Taking Comfort In Society: The Sociologization of Art and its Contents

Chris Crawford

"With the continuing organization of all cultural spheres the desire grows to assign art its place in society theoretically and indeed practically; this is the aim of innumerable round table conferences and symposia. Once art has been recognized as a social fact, the sociological definition of its context considers itself superior to it and disposes over it."[1]

I.

Today the properly credentialed intellectual cannot neglect the obligation to equip herself with the right kind of social theory. Whereas formerly it might have been possible to discuss a work of art without launching straightway into considerations of the race, gender, ethnicity, class, etc., of the artist in question, or into whatever social and political issues are latent, manifest, or overlooked in the work, today such analysis would be considered incomplete if not politically irresponsible. Some artists are suspicious of the trend to reduce art to a political or identity position. They reject an interpretation of their work along these lines as the irrelevant prolixity of university professors or as a reaction formation of aesthetically inept journalists. For others, a grasp of “theory” is essential to the artist’s creativity, and aesthetic production and interpretation would be impossible without it. Artists no longer hear the voice of the father defining what is aesthetically possible. They hear the voice of the “critical” social theorist. The centrality of identity is only one manifestation of the social integration of aesthetic consciousness. Just as the historical subject of capitalist society is not humanity but capital itself, that peculiar self-moving form which is the goal of its own process, so the hazy notion of society has become the sole subject of art, a conscious and unconscious structuring element of art criticism and production. Art now addresses itself less to a concept of aesthetic experience than to the various theories that follow from the notion of society. The critique of art’s social character requires an analysis not only of the concepts of social theory, history and the philosophy of art, but also how these concepts are both mutually determining as well as conditioned by antinomies. For our purposes, we can begin with the class-based model of committed art which lost legitimacy with “Orthodox Marxism,” opening a generative vacuum between left politics and the ageing avant-garde. Artists explored art’s relation to the logic of commodity society in a more distanced, mediated way: they collected egg shells and opened storefronts. They disappeared into the ocean, wrote about their compulsion to manual labor, purchased worthless pieces of real-estate, and constructed architectural interventions. What brought these otherwise disparate practices together was a relation between art and society increasingly mediated by the concept. How it might escape its inherently ideological status, taken to mean a compromised position as a useless luxury commodity, oriented much of its post-war history: the intellectually rigorous formulations of post-minimalist and conceptual art; the myriad forms of institutional critique—not so much a movement as an emerging premise of all artistic production; the ironic anti-aesthetic modes that proliferate today, curating in the works themselves art historical references and techniques to play on the hopelessness of expression and the inescapability of society’s logic as a force far too strong for art to transcend. The aestheticization of bureaucracy, a turn to language as material, a move from a politics of class to that of institutions, the expression of non-class-based forms identity, a focus on inclusion, equality, and communalism without politics—all these strategies replaced the idea of revolution and the radical alterity of aesthetic experience with the question of how art should handle its immanence in society.

II.

Art’s integration to social theory—its “sociologization”—is typified by two major orientations. The first understands the work as an instantiation of social knowledge, and criticism’s task is to read an insight out of the dialectic of art’s content and form. The critic delineates a “perspective”—the sociologically pliant category of contemporary aesthetics that replaced style and individual expression, both residues of bourgeois subjectivity, as evaluative markers. Aesthetic experience and criticism become opinion research: the critic becomes a detective of social-realistic cues, and the aesthetic subject becomes an analytic practitioner of base-superstructure reductionism. The most important criteria for art’s evaluation is how faithfully it is able to mirror reality in all its details. But cultural criticism is not the predominant form of socially-integrated aesthetic consciousness. The more significant form treats art as a fait social and draws conclusions about its role in the maintenance of the status quo. Social content is not examined as part of the works themselves; rather, artistic production and reception are considered particular sets of activities which can be exhaustively explained by sociological analysis. Art, emerging as a subfield of the sober, distanced perspective of the academic sociologist, is conceived as a “field” next to politics, fashion, education, and mass cultural consumption. If the first form, cultural criticism, functions as a form of cultural hermeneutics, this second form smuggles in anti-aesthetic tendencies that have been operative since the beginning of modernism. Its aim is to disenchant the making and viewing of art, to uncover the forms of power inherent in these activities.

III.

