Robert Kaufman
In 1976 Fredric Jameson published an ear‐opening essay whose apparently modest title, “Criticism in History,” turned out to speak volumes about Marxian engagements with literature. What the title—what the essay as a whole—helped re‐articulate as an again urgent issue had in truth always been a charged question for Marxian literary and critical theory, though the question’s problematic character had too often been muted or magically transformed into the certainties propounded by various orthodoxies, dialectical or otherwise. Jameson’s essay in effect asked how a philosophy, methodology, and sociopolitical orientation known for stressing the historically determining character of the mode of economic production—meaning, in modernity, capitalism in its various stages of development—might best approach matters of subjective, creative human agency and imagination like…well, like artistic‐aesthetic activity.
Recognized after his path breaking books Marxism and Form (1971) and The Prison House of Language (1972) as an important new figure in Marxian literary criticism and cultural analysis, and soon to be regarded internationally as one of the most influential of living Marxian thinkers about literature and film (and their relations to aesthetics, critical theory, and the sociopolitical), Jameson had publicly presented a version of “Criticism in History” on an auspicious occasion, the Modern Language Association’s first Forum on “Marxist Perspectives in Literary Scholarship and Teaching.” The Forum took place in 1972, at the onset of the 1972–74 moment that Jameson would later pinpoint, ironically enough, as the 1960s’ political curtain‐call. This terminus, for Jameson as for many other Left observers, was precipitated by profound transformations in the global structure of an international capitalism which had proved itself adept at outflanking, absorbing, or brutally suppressing insurgent socialist, anti‐imperialist, and allied oppositional advances of the 1960s and early 1970s (Jameson 1984: 205). As it happened, the complete, final text of “Criticism in History” subsequently appeared in the signal collection Weapons of Criticism: Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition (1976). Published by the iconic Ramparts Press,1 Weapons of Criticism—its very title resurrecting one of Marx’s great, tensile aphorisms about the initially fragile yet potentially powerful character of critical thought2—arrived at an hour that seemed to call not only for historical and sociopolitical reassessments, but for taking stock of emergent literary and cultural states of affairs. The need for historical reassessment that appeared to prompt the contributors to Weapons of Criticism no doubt included the waning of the 1960s’ levels of mass activism; the end of the war in Vietnam; and the progress of anti‐imperialist movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, even as global capital aimed cannily to integrate them and allied “countercultural” protest orientations into its own image. It was likewise motivated by a domestic U.S. politics that found progressives still unsure about how to respond to Nixon’s successful 1968 “Southern Strategy,” and wondering as well about the degree and direction of fallout from the Watergate affair. These and related questions were met with an empowered sense that the U.S. might now be entering the second decade of a post‐McCarthyite era that would allow for a renewal of Marxian discourse in the public and academic spheres.
It would be worthwhile telling a lengthier story about Weapons of Criticism, whose contributors thoughtfully canvassed important aspects of Marxian political commitment and literary analysis. They queried how and why powerful works from various national literatures generated insights crucial to Marxian critique, which, in the mid‐1970s in North America, was not generally thought an academically acceptable, much less a fashionable, mode of criticism. And they imagined how to coordinate traditional Marxism’s historical‐materialist emphases on class and modes of production with work on imperialism, feminism, and the liberation movements of peoples of color. But what made “Criticism in History” stand out within a fine cohort of essays was the acuity with which Jameson captured art’s unique ability to illuminate situation—our historically given socioeconomic, political, and cultural conditions—in a manner making those conditions take shape, come alive, capable of being intellectually and affectively grasped (Jameson 1976: 119). Jameson deftly, though briskly, limned some of the modes in which imaginative literature affords access to areas of historical experience and meaning that would otherwise go missing. But his essay’s real concern was literary criticism’s role in enunciating, conceptually, just how literary form indeed makes available, embodies, and keeps alive—in the as‐if experience presented through fiction, mimetic illusion, gesture, and so forth—the “bones and marrow” of ongoing sociohistorical content or significance (Jameson 1976: 136).
