather than through absolute and abstract theoretical laws” rather than proletariat revolution (229).

“In this way, his thinking has appealed to Marxists influenced by structuralism, who see everything through its relation to something

else, as well as to Marxists influenced by deconstruction, who see culture as a continuous shifting of multiple forces” (229).

o The Frankfurt School – mid-twentieth century Marxists out of the School for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Macuse, Jurgen Habermas

Aimed to examine the relationship between “reason, art, modernism, and public debate” (229).

“…sought to understand how capitalist ideology deters revolutionary consciousness, concentrating their attention, like Gramsci, on the superstructure, on culture rather than on economic determinism” (229).

“…they saw technology and the commodifying, commercial ‘culture industry’ (the entertainment industry – movies, music, the media, sports, and so on) reproducing capitalist ideology from one generation to the next, drawing the consuming masses to take capitalist assumptions for granted” (229).

“…art becomes another commodity, encouraging political complacency instead of revolutionary or critical thinking” (229).

Adorno believed modernist art reflected the “horror of modernity” while attacking “the promises of Enlightenment rationalism” and “traditional complacency” (229).

Habermas “sees Enlightenment models of public debate, which he dubbed the public sphere, as offering a space between the state and civil society and offering the best alternative to the threatening fragmentation of modernist art and life” (230).

Habermas privileges “communicative reason” rather than “poststructuralist and postmodernist skepticism” (230).

Benjamin argues that technology (and the ability, therefore, to “reproduce” art on a mass scale) “displaced the traditional ‘aura’ of the work of art” (230).

o Contemporary Marxism – a number of factors combined to critique / replace “traditional” Marxism, including rejection of Soviet-style communism, proliferation of post-structuralism/deconstruction, radicalization of academia, rise of other –isms (i.e. – feminisms, etc.), Cold War, etc.

Led to new Marxism, post-Marxism, contemporary Marxism in direct opposition to classical or vulgar Marxism.

These “new” Marxism(s) / materialists look “critically at the base / superstructure model of classical Marxism” (231).

Classical Marxism: o Believes “the base is economics, and everything else –

including art, literature, music, politics, and popular culture – is the superstructure. The base is the cause and the superstructure is the effect, the direct reflection of the base” (231).

o “…the superstructure is the effect, the direct reflection of the base…” (231).

So called ‘new’ Marxists believe tying everything back to economic determinism in this manner dismisses the “imaginative unpredictability” and “variety” of “human behavior” and, in turn, its artistic impulses (231).

Louis Althusser – French Marxists – examines “ideology” and “interpellation”:

Defines ideology as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” – or – as an “unconscious process” (231).

“…in ordinary English usage, ideology refers to a conscious, deliberately chosen set of political beliefs” – but, for Althusser, “ideology refers to an unconscious set of beliefs and assumptions, our imaginary relation to real conditions that may not match what we imagine” (231).

In other words, according to Althusser, “we mostly misunderstand the world around us and the reasons that lead us to act in the ways that we act” (231).

Moreover, “[t]hat system needs to remain unconscious and imaginary, because if it were conscious, no one would go along” (233).

Interpellation, then, is the “engine that keeps the system reproducing itself” (233).

o The system “calls” to / “hails” us “and we answer” (233).o And, “[w]hen we answer, we become subjects of

interpellation, like subjects to a queen or king or subjects to the law” (233).

“And so we get drawn into ideology more by what Althusser called ideological state apparatuses (ISAs), echoing Gramsci’s term civil society, which include the schools, media, churches, families, unions, and entertainment culture, than by the repressive state apparatuses (RSAs), echoing Gramsci’s term the state, which includes the police, courts, prisons, and military” (234).

“Interpellation is the engine that reproduces taken for granted (unconscious cultural assumptions from generation to generation, preventing radical change” (235).

Marxists do not subscribe, necessarily, to the power of individuality, preferring instead, to believe that relative autonomy leads to intervention and agency:

Intervention – “the technical word for changing the system or at least for trying to change it” (235).

Agency – “the ability to make things happen” (235). Relative autonomy – “…the superstructure’s partial independence

from the base” (235).o “Relative autonomy suggests at least a little independence from

the clutches of the system, from interpellation, but such independence does not have to come in the form of individualism” (235).

Subject, subjectivity, self: Subject – “two different but related meanings…. Based on the

grammatical model of a sentence, the subject is the agent, the one who does, as opposed to the object, which someone does something to. In that sense of the term, the subject holds a position of relative or

potential power, similar to a self or an individual but not the same as a self or an individual” (236).

