IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE, AUTONOMY AND REPRODUCTION
‘It is concrete, however, to analyze the deaesthetization of art as a praxis that, devoid of reflection and on this side of art’s own dialectic, progressively delivers art over to the extra-aesthetic dialectic.’ Theodor W. Adorno1
In Aesthetic Theory,2 Theodor W. Adorno points to an irresolvable problem that he calls ‘deartification’ (Entkunstung):3 the encroachment of the outside world into art’s autonomy, led by ‘those who have been duped by the culture industry and are eager for its commodities’, those who are ‘this side of art’.4 The roles seem to be clearly distributed. The assault of the twentieth century on the nineteenth, that of mass culture on the modern culture of emancipation, seems as fateful as it was inevitable: the mission of the modernist advocates of autonomy against the victims of its replacement by disposable actualities, who are caught up in the cultural-industrial present – all this seems unmistakably clear. And yet, salvation does not seem to come. ‘The deartification of art is not only a stage of art’s liquidation but also the direction of its development’,5 and those who have been duped find themselves ‘this side of art’ as much as deartification finds itself ‘this side of art’s own dialectic’. There is not a ‘beyond’ in sight. Rather, deartification is an assault by art in general, as part of social reality, on the singular art work, seen as an individuated protest against this social reality. The institutionalized autonomy of art in the nineteenth century that Adorno is addressing falls apart in the twentieth century, when the artistic meaning of this autonomy is detached from its economic meaning.
And precariously, autonomy lost the material power of its artistic meaning precisely where Adorno and others had, since the 1950s, been defending the modern against its decline by instituting it as modernism, demonizing its economic meaning. Whereas autonomy characterizes the modern status of art as a socially separate field of unproductive labour and aesthetic individuation, deartification, with Adorno, characterizes the mass-cultural identification of its individuations, and counter to him, the becoming-productive of artistic labour in contemporary art. In the present text, deartification is therefore not only a transitional figure that makes it possible to see the disintegration of modernity as the losing deal that Adorno recognized, but also the mechanism that opens up concrete social perspectives within art, its production and circulation, in which art achieves a kind of presentness that was still inconceivable in the modernist understanding. This is a shift that Marxist art historians such as Otto Karl Werckmeister or Peter Gorsen already registered in their discussions of Adorno’s posthumously published Aesthetic Theory in the early 1970s. In contrast to Peter Bürger’s immanent attempt to expand the ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’6 towards a ‘neo-avant-garde’, both insisted on Adorno’s insufficient historicization of the category of art itself, demanding an understanding that exceeded its identification as inherently bourgeois. Werckmeister saw a simultaneity of artistic production, distribution and reception after the Second World War, which fundmentally puts into question the relevance of any contemporary aesthetic theory in the face of contemporary art,7 and Gorsen proposed an ‘operative’ understanding of art that takes into account its material terms of production.8 Both account for the fact that, as Andrew Hemingway has put it, ‘Marxism as a totalizing theory of society necessarily throws disciplinary boundaries into question as obfuscations of bourgeois thought.’9 It necessitates a contemporary understanding of art as a sphere of (re)production, distribution and reception in which the bourgeois antinomy of art and life can no longer be pressupposed.
But for Adorno, the separation of art and life is the necessary basis of artistic autonomy, and its deartification is a two-sided perforation. On the one hand is the decline of the historical ‘self-understanding … [of art] in relation to the living contexts in which it previously had been embedded’10 – the loss of its institutionalized autonomy, obtained in modernity as a special social status, and thus also art itself as an independent, ideological figure.11 Deartification brings these two aspects together: ideology and reality, in Adorno’s words, are moving towards one another.12 What remains is a modernist autonomy of ‘pure’ art as ideology, in the middle of society, with the simultaneous loss of the special status that socially belonged to it. Deartification designates the embedding of autonomous art as an integrated social reality. In deartification, the autonomy in art is not ruled out, but it has ceased to be modern. It is, as I shall demonstrate, no longer the autonomy of art, but autonomy in art.