All this in many respects restated canonical literary‐critical and philosophical notions, since Aristotle at least, concerning what the artwork’s aesthetic form—with all its subjective entailments— can contribute to genuine knowledge. Restated too was a familiar idea about the task of criticism: that it involves—in addition to work with the traditional themes, materials, and procedures of poetics and aesthetics—the attempt to engage, understand, and describe the relations between the subjective knowledge gleaned from artistic form and the knowledge derived from more “objective” sources. (As might be expected, for Marxism, that more objective knowledge was based in the facts, dynamics, and tensions of socioeconomic, political, and cultural history.) The overlap with long‐standing critical approaches was of a piece with Jameson’s insistence throughout his career that Marx himself and the richest Marxian criticism tended to value, build upon, and extend, rather than reject, insightful non‐Marxian (certainly including “bourgeois”) modes of literary and aesthetic criticism.
In fact, the very category of situation that Jameson’s essay raised to the second power—from its importance for understanding literature’s historical dynamics, to its foundationality for understanding criticism and critical theory themselves—came from an initially non‐Marxian source once so taken for granted that Jameson could invoke and adapt without ever bothering to explicitly cite it. That source was Jean‐Paul Sartre’s enormously influential Being and Nothingness (1943), a phenomenological meditation that became one of the touchstone texts of post‐World‐War‐II existentialism. Preserving and intensifying Sartre’s phenomenological view that human beings are generally confronted with historical, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural conditions that they themselves had very little say in choosing, Jameson implicitly affirms the early Sartre’s phenomenological (and the later Sartre’s more Marxian‐inflected) view that human beings also have the capacity to be in excess of their given situations. So what could be problematic, not to say controversial, about such a view?
Significantly, the phenomenological tradition that underwrites Sartre’s existentialist as well as his later Marxian thought—and that perforce informs the Sartrean and heterodox strains in Jameson’s work—has roots in idealist philosophy and in what many of idealism’s critics take to be its most egregiously anti‐materialist, even “escapist” sector: aesthetics. With the advent of “really existing” socialist regimes (first in the Soviet Union, and later, in Soviet‐established or supported governments in Eastern and Central Europe, in China, and often in formerly colonized or “Third World” countries), orthodox Marxist doctrine generally held that Marxism was a resolutely “materialist” (i.e., anti‐idealist), philosophy and practice. Most of these “official” Marxisms and even many heterodox variants programmatically described philosophical idealism as inherently “bourgeois.” Focusing on Marx and Engels’s insistence that the foundations of social life were economic (“infrastructural”) in character, and that aesthetic, cultural, and political (“superstructural”) phenomena merely “reflected” the material base of economic power and class relations, many influential Marxist critics and philosophers aimed to show that all aspects of art and its reception were determined by their relation to the economic base. From this perspective, “Marxian aesthetics” was an oxymoronically named field of inquiry.
Perhaps first in the ranks of influential twentieth‐century proponents of this view was the Russian Marxist philosopher, political theorist, and literary critic Georgi Plekhanov. Plekhanov became known for his self‐denominated “Marxist materialism,” which he thought inseparable from staunch anti‐idealism. Despite his own decisive break with Lenin and the Bolshevik faction within Russian Marxism, Plekhanov’s philosophical and literary‐critical views came to be adopted in the Soviet Union, and then in the socialist world more broadly, as if they accurately presented the views of Marx and Engels. In Catherine Flynn’s apt characterization of the Plekhanov view—later also identified with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s powerful commissar of culture, Andrei Zhdanov—art and culture were in practice “reduce[d] to a mere reflex of … economic context” and interpretively handled via an allegedly objectivist “scientific encyclopedism” that yielded “a didactic, positivist, and even fatalistic vision of culture in lockstep with the forces of production” (Flynn 2013: 122).