Today could be considered the age of art after Bourdieu. If we for a moment return to the terminology of his initial object of critique—Kantian philosophy—we might say that the concept of society operates as a schema structuring contemporary aesthetic consciousness, not as an objective, material force in the works themselves, but as a set of categories structuring the production and reception of serious culture. Schema, as a critical concept, delineates how conformism, repetition, and standardization inform the culture industry’s pre-digested products—the dispensation of sameness as a necessary element of commensurability within the production and consumption of a culture reduced to the form of exchange. In this view, the Kantian schema of pure reason, the spontaneous activity of the mind that brings the sensuous given of intuition under the pure concepts of the understanding, does not emerge as the essential epistemology of every empirical subject. It is socially produced, manufactured through standardization within production and its corresponding modes of reception; it is a material reality, internal to the manufacture of things and the socialized human beings who experience them. Just as the repetitive use of a particular software begins to structure our habits of perception and response, so the standardized forms of cultural objects begin to place limits on what and how we are able to experience. Whereas the real, material dynamic of society once found its way transfigured into the immanence of art, today the concept of society operates as an unconscious precondition of art’s production and reception. For this reason it is crucial to determine precisely what kind of social theory is operative, as well as to keep in mind that critical concepts are not immune from the historical dynamic they attempt to grasp. In many instances, these concepts, which once captured the social dynamic taking place within products of culture, have themselves undergone reification and function like a syllabus against which one measures all experience.

IV.

Art’s sociologization can be interpreted as the elaboration of the historical legacy of the debate around so-called “committed art,” a politics of art oriented by a polemical attitude to the bourgeois’ regime of disinterested liking and its art-historical counterpart—l’art pour l’art. The social catastrophes of the last century called into question art’s naive self-regard as an autonomous realm of culture, and artists responded by aesthetically challenging art’s aesthetic character. The attributes that followed from art’s semblance, its difference from reality, were problematized in the works themselves. The beauty of unblocked expression was submitted to critical, inner-aesthetic détournement directed at what were previously considered necessary conditions of a work. The paradoxical result, though, was a heightened level of semblance. Committed art took for granted art’s capacity to develop into something more than the stamp of a social logic which heteronomously defined its position in the division of labor. The goal was to take control of art’s demythologized status and emancipate it from the social ambivalence cherished by the bourgeoisie. That art is a product of a particular society, which it could by extension express, comment upon, and critique that society’s logic in the construction of its details, that it was perhaps doing this more forcefully than ever before, all this was to be more explicitly treated and submitted to control. The desire to bring art closer to a determinate praxis could not be separated from the critique of semblance already at work in art’s autonomous development. The transformation of form from a sedimented social content to a political telos allowed artists to marshal art’s immanent social dimension, previously limited to its expressive qualities, into more pointed forms of provocation. But by transfiguring art’s implicit critique into intention, committed art combatted the fetish of art’s autonomy with a fetish of application. In the act of producing an image of something more than is the case, autonomous art was able to express an altered form of life even as it was limited to images and material from a damaged world, thus solving in itself one of the aporias of critical theory: how to articulate the correct society immanently, without removing oneself from the concrete socio-historical situation to a utopian idealism. Autonomous art was thus generative of compelling experience precisely by concealing its social truth and by taking the taboo on utopian images seriously; its socially critical eloquence was expressed obliquely—through form. With committed art, art’s spontaneity was submitted to the logic of practicability—that element of socialization autonomous art negated by its purposelessness from the perspective of society. Art’s anti-social character was thus transformed into a revolt in forms that were not always inherently antagonistic to the essence of capitalist society. Political art touched its opposite—the stock phrases and functionalism of the culture industry. Art’s hermetic alterity, its inner development, in becoming an object of experience, signaled that society was not the totality that ideological consciousness took it to be. By constituting itself as an autonomous appearance, art punctured society’s appearance as a second nature. Art’s ability to conjure something different stood as an objective restorative to our stunted capacity to do so. Art forfeited this task by taking the status quo, even if negatively, as its only object.

V.