On the other hand, deartification in Adorno is aimed at the self-understanding ‘of alterity. Art needs something heterogeneous in order to become art.’13 Alterity, which is to say the material level of the special social status of art within the work, increasingly develops a life of its own as the world surrounding the art work becomes reorganized according to the capitalist principle of exchange.14 The heterogeneous can no longer be integrated without a trace; instead, an order is situated in the work that increasingly lies outside its late feudal means of production. Ultimately, the form of the work becomes heterogeneous in itself due to these changed elements. For ‘whatever tears down the boundary markers is motivated by historical forces that sprang into life inside the existing boundaries and then ended up overwhelming them’.15 Deartification takes art outside the work, and it is, I believe, through these heterogeneities that the contemporary art that emerged from this can be the equal of its time.
For this contemporary art, Herbert Marcuse’s dictum from 1973 (based on Adorno) that ‘art, as “ideology”, overrides the reigning ideology’ is no longer sustainable.16 The fact that ‘each artwork could be charged with false consciousness and chalked up to ideology’ is not something that emerges, for Adorno, from the artwork itself, but from its special economic status as art. For ‘in formal terms, independent of what they [that is, the works] say, they are ideology in that a priori they posit something spiritual as being independent from the conditions of its material production and therefore as being intrinsically superior and beyond the primordial guilt of the separation of spiritual and physical labour’.17 In modernism as Adorno describes it, the relationship between art and labour is a categorical one. Art’s capacities cannot be distinguished by it; on the contrary, only the rejection of general social labour as culpable makes it possible for an individual art work to have the ‘power of its internal unity’.18 Breaking through this separation out of the space of art itself, for Adorno, is a defect of the deartification of modern art, and at the same time it became an individualizing point of departure for contemporary art. In Adorno’s understanding, the end of the categorical divorce of art from quantifiable, productive physical labour does indeed mean a deartification of modernity and thus a loss of its autonomy, but at the same time it produced a new social type of art, contemporary art, that could no longer be sufficiently explained through an art-historical understanding of epochs. Consider writings that draw their understanding of art specifically from an understanding of its production, as has been done in several publications dedicated to artistic productions of the 1960s, most recently in Julia Bryan-Wilson’s Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009),19 but also Helen Molesworth’s catalogue Work Ethic (2003)20 and Justin Hoffmann’s brilliant Destruktionskunst: Der Mythos der Zerstörung in der Kunst der frühen sechziger Jahre (1995).21 The question of the (un)productivity of artistic labour turns into a characteristic of the art works and accounts for the self-understanding of the artists as producers. Here, art-historical periodization is challenged by turning from an understanding of the work to one of labour. Andrew Hemingway’s seminal account Artists on the Left22 in many ways opens up an even more fundamental a-epochal understanding, in tracing the convergence of those questions of labour and work with the origin of their possible anti-capitalist meaning: the communist movement in the United States between 1920 and 1950s. It is no coincidence, however, that these accounts of (un)productive labour in art all begin where Hemingway ends. His is a discussion of radical politics and art, whereas the others are accounts of radical politics in art. The rise of contemporary art, and thus of productive labour in the arts, coincided with the disintegration of internationalist communist politics, a correlation to which I shall return later.
Adorno’s attempt to deal with the becoming ‘contemporary’ of art in the 1960s concentrated, conversely, solely on the level of its reception. When he was claiming that ‘the most recent deartification of art covertly exploits the element of play at the cost of all others’,23 his reference point for this, as it was for Marcuse during the same period, was Friedrich Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1801), a perspective that cannot recognize any form of activity within art as labour because its rejection is precisely what constitutes this historical moment. Schiller, however, was describing late feudal relations of dependence; Adorno, as he himself writes, was describing ‘high capitalism’. What he attacks as the play of deartification is not least an actualization of the historically changing forms of labour in art. ‘A contradiction of all autonomous art is the concealment of the labour that went into it, but in high capitalism, with the complete hegemony of exchange-value and with the contradictions arising out of that hegemony, autonomous art becomes both problematic and programmatic at the same time.’ ‘The work of art’, continues Adorno in his In Search of Wagner (1952), which deals with the banishment of labour (Arbeit) from the work (Werk), ‘endorses the sentiment normally denied by ideology: labour is degrading.’24 And the fact that it does so seems incontrovertible to him. Autonomy can be formed only beyond labour; both are socially negative. And this is why he cannot recognize labour in art despite practical ideology critique, and why he classifies the appearance of any activity as an element of play, in which spiritual and physical labour are joined once again.