Elsewhere I’ve tried at length to show how skewed these standard views of Marx and Engels actually are, and that Marx and Engels’s stance is far more accurately characterized as a sustained critique of the ideological opposition between “idealism” and “materialism.” In fact, what Marx and Engels contributed to was the notion of determination, not so much by “matter” as by an ensemble of historical forces, with the mode of economic production—feudalism, capitalism, and so on—generally playing a major or predominant role in shaping social conditions. They argued as well that the heightened emphasis on “the economic base” stemmed largely from an urgently felt need to correct their own liberal and Left contemporaries’ tendencies to discount the mode of production’s importance, in an especially explosive moment within capitalism’s international development. And indeed, Marx and Engels deemed not only ideas and philosophical thought more broadly, but art and aesthetic experience in particular, to be crucial for our own ability to grasp and then to respond to sociopolitical and historical reality (Kaufman 2000; 2018).
Much twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century Marxian and Marx‐influenced literary criticism of consequence—Left criticism that has genuinely helped illuminate aspects of literary and cultural works, and the social histories that shape and are in part shaped by them—has contributed to this dialectical or stereoscopic viewpoint. The most perspicacious Marxian criticism underlines its commitment to the fundamental importance of capitalism for the meanings and values of modern artworks and aesthetic experience; at the same time, it contends that literary, aesthetic, and cultural works and experience are not one‐sidedly determined by, and thus do not merely passively reflect, socioeconomic and political dispensations. Rather, literary and other artworks help to construct those dispensations, and the works themselves frequently reveal aspects of social and political reality that would otherwise remain inchoate. For all the real differences among them, this perspective is in significant part shared by influential critics whose work partakes of Marxian ideas and methodologies, from Georg Lukács to Erich Auerbach, Ernst Bloch, and the Frankfurt School critics Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Leo Löwenthal, and Herbert Marcuse; C. L. R. James, Annette Rubinstein, Sidney Finkelstein, Raymond Williams, and William Empson; and more recently, critics like Gayatri Spivak and Catherine Gallagher—to list only a few of those whose criticism demonstrates literature’s ability to make visible or audible crucial aspects of sociopolitical and historical reality that sociology, political science, economics, or historiography themselves might not reach.
Focusing on three canonical figures from the modernist and early postmodernist period—Lukács, Benjamin, and Adorno—C. D. Blanton reminds us that such Marxian criticism sought to elaborate the ways that meaningful artworks salutarily crystallize modernity’s tendencies toward “reification.” (Reification is the dynamic by which particular processes and experiences of daily life—and history—are abstracted into an ideological regime of ruling concepts that seem to define reality, yet appear removed from time and change.) In making such problems available to our literary or aesthetic experience, the art makes palpable, in a manner at once intellectual and affective, these dynamics of reification, abstraction, hyper‐conceptualization, and standardization. This process of coming to awareness of reification is decisive. It confirms that artworks can make us critically aware of our capacities to reach intellectually and affectively beyond the authorized concepts of a reified capitalist modernity (Blanton 2016: 802–3, 816–17).
Countless journal and anthology essays have for decades sketched the ways various modes of criticism have both developed and critiqued aspects of the Marxian legacy from the perspectives of altered notions of cultural and economic history, and from standpoints of race, gender, and colonial or postcolonial analysis. Rather than rehearse once more these important lines of critical development, it might be more useful here to hone in on what in Marx’s own work has been seen as “deterministic.” This involves looking closely at how Marx emphasizes capitalism’s fundamental importance for modern social relations and human experience, yet also at his championing of a human capacity in our aesthetic experience of works of art and culture that underwrites an ability to comprehend, critique, and transform capitalism. In that latter, crucial sense, capitalism is neither intellectually nor socio‐politically determining of what we can make of our inherited conditions.
The key textual moment we’ll consider is Marx’s anatomizing of the commodity in his most mature work on the subject, Das Kapital. Das Kapital develops concepts of critique and construction that seek to maintain urgent contact with the social history and contemporary reality of labor and its transmutation into the concept and practice of exchange or commodity value. But Das Kapital also wishes to avoid subsuming all critical thought—including art and literature—under exchange‐commodity value. Unlike later orthodox versions of Marxism (perhaps especially those having affinities with Leninism, and what Adorno and others within Marxism came to criticize as “productionism”), Marx does not define the commodity or exchange‐value as being based solely on labor or labor‐time.