“The terms self and individual suggest a romantic individualism, whereas the term subject refers to a position, specifically to a position that can be held by a group as well as an individual, such as when we speak of feminist or Asian American subjectivity” (236).

“Althusser, by contrast, uses the term subject to refer to having less power, as in being subject to the law or subject to a queen or king, or, for Althusser, subject to a dominant ideology” (236).

“Althusser’s use of the term focuses on how the subject is interpellated and made into a subject by being interpellated. The subject’s delusion of selfhood and individuality keeps it from recognizing that it is a subject, not a self or individual” (236).

“Given the Marxist interest in thinking socially, not just individually, relative autonomy, agency, and intervention can come from groups, not just from individuals” (237).

Relative autonomy – the intermittent ability to think critically and resist interpellation (237).

History and collective thinking (whether as a society or a subset of society (class, race, gender, etc.) influence one’s relative autonomy (237).

For Marxists, “critical thinking leads to agency and intervention” (237).

Relative autonomy is NOT bourgeois individualism (237).o It is not a “romantic” term like “individuality.” Marxists find

such individuality a virtual impossibility given the complex, often subtle manipulations imposed upon us as “subjects” (237).

False consciousness – Essentially, “the opposite of relative autonomy. False consciousness refers to a way of thinking that is so interpellated into oppressive ideologies that it leads people to act against their own [self] interest[s]” (238).

“How Much Do We Make Our Choices, and How Much Do Larger Forces Make Our Choices for Us?” Relative Autonomy IdeologyAgency (Positive) (Negative) InterpellationIntervention False consciousness

o “The interest for a critic lies not so much in pasting on a label of ideology, interpellation, and false consciousness or a label of relative autonomy, agency, and intervention and then calling that the end of the story. Instead, the interest comes in the intricate negotiations across the interlocking possibilities in any particular cultural activity, including poems, movies, novels, plays, clothing styles, music, political campaigns, sports, websites, magazines and so on” (241).

o “Once we notice the workings of powerful, dominant ideologies and bring them to consciousness, then we have begun to look, at least partly, from outside the ideologies, and that makes it possible to resist them” (241).

o Bertolt Brecht – German Marxist playwright – brought Marxist theory into drama – calling for a “new style of acting, which he dubbed the alienation effect, which would encourage readers not to identify with the actresses and actors on the stage or the roles they played” (241-242).

“Brecht asked for staging and acting that calls attention to itself as performance. Let the lights go on…and let the lights be visible, and let the performers act in ways that expose their role as actresses and actors, so that audiences can have a critical distance that allows them to question ideological assumptions instead of letting interpellation smother their skepticism” (242).

Also applies to poetry, fiction, etc. in that such an approach to literature “calls attention to itself as performed, constructed writing instead of encouraging audiences to see the literary text as a passive window to or transcript of unquestionable truth and realism” (242).

o Marxism and race – “In classical Marxism, because the base of economics determines everything else, class, an economic category, was thought to determine race, a cultural category. In the eventual classless state that Marxists predicted, race would disappear” (242).

Over time, however, “it grew harder to see race simply as a product of class” (242).

“[P]eople of all races belong to every class. Race is therefore a relatively autonomous determinant of cultural variation, of who we are and what we do. Racism may feed off economic exploitation, but economic exploitation also feeds off racism” (242).

o Marxism and gender – “…so long as Marxists tried to explain everything by economics, they had a difficult time accounting for gender, since people in the same family, and hence in more or less the same economic position, do not all share the same gender. For that reason, classical Marxists often ignored feminism and ignored women’s concerns” (242).

Over time, though, Marxists began “to see gender, like race, as a relatively autonomous determinant of culture” (242).

“Much as in the relation between racism and economic determinism, misogyny feeds off economic exploitation, but economic exploitation also feeds off misogyny” (242).

o Pierre Bourdieu – French sociologist – “expanded the traditional Marxist notion of capital to include cultural capital” (243).

“Most people think of their aesthetic taste as something they choose for themselves” (243).

Bourdieu argues, however,that “we do not freely choose our aesthetic style, our taste in music, clothing, movies, or home décor, or even our style of speaking” (243).

“Instead, class position, defined not so much by economic capital as by the related qualities of family and formal education, goes a long way to determine aesthetic taste” (243).

“Bourdieu argued that working-class taste tends to favor realism and escapism in literature and favor realistic or functional painting and photography” (243).