But what disturbs Adorno as the play of deartification and contradicts his tactical projection of autonomy as a presence of labour in the work (Arbeit im Werk) develops into scenarios of artistic disruption outside the constriction of the space of the work. Labour and work thus become terms that facilitate what Hemingway calls ‘a totalizing theory’ in that they enable an art history that identifies artistic approaches by their homology to non-artistic forms of labour and work. This is because artistic forms of labour begin beyond modernist forms of compositional work and are orientated to the international forms of industrial mass culture. In 1952 the Independent Group (IG) was established in London. Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Reyner Banham, Alison and Peter Smithson, Nigel Henderson, Toni del Renzio and others examined the primacy of everyday culture, which had become obvious from American magazines and the adverts in them, and its priority over aesthetic construction, something that, in the ruins of Europe, could no longer be denied. They suspended the work, or rather they inserted it into exhibitions, lectures and series, where their artistic and scholarly labour extended over photography, architecture, painting, collage and art history, at the same time as they incorporated their mass-cultural repetitions and extrapolations.25
The developments by Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg or Jim Dine from painting to a practice of happenings and performance in the second half of the 1950s in New York, like many other artistic expansions of the working field at this time, could be discussed from a similar perspective. These artists acted out ordinary events, whether banal, as in Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1958), or traumatic, as in Oldenburg’s Snapshots from the City (1960). They acted out events with artistic means, making their production public, codifying it rather than segregating it. This can be seen precisely in relation to the expansive changes in Fordist labour rules occurring at the same time due to the increasing importance of the service sector,26 which caused a shift in how work was understood both inside and outside art. With the professionalization of previously unpaid, private or individually remunerated activities – especially in the areas of health, education and production services – the postwar years saw a great change in the education of artists, the structures of supply and the means of production. Simultaneously, artists became part of the social changes outside their genre: in healthcare, finance and real estate. This situation applied in particular to the changes in forms of practice in the North American art scene, for here the economic upheavals had clearly accelerated, even in the 1950s. David Harvey, in his analysis of the introduction of ‘flexible accumulation’, has emphasized another aspect: that of, in Adorno’s words, ‘atomization’27 – that is to say, a short-lived pattern of consumer behaviour in relation to new products. Harvey, on the basis of the growth of the service sector in all areas of production, describes a shift from the production of goods to that of events.28 Even if, in my opinion, this opposition is difficult to maintain, the transition it denotes is extremely significant, especially with regard to Kaprow’s assemblages, environments and happenings, for example.29 And it is also significant because the comparison of the commodity character of the works in the sphere of distribution and their seemingly pre-capitalist existence outside exchange, which would enjoy great popularity a decade later in conceptual art,30 is criticized here in terms of practice. The becoming-event of art is demonstrated by Kaprow, Oldenburg and others as a step into public (production) practice. Even Adorno, as cited above, reduced the reorganization of the world in advanced capitalism to the identification of its parts within exchange. He thus emphasized, not least, the Fordist separation of physical and mental labour. It is only from this hierarchization that an area of mental labour emerged that was seemingly prior to the sphere of distribution, a potentially autonomous area of activity. But with the social expansion and professionalization of the service industries, which characterized the end of the Fordist order of production, this strict separation could no longer be maintained.
For its part, the London IG turned out to be such a timely artistic response to the upheavals of its day because their common interests developed from the opposition between the American mass culture and the explosion of ordinary design that they examined and the postwar situation in Britain. Their practice found its structure in this opposition. They did not stop being artists – all of them continued to produce outside the IG – but they abstained from producing art works in their collective projects. In their exhibitions, they reconfigured the aesthetic gaze above all beyond the modern hierarchy of art and mass culture.31 Here the shift of artistic activities intersects with another tendency, which Harvey, considering the same period, traces as an updated capitalist form of labour. Fordist mass production becomes specialized in drastically expanded but reduced numbers of segments of goods produced. In art, even with the IG, and subsequently in the product range of Pop art, one can observe a drastic expansion of commodity segments. But here, this means an absolute increase in the quantity of production, precisely because the artistic had previously been diametrically opposed to Fordist production norms (individuated single pieces as opposed to standardized mass commodities). Artistic and other forms of labour converged increasingly after the Second World War, just as artistic and other forms of commodities had.