The second form of our schema—what we might call “sociology of knowledge”-inflected art and criticism—can be read as a transformation, as a result of developing socio-historical and art historical conditions, of committed art’s repudiation of autonomy. Art’s critical interventions upon society, which never had better than dubious results, gave way to self-reflection on art’s place within society. The emergence of art’s sociologization does not have a linear history, but it can be speculatively traced both to objective, socio-historical changes as well as to theoretical developments of which Bourdieu’s anti-philosophical-aesthetic is only a part, i.e., to the predominance of social theories which delineate elements of culture as manifestations of their material base. The relation between art’s autonomy and its political efficacy proved a productive but irresolvable tension from Dada to Brecht and the Situationists. The “construction of situations in life,” as a form of cultural activity, was characterized along the lines of communization—as “inseparable from the history of the movement engaged in the realization of the totality of revolutionary possibilities contained in present society.” [2] The end of committed art’s heroic phase and its political preconditions had as much to do with the history of society as aesthetics. The belief that art could aid in the transformation of society could not survive the dissolution of the belief in revolution itself. Artists no longer felt comfortable squaring their work with narrow political aims, particularly as society seemed increasingly dominated by abstractions which function with equal necessity in both capitalist and socialist countries. Art’s orientation to society often forced it to lift contents positivistically from society’s surface, transforming social forces and conflicts into images even as society’s ultimate contradictions are antithetical to any such representation. Disillusionment, conscious or not, on the side of political action, led to perspectives removed from the goal of transforming reality through the configuration of revolutionary consciousness. In order to distance itself from a narrow comportment without abandoning its critical function altogether, art’s bearing toward society underwent a subterranean modification: socially critical art lost faith in the concept of autonomy as well as commitment. Art could unshackle false consciousness only if it punctured society’s ideological totality if it made society appear to be the historically contingent form it truly is. In this way, art believed itself to be acting on society as well as through it. Sociologized art became skeptical of the claim, implicit in both autonomous as well as committed art, that immanence could ultimately lead to critique. It was more important to demonstrate how truly trapped art and its consciousness has always been. Art was always ideology insofar as it shielded itself from the consciousness of its emergence as a form parasitic to social production, a part for which the bourgeois character could never fully forgive it. But art’s rebellion against itself only highlighted its dreamlike quality next to a reality that was becoming synonymous with the absolutism of effective procedure. When art can no longer take its claims to autonomy seriously, the best it can offer is an illumination of all the ways it is compromised by entanglements with power—tirelessly, confessionally demonstrating itself as an ultimately racist, sexist, elitist institution. Political commitment gave way to ideology critique as the most advanced political aesthetic, a move reflected in other elements of the left as it tried to comprehend the failures of the internationalist workers’ movement. The relation between the history of left politics and the avant-garde is beyond the scope of the present analysis, but art’s sociologization cannot be understood without reference to the developments of the left in Europe, the shift in centrality from Paris to New York, and an emerging skepticism that the industrial and urban proletariat could become the leaders of a new society. Both the failure of the latter and continuing crises inspired a return to questions of revolutionary consciousness and ideology, as well as more fundamental reflections on the precise logic and essence of capitalist society. And, what is most important for understanding the contemporary moment, it also provided room for a politics of social identities not based on class. Society as an immanent force to be figured within aesthetic form, while previously replaced with a political telos, was now supplanted with art’s reflection on its ideological position in society and the vectors of power and marginalization that course through its realm of disenchanted piety.

VI.

Artists and critics finally concluded that art’s most advanced progressive function was to express a social identity or illustrate the various ways it is marginalized or disrespected. Identity oriented art did not bother itself with the dilemma that the specific commodity character of artworks in their market functions precisely by delineating and marketing the artist’s identity. Unlike other commodities which have a socially general definition of value, artworks can be valued only through being tied to a personality. Art-as-personality had a venerable history in modern art—an era in which there were personalities—which identity art revived to give cultural capital a radical sheen and to re-inject it with a politics it took to be worthy of conviction, i.e., not one based on class as society’s ultimate source of misery. In fact, the problem of art’s function within capitalism as a whole, the way the experiential power and critical content of image-making is weakened as its form approximates the commodity form, was replaced with a politics that completely lost a grasp on this dialectic. Never capable of fully shaking its tendency toward politics-as-market, identity art’s ostensibly critical dimension, a dimension which still plays out in contemporary art, in no way hindered its commodification. It served, rather, as a condition of its possibility. Just as capitalism develops through the production of new needs in its subjects, so the constant production of ever new identity conflicts creates the feeling that politics presses urgently forward. Certain forms of identity politics border on functioning, against their better intentions, as neoliberal forms of anti-racism, sexism, etc. They do not call into question the fundamental parameters of capitalist society, but internalize these parameters in the way they look at identity as a form of capital--as that which is both exploited and worthy of championing. While in its heyday it could make a scandal out of a major American exhibition, today identity functions as the politics of the culture industry’s major award ceremonies. [3] Identity art always bordered on making the artist’s persona, transformed into an exemplar of a particular identity position, into a paid advertisement for that particular group’s misfortunes. Many artists in this tradition genuinely struggled with this problem, and the result was a critical art of incontrovertible quality, nuance, and humanity. Art’s ability to express the critical experience of accumulated injustice returned in identity art’s attempt to articulate the specificity of suffering in all its socio-historical and subjective dimensions. The result was an art of universal dimensions. This has given way to a politics of art based mostly in censorious rage and guilt mongering. Identity art’s ability to locate particular experiences within the unfortunate universality of suffering has given way to a politics oriented not to eradicating generalized misery, but to one that seeks to take possession of it as a tool to shame others and fortify divisions. This, too, plays a role in the maintenance of class society—the community of collective humiliation—where even social justice comes to mean its opposite: that we take possession of our misfortune, that we mystify it and make it sacred, and that we comport ourselves to it like property. The way capitalism alienates individuals from one another so that they might confront one another only through the objects they produce is internalized and replicated even in those increasingly rare points that should provide some unity to a class that can no longer experience itself as such. By introducing anti-aesthetic techniques which, in their most extreme forms, petrified artworks into death-masks of progress, modernism struggled against art’s inherently affirmative existence as a product of culture and an object of experience. For this kind of identity artist, the problem of art’s inherently affirmative existence is an overly speculative and irrelevant philosophical quandary. In its most impoverished contemporary iterations, the genuine anti-aesthetic is replaced with crass ambiguity whose crowning achievement is irony without satire, construction without expression, art without experience. [4] The identity turn is only one manifestation of art’s integration to the immanence of society. Artists who take identity to be overly narrow locate a more socially objective frame through a return to conceptualism or the production of art that borders on social research and information design, creating well designed charts of society’s negativity. The worst of this results in museum exhibits that take on the aesthetic of a TED talk. Whereas art once allied itself to the liberation of the proletariat, it has since shifted its allegiance either to identity liberalism, canonized French professors and positivist sociology.