“Elite taste, by contrast, favors – and has the luxury to favor – an appreciation for form and style in themselves in literature, music, abstract painting, and artistic photography” (243).

Matter vs. Manner - “Those with less formal education tend to favor matter, while those with more formal education tend to favor manner” (243).

“It often requires more education and aesthetic experience to appreciate an art that imitates or plays off other art than to appreciate an art that imitates nature” (243).

“Just as cultural capital produces an elite taste in art and elite patterns of speech and behavior, so those tastes and patterns of speech and behavior produce cultural capital, so that social stratification reproduces itself from generation to generation” (243).

“Thus, cultural capital, and not simply economic capital, makes working-class people stay in the working class and makes upper-class people – defined now by their aesthetic taste and not merely by their economic wealth – stay in the upper class” (243).

In this sense, then, Bourdieu argues that “art serves a social function: it reproduces and legitimates social hierarchies” (243).

o Terry Eagleton – perhaps the most widely read contemporary Marxist critic – focuses primarily upon the “historical and political embeddedness of literary writing” (243). He sees his work primarily as seeking Marxist political change – not just “studying theory for its own sake” (244).

o Fredric Jameson – Perhaps the most prominent contemporary American Marxist who combines “Marxist theory, structuralism, and formalism with poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and the study of popular culture and capitalist globalization” (244).

Known for his phrase “Always historicize!” (244). “[S]ees literature and other cultural productions and movements as shaped by

unacknowledged social meanings that he calls the political unconscious, evoking a social dimension to psychoanalysis and to bourgeois culture’s investment in repressing its recognition of its own desperate motives” (244).

“[C]riticizes the bourgeois belief that art is pure and separate from history and politics” (244).

“In postmodernism, he argues…modernist fragmentation multiplies itself until parody, without its biting cultural criticism, gives way to postmodernist pastiche, imitation without the political bite of parody” (244).

“The fragmentation of modernist style implied a critique of capitalist commodification…but the cultural logic of late capitalism and postmodernism is the ascendancy of commodification as an end in itself” (244).

o Jacque Ranciére– French philosopher – who “focuses on the relation between politics and aesthetics” (244).

“To Ranciére, what we can and cannot see and say shape our art and politics and tie art and politics together as versions and causes of each other” (245).

“Ranciére roots in Marxism center his thinking on a pervasive sense of equality across all people. He sees people of all class as equally intelligent, from the humble worker to the intellectual and the political leader” (245).

Privileges “workers, students, undocumented or illegal immigrants, the unemployed, and pretty much everyone not part of the Marxist intellectual vanguard” (245).

Juxtaposes consensus and dissensus: “He sees contemporary politics as caught up in the sway of a liberal,

managerial consensus that relies on experts and professional politicians to establish the boundaries of what we can think and do politically” (245).

“Outside the consensus live undocumented immigrants, the unemployed, the indifferent, those who do not fit into the dominating managerial agreements about what counts and about what we can and should sense. The concept of what we can and should sense, what we can see, think, understand, hear, do, make, and say, leads Ranciére to theorize what he calls the aesthetics of politics. It also leads, in turn, to what he calls the politics of aesthetics” (246).

Distribution of the sensible – Sensible – “perceptible through the senses” (246). Identifies “three dominating patterns in the history of the distribution

of the sensible” (246) – they do not disappear / they grow less prominent:

o 1) Ethical Regime of Images – Plato – privileges truth/accuracyo 2) Representative Regime of Art – Aristotle – values art as

“valuable fictions that follow their own logic and rules, their own consensus” (246).

o 3) Aesthetic Regime of Art – 19th C. – Works can use any style / language “…the aesthetic is the regime of the modern and of democracy and equality. Art is no longer about representing something else. It is about its own language and expression rather than about representation. It is singular, autonomous, pure suspension” (247).

“[P]olitics and aesthetics shape each other” (247). “Once … art moves into the world, it takes on a momentum of its own,

because different audiences will read the same art in different ways. Indeed all art includes contradictions. The intentions behind a work of art may contradict its effects” (247).

“Art can no longer be shut into the locked room of Aristotle’s rules. Now, in the aesthetic regime…all classes and all parts of the population have access to the arts. Art’s capacity to go in any direction undermines the oppressive hierarchies that constrain freedom and that constrain politics and the aesthetic imagination” (247).

Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: Introductory Notes:

o Here, Marx provides a summary of “his materialist understanding of history, economics, and human consciousness, including the relations between the base (economics) and the superstructure (the rest of culture, including law, politics, religion, aesthetics, and philosophy” (379).

o Marx argues that “capitalism leads people to fetishize commodities” (379). By fetishize, he means ascribing “mystical value” to commodities (379).

o “Such fetishizing, Marx argues, leads people to overlook how the value of commodities is socially produced rather than mystically inherent in the commodities themselves” (379).

o Identifies “a series of epochs in the human understanding of commodities…ranging from the hypothetical isolated individual’s relations to potential commodities…to what he describes as the movement from primitive economies to feudal and capitalist economies” (379).

o “Each of these epoch opposes Marx’s ideal of a socialist economy that provides for people in proportion to their labor” (379).

o “…capital exploits workers…” (379).o Marx laments capital’s ‘werewolf hunger for surplus labour’” (379).

“…relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production.

“The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society [the base] – the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures [the superstructure] and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness” (380).

“The mode of production [the base] in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life [the superstructure]” (380).

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness” (380).

“At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production” (380).

“Then comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed” (380).

“…the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic – in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out” (380).

“…mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation” (380).

Marx’s “epochs of progress” “the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of production” (380).

“The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from conditions surrounding the life of individuals in society; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation constitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society” (381).

Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”: “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis

shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (381).

“So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it” (381). “…man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by nature, in

such a way as to make them useful to him” (381). “The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use-value”

(381). “…however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a

physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism” (381). Marx defines “the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value” as “the duration

of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour” (381). “…there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the

labour-time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development” (381).

“…from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form” (381).

“A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of labour” (382).

“This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses” (382).

“There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom” (382).

“There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things…. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities…” (382).

“This Fetishism of commodities has its origin…in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them” (382).

“As a general rule, the articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other” (382).

“The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society” (382).

“Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange” (382).

“…the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products and indirectly, through them, between the producers” (382).

“…the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things” (382).

“It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility” (382).

“This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged” (382-383).

“…their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production” (383).

“From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a two-fold character. On the one hand, it must…satisfy a definite social want…. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others” (383).

“…the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form [of] … all … physically different articles that are the products of labour” (383) All have “one common quality” they have value (383).

“…by an exchange, we equate as values our different products…, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it” (383).

“…value…converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later…we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products” (383).

“…the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production” (383).

“The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value” (384).

“These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers” (384).

“…in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour-time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of nature” (384).

“The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative value of commodities” (384).

“Man’s reflections on the forms of social life…take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development” (384).

“…the analysis of the prices of commodities…alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and it was the common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their characters as values” (384).

“…this ultimate money form of the world of commodities…actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers” (384).

Epochs Isolated/Independent Producers (Crusoe) Feudal (Middle Ages) Bourgeois / Industrial / Capitalist (Modern) Revolution! Communist

o (NOTE – Some scholars see five epochs… and, indeed, I can see how one might interpret Marx to identify five…instead of the four I teach here. I, however, (wrongly or rightly) combine the “slave” and “feudal” epochs into one…)

o First Epoch Independent / Crusoe Individual: “Robinson’s island bathed in light” (385):

“Moderate though he be, yet some few wants he has to satisfy, and must therefore do a little useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming goats, fishing and hunting” (384).

“In spite of the variety of his work, he knows that his labour, whatever its form, is but the activity of one and the same Robinson, and consequently, that it consists of nothing but different modes of human labour” (385).

“Necessity itself compels him to apportion his time accurately between his different kinds of work. Whether one kind occupies a greater space in his general activity than another, depends on the difficulties, greater or less as the case may be, to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at” (385).

“All the relations between Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of his own creation, are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion” (385).

o Second Epoch – Feudal – Social: “the European middle ages shrouded in darkness” (385).

“Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy” (385).

“Personal dependence here characterizes the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organized on the basis of that production” (385).

“…no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and payments in kind” (385).

“Compulsory labour is just as properly measured by time, as commodity-producing labour; but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord, is a definite quantity of his own personal labour-power” (385).

“…the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour” (385).

“…the patriarchal industries of a peasant family, that produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen, and clothing for home use… are, as regards the family, so many products of its labour, but as between themselves, they are not commodities” (385).

“The different kinds of labour, such as tillage, cattle tending, spinning, weaving and making clothes, which result in the various products, are in themselves, and such as they are, direct social functions, because functions of the family, which, must as much as a society based on the production of commodities, possesses a spontaneously developed system of division of labour” (385).

“… a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community” (385).