From Adorno’s perspective, as already mentioned, the irreconcilable opposition between industrial and artistic production characterized the centrality of the ideological position of modern art itself, its autonomy as a socially given exclusion from a process in which, as Hans-Georg Bensch has summarized, the ‘goal of production is not to sustain people. But the goal of production is to sustain capital, which … can only be sustained through accretion.’32 The position of modern art as a sphere of production is systematically irrelevant to capital, for ‘luxury goods’, as Frank Kuhne adds, ‘are meant for individual consumption, without, as is the case of food, being necessary to reproduce the use value of the commodity of labour. The production of luxury is thus opposed to the understanding of capital as an end in itself.’33 Quite in keeping with Adorno, the autonomy of art, viewed socially, is a continuing negative process of unproductive labour, which is, however, dissolved from its boundaries by the changes outlined here, involving the disintegration of Fordism up to the point of flexible accumulation. Through the sustained intensification of the division of labour and the progressive integration of service labour in the luxury sector as well as in the mass sector, art production too can no longer strictly be distinguished from the general goal of capital. Art begins ‘to produce for production’s sake’,34 becoming a productive part of capitalist postwar society. Not because it now produced consumer goods – although this also developed into an area of its own within the upper segments of the gallery market, where artists create lamps, architecture, chairs, tables and rugs as a luxury sideline to their art production, which are then distributed in series by galleries – but because their ways and types of production, their forms of distribution and margins of productivity, become increasingly tightly interwoven with the adjacent supply industry. An industry arises.
This also concerns the status of art as an ideological figure, for ‘one can speak of ideology’, as Adorno writes in 1954, ‘in a meaningful way only to the extent that something spiritual emerges from the social process as something independent, substantial, and with its own proper claims’.35 In a devastated modernity, forms of permeability appear, which Louis Althusser summarized eleven years later in the productive supposition that ‘men live their actions, usually attributed to freedom of “consciousness” by the classical tradition, in ideology, by and through ideology; in short, that the “lived” relation between men and the world, including History … is ideology itself’.36 The reverse projection onto art as counter-ideological ideology, which Adorno strategically confronted with its present, is in part itself a past ideological phenomenon of a no longer current division of the various social areas of production from one another. Only in the modernist vision of things does a postmodernity take the place of modernity, whereas, for instance from structuralist perspectives such as Althusser’s, new autonomies and antagonisms can be recognized from the increased mediation of an ideological social life – autonomies and antagonisms that are built up on a present and constantly changing ideological practice, momentarily coming detached from them instead of being built up on historical independencies of social functions in relation to the concrete circumstances of living. For Adorno, what happens to autonomous modern art in deartification (its ideological role as the ideal of mental labour) became an inherent artistic process with the capitalist realization of art after the Second World War through the interconnection of society by expanding the service industry (as autonomization of the ideology of a solely mental labour). This reversal in the meaning of modernity on the one hand and the emergence of the contemporary (art) on the other can be briefly situated, with the full manifestation of these tendencies in the late 1960s and 1970s, in the connection of two fundamental economic and social changes in perspective, two political battles over autonomy. I shall outline them here in conclusion:
1. The transition from Fordism to so-called post-Fordism – or to use Harvey’s words, ‘flexible accumulation’, as he described it in the United States of the late 1980s – in the period starting around 1950 was described by theorists of ‘Workerism’ (operaismo) in Italy during the 1960s and early 1970s, such as Raniero Panzieri or Mario Tronti, from a concrete political practice. One could say that where Hemingway outlined the collapse of the Russia-orientated communist party model by way of the necessarily disaligned practice of its affiliated artists, Workerism began to offer a model in which this form of organization was rethought from the actual conditions of labour at the time. The altered significance of service labour in capitalist production thus also plays a central role in Workerist theory, which first appeared publicly in Antonio Negri’s ‘Proletarians and the State’ (1976)37 in the figure of the ‘socialized