The crux lies in Das Kapital’s historical critique of exchange value and commodity form, located above all in its chapter‐section “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” Significantly, Das Kapital initially makes the Enlightenment (and thus presumably “bourgeois”) economist David Ricardo the virtual hero of its story, affirming the immensely progressive character of Ricardo’s demonstration that what defines the commodity is not its use value but its production for and as exchange value. This is based not on its particularity and inextricable relation to specific use, but on a universalized conceptual abstraction of labor time, with value derived vis‐à‐vis an abstraction of the labor‐time necessary for each product produced over against all other products produced within the market. Marx then steps past Ricardo, and past what had already begun to identify itself as Left‐Ricardian, labor‐theory‐of‐value socialism. Marx notes that the commodity’s value does not derive only from the abstraction of labor time that is the concept and practice of exchange‐value. The commodity’s value also—crucially—stems from capital’s own historical, and by now socially contestable, judgment that this conceptual abstraction of labor time must or should be, as if by natural or scientific necessity, the determining basis for valuation. Marx opposes this allegedly justified determinism to a reflective, genuinely democratic judgment‐process capable of regarding the conceptual abstraction of labor time as a significant, but not necessarily the ruling or determining, basis for valuation. Thus valuation processes would be free to consider and assess labor time, without being determined by it. A truly democratic, social process of reflective judgment would be free to transcend—to not be determined by—the concept and practice of labor time/exchange‐value. And this would hold whether the issue involved capitalists’ nefarious erasures of actual labor‐time from their calculations of workers’ wages; or, on the other hand, examples of labor and labor‐time being hailed by a laborite Left as the truly creative, truly determined value that will come into its own once “emancipated” (Marx 1965 [1867]: 81–6).
Marx shows that this ability to transcend the conceptual abstraction of labor time as ultimate determinant of value would break open—initially, via aesthetic judgment!—exactly what aesthetic judgment by definition (since Kant at least) offers the form or semblance but not the substance of: an already‐extant, determined, determining concept. In this breaking open, stretching past, or sidestepping of extant, substantive‐objective conceptual determination, aesthetic quasi‐conceptuality lets subjects feel/experience their play with the semblance of conceptual form, and with already‐existing conceptual materials, as if this play already were the making of a newly substantive‐determinative‐objective conceptuality, though a conceptuality somehow freely chosen rather than determinatively, coercively compelled by logic or by existing social power. Aesthetic judgment thus begins to enact, in form that is our play in and with semblance itself, the experience and process of forming, making, or constructing something not conceptually predetermined. Marx’s historical critique of Ricardo stresses ultimately that it had been, has been, and continues decisively to be capital’s decision—not labor’s—to make the conceptual abstraction of labor‐time the given basis, limit, or horizon of socioeconomic value. In doing so, capital ideologically proclaims the concept of exchange value (along with exchange value’s embodiment in commodity form, and its enactment in mechanical reproduction) to be a matter of natural or scientific, determinate judgment. Contesting such pronouncements, Marx reiterates, in a quite Kantian schema, the need to break open this seemingly already conceptualized question of value when he insists that socioeconomic valuation be subject to ongoing, democratized judgment (that it be subject not to predetermined but to “reflective,” that is, “aesthetic,” judgment). From The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) through Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) and beyond, Marx will remain adamant that labor socialism’s goal of simply expropriating, nationalizing, or “socializing” exchange value and commodity production is woefully inadequate to labor’s own most pressing sociocultural, let alone socioeconomic, needs, starting quite formally with labor’s need to make, and then to realize, valuations arrived at through radically democratic reflective judgments, rather than judgments conceptually predetermined and imposed from above.