“All of the characteristics of Robinsons’s labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual” (386).

“Everything produced by him was exclusively the result of his own personal labour, and therefore simply an object of use for himself. The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of product and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as a means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary” (386).

“…the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time” (386).

“…a definite social plan maintains the proper proportion between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion of the common labour borne by each individual” (386).

“The social relations of the individual producers, with regards both to their labour and to its products, are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard not only to production but also to distribution” (386).

“…for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standards of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion” (386).

“Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellow men in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection” (386).

“The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan” (387).

o Third Epoch – Bourgeois / Industrial / Capitalist: “…the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being

controlled by him” (387). “…forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by

the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions” (387).

“…exchange value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an object” (387).

“Nature has not more to do with it, than it has in fixing the course or exchange” (387).

“The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois production” (387).

“When arose the illusions of the monetary system? To it gold and silver, when serving as money, did not represent a social relation between producers, but were natural objects with strange social properties” (387).

Commodities “nothing but exchange values” NO use-value (387). “Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not” (388). “Riches” (use-value) are the attribute of men, value is the attribute of

commodities” (388). “A man or a community is rich, a pearl or diamond is valuable…A pearl

or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or diamond” (388). “…the use-value of objects belongs to them independently of their

material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects” (388).

“What confirms them in this view, I the peculiar circumstance that the use-value of objects is realized without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the objects and man, while, on the other hand, their value is realized only by exchange, that is, by means of a social process” (388).

Karl Marx, “The Working Day”: “What is a working day? What is the length of time during which capital may consume the

labour-power whose daily value it buys? How far may the working day be extended beyond the working time necessary for the reproduction of labour-power itself?” (388).

“[C]apital replies: the working day contains he full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of repose without which labour-power absolutely refuses its services again. hence it is self-evident that the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power” (388).

“…all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital” (388).

“Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!) – moonshine!) (388).

“[I]n its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger of surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. it steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight” (388).

“Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour-power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power, that can be rendered fluent in a working day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourere’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its futility” (389).

Marx defines the “capitalistic mode of production” as the “production of surplus-value, the absorption of surplus-labour” (389).

The capitalistic mode of production “produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself” (389).

“It extends the labourer’s time of production during a given period by shortening his actual lifetime” (389).

Given this, Marx argues it “would seem therefore that the interest of capital itself points in the direction of a normal working day” (388).

And yet… see “Victorian Filth” and related material on course website. “What experience shows to the capitalist generally is a constant excess of population, i.e. an

excess in relation to the momentary requirements of surplus-labour-absorbing capital, although this excess is made up of generations of human beings stunted, short-lived, swiftly replacing each other, plucked, so to say, before maturity” (390).

“In every stock-jobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety” (391).

“Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. To the outcry as to the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of overwork, it answers: Ought these to trouble us since they increase our profits?” (391).

“The establishment of a normal working day is the result of centuries of struggle between capitalist and labourer” (391) Marx then provides an historical breakdown of this struggle.

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility”: NOTE: Parenthetical citations refer to “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological

Reproducibility” and Other Writings on Media. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, etc. al. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2008.

Though there was little theoretical precedent for what he was trying to accomplish with his work, Walter Benjamin strove in the 1920s to create a comprehensive theory of media and aesthetics that could encapsulate his ideas about the widely disparate range of modern narrative forms, their place in contemporary society, and, often overlooked, the relationship between these narratives and politics.

Perhaps his best known work, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility examines what Benjamin sees as the relationship between images, scripts, technologies, and modes of perception and cognition in an era defined by technological reproducibility and commodity capitalism.

Whether juxtaposing the signs and symbols of written and graphic narratives with the “mark” and mythic (or legendary) roots of painting or drawing a distinction between “art” and folk art and kitsch, Benjamin predicates his analysis upon the fact that all art represents not only the particular locus of time and space within which it was created but reveals underlying tensions, issues, observations, and aspects of the subsequent eras in which it is produced, as well.

He examines the complex processes through which human sensory and cognitive systems engage the world and then turn those disparate engagements into narrative, with a particular focus upon the inter-related fields of art, philosophy, literature, and politics. More precisely, the mediation of cognitive and sensory apparatuses – whether newspapers, radio broadcasts, paintings, photography, film, advertisements, panoramas, telephones, etc. – lies at the root of his theories.

Writing in response to what he saw as the pervasive influence of commodity capitalism and democratization in the narrative marketplace, Benjamin labored to fix the place of art in modern society, the cognitive conditions under which art is produced, and the implications of art and its reproducibility upon modern individual agency.