worker’ and of organizing outside the factory.38 In contrast to Harvey, the emphasis here is not so much on the changed constitution of capital, but rather on the changed role of labour and labourers. At the end of the 1960s, Tronti argued that the working class needed to liberate itself from its status as wage labourers in order to become politically autonomous, and thus to be more than a mere economic category. ‘He emphasizes their “autonomy” and “subjectivity” to the point of defining them as the propulsive element in capitalist development, and capital as a function of the working class.’39 In Tronti’s words: ‘Distribution, exchange, consumption must be seen from the standpoint of production.’40 The starting point of subjectification thus remains the factory, but now as the image of total capitalist organization, not merely as a geographical site. Autonomy in the workers’ struggle is socially repositioned, within and outside the walls of the factory: ‘the working class must see itself materially as part of capital’.41
Tronti’s discussion of political autonomy within the framework of a disintegrating modernist concept of capitalist antagonism is interesting here primarily because autonomy is not defined as a development beyond the mere economic function of its own social role, but as a development from this.42 This concept of autonomy materializes the fulfilment of a Fordist role against the goal immanent to its system, for instance in the claims and battles about a feminist art (history) in 1970s Germany, in which there was a struggle for the autonomy of a ‘feminine aesthetic’ (Silvia Bovenschen), not least precisely because this could not be aligned with the modernist understanding of autonomy in art and thus set up an explosion within the modernist view of autonomy. The ideological concept of modern autonomy in art functions here as an authoritarian citation, the authority of which is updated through an artistic practice that is turned against it. In ‘Workerism’, Tronti introduced a realization of the social meaning of autonomy, in which the modernist belief in an autonomy from economic production came to be seen as a mere projection that was immanent to capital. What distinguishes both Althusser’s structuralist theories and Tronti’s workerist theories of the 1960s and 1970s, in comparison to many of the ideas that follow them and take up the same object, is their insistence on the ongoing materiality of modern categories in their present, their effectiveness far beyond their own timeliness. In many respects, the public life of art remains modernist to this day, but the possible strategies for undermining modernist hierarchies and ideological figures dramatically changed with the paradigm of the fundamental dehierarchization of ‘distribution, exchange, consumption’. Speaking with Tronti, one could say that artists have to be liberated from their merely economic role (that of unproductive and immeasurable labour) in order to be able to become politically autonomous (from a self-conception as service providers).
2. Feminist efforts in the same period – as advocated, for example, by participants in the Wages for Housework campaign, founded in 1972 by Selma James with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici and others – were aimed at exactly this point. These theorists, with Marxist and, in the case of Dalla Costa and Federici, Workerist backgrounds, emphasize the role of reproductive labour, already undermined in the context of Fordism, in the constitution of capital, demanding that it be incorporated into the analysis and political confrontation of the capitalist present. What is deemed to be ‘unproductive’ labour should be made visible as in fact productive, and an end should be put to its privatization. If it was not entirely unjustifiable that art production fell out of the Marxist analysis of capital in modern times because its order of production does not stand in any systematic connection to that of the value its generates, this was not so easy to claim for reproductive labour. As Dalla Costa argued in 1971, the contrary is the case; the unpaid labour of reproduction, mostly performed by women, produces exactly that commodity on which the production of all other commodities is dependent: ‘the workforce’.43 But the labour of women, seen as unpaid and therefore socially as unproductive, ‘appears to be a personal service outside of capital’.44 Also the ‘Politicization of Private Life’,45 which Helke Sander called for in 1968 at the Socialist German Student Union, marks exactly this point as the basis of a newly modified definition of autonomy against capital, where capital’s innermost driving principle, ‘to produce for production’s sake’, its advanced, expanded reproduction, finally materializes. Making unproductive labour public as a service to capital encounters the residues of modern societies that still exist in the present, here those of women’s housework, by becoming autonomized, in Tronti’s sense, against the system of capitalist reproduction instead of being identified as part of the business of the capitalist present.