Yet the bitterest historical irony of Das Kapital’s section on “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” is that its most urgent, worried‐over message has been precisely the one most often ignored by its intended target: the committed Left. As I have suggested, the chapter’s analysis of commodity fetishism critiques not only bourgeois political economy, but likewise—especially in the last third or so of the chapter—nascent socialist and communist attempts to correct intellectually and politically those bourgeois claims that “use” is still a significant component of commodity value. Marx devastatingly suggests that the most dangerous version or level of the fetishization of the commodity—by seeing comparative labor‐time as the entire basis of socioeconomic value—arises from the Left’s own well‐intentioned championing of an “emancipated” labor that could finally claim to represent its own true value. For while comparative labor‐time may in some cases be the desired (by a democratic majority of society) measure of value, it nonetheless, even when “owned” by the working class, is still not itself entirely the real source of value. Valuation ultimately, Marx stresses throughout the chapter, involves a “total product,” a “social product” synonymous not only with labor and what labor makes but also with all other activities that constitute an economy. These include the entire range of implemented judgments about what socioeconomic valuation is and ought to be, about the “character” we “stamp” objects with in a manner akin to our implementation of value judgments via our “social” product of “language” (Marx 1965 [1867]: 83, 79). Left theory and practice should, Marx argues, historicize rather than celebrate labor as the basis for the concept of exchange value, by grasping how labor‐time came to be, in and for capitalist development, an emancipatory standard. It emancipated productive capacity by making possible the rationalization of the calculations concerning production just as, not coincidentally, technological capacities for advancing production were likewise increasing exponentially.
Hence the final pages of Das Kapital’s commodity‐fetishism chapter teach that leftist attempts by to trumpet “labor” as “its own true value,” although better in practice and opposite in intent to capital’s fables about use‐value, are downright misguided. Instead of what will later become with Brecht and Sartre a socialist vocabulary of revamped “use,” Marx in effect demands that the Left confront the fact that what is needed is the painstaking but transformative construction of the concepts and practices that would constitute a critical‐reflective, democratic, judgment value. These judgments and valuations would be, in the favorite word of the chapter’s final pages, “free.” Free of what? Not, in some utopian, magical manner, free of any and all constraint, and surely not freed from their status as form; but quite simply, freed from the regressive fantasy of being able to return to the bygone era of use‐value judgment. Free too from the concept and practice that heretofore had constrained most socioeconomic valuation: labor and comparative labor‐time judgment (i.e., exchange‐value judgment, commodity‐value judgment). The most perilous commodity fetishization, Marx already worries in this celebrated chapter of Das Kapital, will be practiced by the Left, precisely in its well‐intentioned championing of a labor that will of course continue to produce tremendous wealth, but which need not be the determining standard for the innumerable ways a democratic majority or its representatives might judge how such wealth should be valued.
Humming just beneath this analysis is something about exchange value, commodity form, and conceptualization that might otherwise go unheard. Economic modernity until his moment, Marx argues, has largely involved the emancipation of exchange value, which has made central the socioeconomic triumph of economically rationalist, determinate conceptualization itself. For the first time in history, Marx emphasizes, it is not an unpredictable (because particular and subjective) individual use, nor an unpredictable (because powerful and arbitrary) feudal or authoritarian diktat or set of directives that determines socioeconomic value, but rather a single predetermined conceptual operation: the abstraction of labor time (predictable in its operational formula if not in the yield of its case‐by‐case data).
That historical conceptualization of the way capitalism dynamically, objectively, made valuation into first an objectivist concept and then a mechanical calculation clearly proved to hold enormously generative possibilities for socioeconomic productive capacity. But flowing from the new mode of production’s tendency, in an era of emancipatory and egalitarian discourse, greatly to expand the social character of production and the amount of goods produced while simultaneously intensifying disparities in the distribution of wealth and resources, there flows too an increasing disappearance (related to if not wholly caused by the disappearance of use as a determinant of value) of particularity. This theme, already developed by Marx and Engels, famously becomes in Benjamin and then Adorno’s writings “the crisis of experience” (see Jay 2005). Furthermore, because of what historically becomes the close if not synonymous relationship between conceptual abstraction and capitalist‐era, exchange‐value abstraction, and because language is deemed the medium for significantly communicable conceptuality, there is already in Marx and Engels the noteworthy intensification of a high romantic theme (one that is rooted deeper still in classical poetics and aesthetics): literature—above all, in its most intensely linguistic expression, lyric poetry—bears a special, radical relationship to conceptuality as such and, in modernity, to determinate conceptuality’s overarching socioeconomic identity as exchange‐value, as the commodity, and as mechanical reproduction.