Arguing that as the modes of human perception change so too does the capacity for both art to encode historical information and media to affect changing human sensory apparatuses, Benjamin attacks the iconic nature of art, insisting that, with the modern capacity for technological reproducibility, art has undergone a significant transformation.

Western society, he contends, has long privileged works of art based upon uniqueneness, authenticity, and authority: a status undermined by the fact that by the end of the nineteenth century, all art could be mass (re)produced.

Thus, he argues, because art is no longer unique, of indeterminate authority, and of questionable authenticity, it loses its iconic or fetishistic value.

In essence, modernity, in the form of technology’s impact upon the widely disparate (and always increasing) forms of available narrative, shatters the specific locus of time and space of production and becomes widely available for consumption by an equally increasing mass readership.

In this way, Benjamin privileges the transitory and repeatable nature of the reproduction over the unique permanence of the original by showing how technology mediates between the work of art and the Western tradition.

Further, because the uniqueness of a work of art fixes it in the context of tradition and its aura never changes, questions of authenticity no longer apply – and, in this manner, aesthetics moves from the realm of ritual, legend, myth, and tradition into that of politics.

Along these lines, Benjamin focuses upon film and how, even more than photography (which, in its own way transcends all forms of written narrative), it presents difficulties for traditional aesthetics in that it both requires a new cognitive and sensory “way” of looking and thinking about works of art and suggests a seismic shift in the relationship between a work of art and the “optical unconscious” of its audience.

Benjamin argues, rather controversially, insists that “all semblance of art’s autonomy disappeared forever” in the “world historical upheaval” of the fin de siècle years (28).

“For the majority of city dwellers, throughout the workday in offices and factories, have to relinquish their humanity in the face of an apparatus. In the evening these same masses fill the cinemas, to witness the film actor taking revenge on their behalf not only by asserting his humanity (or what appears to them as such) against the apparatus, but by placing that apparatus in the service of his triumph” (31).

“Exiled not only from the stage but from his own person. With a vague unease, he senses an inexplicable void, stemming from the fact that his body has lost its substance, that he has been volatilized, stripped of his reality, his life, his voice, the noises he makes when moving about, and has been turned into a mute image that flickers for a moment on screen then vanishes into silence” (31).

In film “the human being is placed in a position where he must operate with his whole living person, while forgoing his aura. For the aura is bound to his presence in the here and now. There is no facsimile of the aura” (31).

“The representation of human beings by means of an apparatus has made possible a highly productive use of the human being’s self-alienation” (32).

Benjamin posits an “estrangement” that results in the replacement of the camera lens for the audience. Nevertheless, “while he stands before the apparatus, he knows that in the end he is confronting the masses. It is they who control him” (33).

“Not only does the cult of the movie star which it fosters preserve that magic of the personality which has long been no more than the putrid magic of its own commodity character, but its counterpart, the cult of the audience, reinforces the corruption by which fascism is seeking to supplant the class consciousness of the masses” (33).

“For centuries it was in the nature of literature that a small number of writers confronted many thousands of readers. This began to change towards the end of the past century. With the growth and extension of the press, which constantly made new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local journals available to readers, an increasing number of readers – in isolated cases, at first – turned into writers” (33).

Ultimately, “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character” (33-34).

“Magician is to surgeon as painter is to cinematographer. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue” (35).

“Hence, the presentation of reality in film is incomparably the more significant for the people of today, since it provides the equipment-free aspect of reality they are entitled to demand from a work of art, and do so precisely on the basis of the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment” (35).

“The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, while the truly new is criticized with aversion” (36).

“And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response” (36).

“Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris” (37).

“Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. ‘Other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious….This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis” (37).

“Moreover, these two types of unconscious are intimately linked. For in most castes the diverse aspects of reality captured by the film camera lie outside only the normal spectrum of sense impressions” (37).

Benjamin insists that art is always one step of the times and its tastes, for “it has always been one of the primary tasks of art to create a demand whose hour of full satisfaction has not yet come” (38).

“The masses are a matrix from which all customary behavior toward works of art is today emerging newborn. Quantity has been transformed into quality: the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a different kind of participation” (39).

“The masses are criticized for seeking distraction in the work of art, whereas the art lover supposedly approaches it with concentration. In the case of the masses, the artwork is seen as a means of entertainment; in the case of the art lover, it is considered an object of devotion” (39).

Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”