What artistic production shares with reproductive labour – aside from the fact that both are stigmatized as unproductive in the modern image of society – is, on the one hand, the myth of their immeasurability in the Fordist schema; and, on the other, their capitalization as a service arm over the course of the increasing flexibility of accumulation after the Second World War. Both areas of production were characterized in the Fordist schema of capital by their exclusion from direct industrialization, by the advanced archaism of their labouring means, and by the limitation of their social existence to public forms of representation based on negating the work carried out in them. But where the projection onto art was that onto a seemingly purely mental labour, the epitome of disembodied autonomy, reproductive labour was reduced to the stereotype of an ostensibly merely physical effort, the essence of bodily heteronomy. The feminist battle that continues to this day over establishing autonomy from the perspective of reproduction within capital is therefore, in my view, seminal for an artistic redefinition of what could be designated as autonomies in art today. This is reflected not only in those works of the 1960s and 1970s that explicitly used these relations as the starting point of their productions, works for example by Margaret Harrison, Mary Kelly, Helke Sander or Mierle Laderman Ukeles. There has also been a return to making the private ‘public’ and visible in current artistic efforts, which represents a breaking down of the boundaries of one’s own existence within globalized capital in aesthetic reconstructions, and does not allow for any strict separation of work (artistically individualized production) and life (capitalistically individualized reproduction).
The question of how much an artistic practice, which in a certain sense autonomizes phenomena that are otherwise socialized, can be made more timely could be discussed in relation to the works and methods of artists such as Discoteca Flaming Star, Emma Hedditch, Karolin Meunier, Ulrike Müller, Anja Kirschner and David Panos, Johannes Paul Raether and Ian White, to name but a few. A more thorough answer to this question, however, remains to be developed. For against the backdrop of a generative understanding of ideology critique, autonomy and reproduction, this effort would be less concerned with a continued self-reflection of artistic orders of production, distribution and consumption than with their homologies with other social sites, phenomena and narratives, in relation to which it would be necessary to register one’s own ideological role as much as its oppositional autonomization. Again, this leads back to the need for, in Hemingway’s words, a ‘totalizing theory of society’ in which art history marks one specific thread, one that, since the rise of contemporary art, has been forced even more to help shape an understanding of artistic autonomy as a process of autonomization that confronts modernist nostalgias and enables a solidly united understanding and possibly an organization of contemporary (artistic) labour.
An earlier version of this text (translated by Daniel Hendrickson) appears in Eva Birkenstock, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Jens Kastner, Ruth Sonderegger (eds.), Kunst und Ideologiekritik nach 1989 (Kunsthaus Bregenz: Bregenz, 2013).
1 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1998), p. 182.
2 Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, originally published in 1970, is a posthumous collection of systematic fragments on a critical theory of aesthetics. Adorno himself had planned for the book to be completed in the same year.
3 The English translations of Adorno’s texts tend to translate the term with ‘deaesthetization’, which I think entails a misunderstanding, as it wrongly identifies art with aesthetics. As the difference between art as a practice of manual as much as of intellectual labour and aesthetics as its philosophical dignification lies at the core of my attempt to actualize Adorno’s idiosyncratic term, I will translate Entkunstung as ‘deartification’ in this text.
4 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 16.
5 Ibid., p. 79.
6 Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1974); Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1984).
7 Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘Das Kunstwerk als Negation: Zur geschichtlichen Bestimmung der Kunsthteorie Theodor W. Adornos’, in Ende der Ästhetik: Essays über Adorno, Bloch, Das gelbe Unterseeboot und Der eindimensionale Mensch (Fischer: Frankfurt am Main, 1971).
8 Peter Gorsen, ‘Transformierte Alltäglichkeit oder Transzendenz der Kunst?’, in Peter Brückner, Gisela Dischner, Peter Gorsen, Alfred Krovoza, Gabriele Ricke, Alfred Sohn-Rethel (eds.), Das Unvermögen der Realität: Beiträge zu einer anderen materialistischen Ästhetik (Wagenbach: Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, 1974).