Walter Benjamin will thus grasp that the French postromantic, proto‐modernist poet Charles Baudelaire, taking up the commodity and exchange value, perforce takes as his poetry’s form and subject matter modernity’s problematic apotheosis of determinate conceptuality. And on the other hand, Benjamin grasps that Baudelaire’s tortured explorations of infernal, experience‐denying modern determinism register an abiding reality: the non‐experience of human beings for whom judgment is an already conceptualized, predetermined affair external to them, one which cannot accept any version of their particularity, their subjectivity, that would imply the importance of their capacity for reflective judgment and critical agency. Adorno famously urges Benjamin to extend the analysis to consider whether, starting if not concluding with formal artistic‐aesthetic dynamics, Baudelaire’s wager—about making a significant modern lyric poetry just when the experiential preconditions for significant lyric appear to have gone missing—might itself become a critique of socioeconomic modernity’s concept of concepts, the super‐concept of exchange value. What Adorno’s and Benjamin’s celebrated exchanges will ask—and this is true with variations in other varieties of heterodox Marxian criticism, all the way through Left deconstruction and feminism—is something like the following: Wouldn’t such artistic‐aesthetic activity, of at least the form that begins, as form, to enact critique, likewise constitute, enable, or begin to enact a sensed recognition of renewed possibilities for particular, conceptually undetermined, experience and judgment?
Art or semblance, the underlying argument goes, is critical precisely in its formal character of aesthetic illusion, as opposed to unknowing aestheticist delusion. In marking itself as illusion (as the form rather than substance of conceptuality), in advertising its illusion‐character (Scheincharakter) to its audience, art signals the interaction and interdependence of, but also the difference between, itself and the world. In contrast, aestheticist delusion tends toward the collapse of the different identities, at times under the pressure of well‐intended assumptions of responsibility for sociopolitical or ethical engagement, for changing the world, and aestheticist delusion can thus contribute unwittingly toward an inability to distinguish between artwork and world. Critical aesthetic illusion pivots on a formal dynamic or dialectic of charged distance (to paraphrase Benjamin on Baudelaire): the artist’s, artwork’s, and audience’s intense engagement and correspondence with (amid an awareness of difference from) the empirical, sociohistorical and political, Real.
The audience that participates in semblance on the one hand provisionally treats the semblance, the artwork, or our aesthetic experience of it, as if it were real or had the dignity of the real. Or, what amounts to the same thing, the audience judges it as such and feels it can cognitively make such a judgment, that it can experience or know the feeling of this judging agency (via a “concept” that in fact doesn’t really yet exist, and isn’t really yet nameable, outside of aesthetic illusion‐space). On the other hand and virtually at the same moment, the audience also knows—indeed, dynamic, constructivist semblance demands that the audience know—that this still is only an as‐if, a fiction, an aesthetic illusion‐generated experience, because, despite the real subjective feelings of agency engendered, nothing, or at least nothing much, has yet been done to the empirical world. In other words, semblance‐character’s formal, proto‐critical dynamic constructs the true fiction whereby one feels the capacity for cognizing (via the aesthetically constructed form or semblance of a new concept) and then, for acting on and changing the world. At the same time, in its anti‐aestheticist role, aesthetic semblance‐character negatively reminds the subject that however he or she might feel otherwise, this capacity has yet to be practically, concretely applied and realized.