9 Introduction to Andrew Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left (Pluto Press: London, 2006), p. 3.
10 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Theorie der Halbbildung’, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8: Soziologische Schriften I (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1997), p. 97. Adorno writes about education here, but in a structure that can be extended to art and philosophy, as Adorno himself argues; see p. 112f.
11 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Contribution to the Theory of Ideology’, in Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (ed.), Aspects of Sociology (Heinemann: London, 1973), p. 189.
12 Ibid., p. 193.
13 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Art and the Arts’, in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2003), p. 375.
14 Adorno’s critique of capitalism as a social form of reproduction is essentially based on a critique of exchange made absolute. A problem that I will return to in the next part of this text.
15 Adorno, ‘Art and the Arts’, op. cit., p. 370.
16 Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Beacon Press: Boston, 1972); see Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 232ff.
17 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 227.
18 Ibid., p. 77.
19 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2009).
20 Helen Molesworth (ed.), Work Ethics (Baltimore Museum of Art: Baltimore, 2003).
21 Justin Hoffmann, Destruktionskunst: Der Mythos der Zerstörung in der Kunst der frühen sechziger Jahre (Silke Schreiber: Munich, 1995).
22 Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement,1926–1956 (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2002).
23 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 317.
24 Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner (Verso: London, 2005), p. 72.
25 See Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–1959 (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1995).
26 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Blackwell: Cambridge, 1990), pp. 152–3, 156–7.
27 See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Schöne Stellen’, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 18: Musikalische Schriften IV (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1997), p. 695.
28 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, op. cit., p. 157.
29 See Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1966).
30 See Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Praeger: New York 1973, ‘Escape Attempts’, p. viiff, and ‘Postface’, p. 263ff.
31 See Thomas Schregenberger and Claude Lichtenstein (eds.), As Found: The Discovery of The Ordinary (Lars Müller: Zurich, 2001).
32 Hans-Georg Bensch, ‘Zum “Automatsichen Subjekt”’, <http://www.trend.infopartisan.net/trd0705/t180705.html>, accessed 27 September 2013.
33 Frank Kuhne, ‘Marx’ Ideologiebegriff im Kapital’, in Hans-Georg Bensch and Frank Kuhne (eds.), Das Automatische Subjekt bei Marx (Zu Klampen: Lüneberg, 1998), p. 85.
34 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867) (International Publishers: New York, 1967), p. 592.
35 Adorno, ‘Contributions to the Theory of Ideology’, op. cit., p. 199.
36 Louis Althusser, For Marx (Verso: London, 2005), p. 233.
37 An English translation appears in Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy (Verso: London, 2005).
38 See Dario Gentili, ‘The Autonomy of the Political in the Italian Tradition (Tronti, Negri, Cacciari)’, in Nathaniel Boyd, Michele Filippini and Luisa Lorenza Corna (eds.), The Autonomy of the Political: Concept, Theory, Form (Jan van Eyck Academie: Maastricht, 2012), p. 12.
39 Gisela Bock, ‘Zur deutschen Ausgabe’, in Mario Tronti, Extremismus und Reformismus (Merve: Berlin, 1971), p. 10.
40 Mario Tronti, ‘La fabbrica e la società’, Quaderni Rossi, no. 2 (1962). No English translation has yet been published. German translation in Mario Tronti, Arbeiter und Kapital (Verlag Neue Kritik: Frankfurt am Main, 1974), pp. 17–40. A French translation also exists: <http://multitudes.samizdat.net/L-usine-et-la-societe>, accessed 27 September 2013.
41 Tronti, Arbeiter und Kapital, op. cit.
42 Post-Workerist theories have seen the changes in concrete working conditions since the 1970s in an essentially more contemporary way, even if their optimistic outlooks on new classes, new movements and new forms of labour are faced with economic, social and cultural hegemonies that effectively reinitiate social structures that continue to be built up on the basis of modernist models of society. See Thomas Atzert (ed.), Toni Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno: Umherschweifende Produzenten (ID Verlag: Berlin, 1998).
43 <http://libcom.org/library/power-women-subversion-community-della-costa-selma-james>, accessed 27 September 2013.
44 Ibid.
45 <http://www.1000dokumente.de/pdf/dok_0022_san_de.pdf>, accessed 27 September 2013.