In the traditions of poetics and aesthetics that Marx and Engels, and then later Marxian oriented critics (not least, the Frankfurt School) inherit, all consequential literature does this, but lyric poetry does so with special intensity. Lyric’s special role here derives not from its being better, nobler, or more right on than other kinds of literature, art, or cultural works, but simply from the otherwise almost unremarkable fact that, as a formal matter, lyric maintains a specially intensified relationship to the medium for communicable conceptuality: language. Each art has its own unique character; lyric’s is to take language, the presumably bottom‐line medium of objectivity (in the Frankfurters’ and others’ philosophical‐theoretical vocabulary for the attempt to cognize reality, of conceptuality) and, first, to subjectivize it, affectively to stretch conceptuality’s bounds in order to make something that seems formally like a concept but which does something that ordinary objective concepts generally do not do: sing. For lyric song to reach and give pleasure to a significant audience, it must first construct its own form of objectivity or coherence, though the logic is that of art—including lyric art’s relationship to musicality—rather than strictly mathematical or conceptual logic. Each of the arts has its own mode of semblance. In lyric, semblance primarily involves making speech acts appear, feel, as if their very logic has compelled them somehow to burst—naturally, justifiably, as it were—into song. Within the moment of aesthetic experience, such song suddenly seems necessary though it had not yet felt predetermined; precisely in this bursting (in a manner inseparable from pleasure) of the formal contours of extant conceptuality, the sense of songfulness allows for a renewed sense of capacity or agency vis‐à‐vis materials that can eventually be grasped as reconceived or newly conceived sociopolitical, historical, and/or ethical content within the newly stretched conceptual form or formal capacity.
The basically shared aspects of Benjamin and Adorno’s account of the age of art’s technological reproducibility (“mechanical reproduction”) is actually already in Das Kapital, where mechanical/technological reproducibility is characterized not by the aesthetic aura (or semblance character, illusion character, appearance character [Scheincharakter]) that operates through charged distance, suspension, or negation. Rather it operates by the commodity form’s version of aura or semblance, wherein a privileged concept—the super‐concept of exchange value—pretends (by means of what Benjamin initially thinks of as phony aura [Benjamin 1999: 517]) that it isn’t an already determined and determining concept. Commodity aura hence pretends that what it presents or contains is a free particular open to the meaning of the subject’s interactions with it (rather than being predetermined in value and meaning through subsumption under the master‐concept of exchange‐value). Commodity aura is thus the photo‐negative of aesthetic aura’s (and, especially relevant to conceptuality because of its linguistic character, lyric aura’s) genuinely distanced‐yet‐charged (because generally openly acknowledged) semblance‐character. This specially charged distance of recognized or admitted aesthetic semblance is to be grasped as a critical (though only formal) negation, a provisional negation or suspension emerging from the process in which aesthetic thought‐experience phenomenally takes the form of conceptual thought—though it takes only the form, and is therefore only the semblance, of a determinant, substantive‐objective concept.
The commodity, on the other hand, attempts positively to sell or serve up its aura luminously, to package it as an allegedly genuine, free immediacy, and the commodity does not wish to admit that its seeming freedom from conceptual determination is illusory. That is, commodity form does not present aura, illusion, in or as aesthetic experience, as Benjaminian‐Baudelairean‐Brechtian charged distance. Commodity‐form does not really proffer its aura through the aesthetic or the literary as‐if, where semblance is simultaneously engaged as if it were reality, while also being marked consciously as mere aesthetic semblance, inherently distant from reality. Rather, the commodity presents aura through aestheticization (where the audience is meant to lose sight of the status or character of illusion, and thus to have the illusion meld in identity and immediacy with reality), and the commodity does this in lockstep with aestheticization’s march towards its own logical endpoint: the collapse into pure immediacy of the as‐if’s constitutive tension of charged distance, so that semblance or illusion is no longer critically, simultaneously enjoyed and also recognized as illusion but instead now produces the delusion of literal, immediate, particularized presence that supposedly never was illusion, or that has somehow left illusion, semblance, mimesis and judgment‐play behind. This collapse, of charged aesthetic illusion into delusion, leads to the concomitant collapse of the experiential preconditions for reflective judgment and critical agency. And that’s also why Das Kapital takes care to present—as will Adorno and much of the Frankfurt School—its critical judgment as still being only formal, and as necessarily and importantly so. That is, it is not really yet the “social act” that Jameson (1976: 136), following Sartre in feeling an understandable pressure to make the “critical” already produce activism or change, at times hopes to generalize criticism itself into being. But for Marx, criticism—like literature itself—sparks an animating sense of capacity, of critical agency. Literature and the other arts do this through a generative, self‐critical semblance‐ experience of illusion affording us an empowering sensing of our capacity to conceptualize, and even to make change, and then—in the negative reminder that this is as yet only semblance—spurs us, without any guarantees about it, to act in the world itself. Criticism, turning in the post‐aesthetic moment to reason and critique (rather than remaining in the semblance‐experience that had been proper to the experience of the artwork), likewise works to let us know what we might still think and do. The rest—which would be post‐literary and post‐critical—would be action.
“The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” instructively condenses and keeps reiterating, especially in its final few pages, these concerns about the ultimate and most dangerous stage of commodity fetishization—of the misrecognition of the commodity’s source‐value as labor, rather than labor and a taken‐for‐granted but actually alterable judgment that only labor should be treated as source‐value (rather than labor and other activities including judgment itself as always comprising the actual constituents of valuation). Marx presents and critiques Left fetishization of labor, and hence of the commodity, as misrecognitions of an inherently determining value in labor. Marx likewise implies his own critique—at least for the modernity now confronting him, as opposed to earlier stages of the era of industrial capitalism—of use, production, and action as being inherently valuable in a progressive or revolutionary direction. The formal, reflective critical judgment generated by art or literature is thus crucial to what value action can have.
In scathingly comedic tones, this combined worry about what will later be termed “productionism” and “actionism” informs Marx’s re‐writing, throughout the chapter, of Robinson Crusoe. “Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, 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. All the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual.” Marx goes on to stress that the valuation involved can be based on actual, observed and measured labor time, but that that would itself become part of a reflective decision to do so, made directly or indirectly by a democratic majority, which he terms “apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan.” Less comedically, the worry returns in Marx’s observation—coupled again with his recourse to own lexicon to suggest ways to socialize the process of reflective judgment—that “The life‐process of society … does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated people, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a regulated plan” (Marx 1965 [1867]: 76, 82, 84, italics added).
As throughout Marx’s writings, the paradigm in this chapter of Das Kapital for thought seeking truth, while doing so without having been determined beforehand by an extant concept, is literary/aesthetic thought. The chapter consequently ends—as Marx so often ends—with Marx assuming the voice of his hero of heroes, that most modern and German of authors, William Shakespeare. In case we’ve until now missed the point, Marx’s ends the chapter by again underscoring that emancipation of socioeconomic value begins with aesthetic—that is, reflective—judgment being made into the modality for socioeconomic valuation itself. Aesthetic judgment aims for a potential validity or non‐coercive universality that does not depend on an already‐existing, determinative concept. The Shakespeare‐text that Marx hilariously, yet also dead‐seriously reanimates on this question of seemingly “natural” (already determined) versus under‐construction modes of valuation is one whose very title signals freedom from the notion that previously existing conceptual/valuation regimes possess an already‐determined substance that ought to be determining or binding on future generations seeking to transform their own social life. Everything has been determined, or so we’ve been socially, ideologically, conceptually led to believe. In fact, those capable of critically reflecting can then themselves—trying to build on such achieved understanding in order to act individually and collectively—become capable of re‐determining everything that had seemed already to have been fixed, set, determined, titled without their say. The Shakespeare text with which Marx ends Das Kapital’s discussion of the commodity—the Shakespeare text that, in good literary and aesthetic fashion, Marx’s reading makes into his own creative act, and our reading of which can become the basis for our own sense of creative and reflective‐judgment capacity, carrying with it all the potentially transformative consequences that can come from engagement with something “merely formal,” merely literary, a mere nothing—is, of course, Much Ado About Nothing.