VII.

If the transformation described above consists in a broad move from autonomy and commitment to art as ideology critique, then this transformation must be analyzed alongside theoretical changes in the understanding of ideology. One way to delineate these changes is to examine them as the artistic manifestation of critical theory’s inability to maintain its specificity against traditional, ultimately bourgeois forms of social theory. The theoretical nuances of this distinction have ramifications for the social philosophy of art. First generation critical theory’s focus on the irresolvable contradictions of the capitalist mode of production gave way to social theorizing that takes society as an object to be explained and subsumed to concepts. The sociology of knowledge, cultural criticism, and traditional theory—Scheler, Mannheim, Habermas, Luhman (after Weber) in Germany, Bourdieu, Althusser, Foucault (after Durkheim) in France—provide the broad theoretical armature of this development. Post-structuralism’s critique of metanarratives, including that of capitalism’s historically directional dynamic as a fundamental concept of social theory, further problematized the grand theory of capitalism as a contradictory, dynamic totality, and one susceptible, therefore, not to any thoroughgoing explanation, but only critique. Critical theory occupied a Socratic position with regard to other social theories. If the Platonic dialogue exposed ideology through the philosophical distinction between truth and opinion, taking its task to be the demonstration of contradiction inherent in philosophical reflection, critical theory traced these contradictions not to the inherent limitations of human beings and their faculties of knowledge, but to the material conditions of society. At the same time, it struggled, just as the Socratic dialogue struggled, to elaborate a positive account alongside its critical one. The shift to non-critical social theory implied an alteration in the theory of ideology and, by extension, art’s place within it. Traditional theory, typified by social theory as the sociology of knowledge, transformed ideology critique into an apolitical epistemological analysis between “conditions of existence and modes of thought”. [5] Ideology is transformed from socially necessary semblance, a set of inversions that, while structuring consciousness, are fundamentally a result of the objective social relations typical of societies that produce in a capitalist mode, into consciousness per se. Once the mental contents are traced to their social derivation, the analysis is complete. This is not to be confused with the Marxian critique of the fetish forms of social relations as both false and objective. Consciousness of the socio-historically determinate, abstract character of labor as the socially mediating form of wealth is blocked by the very nature of the social relations themselves. Labor’s double character as abstract and concrete is taken to be transhistorical, belonging to the ontology of laboring activity per se, rather than a peculiar result of labor when it becomes the means of social mediation. Only critique, and not any explanatory theory, can recognize the contradiction between real wealth and labor as the measure of value. The sociology of knowledge converts the politically emancipatory telos of ideology critique into an epistemology of mental contents and their derivation. It naturalizes what ideology critique is supposed to see through. Critique, which interprets social knowledge as an expression of an inherently contradictory, objective social dynamic, is replaced with an orientation to ideological struggles within and between classes. It naturalizes the division between mental and manual labor which critical theory ought to problematize. Overwhelmed by metaphysical subtleties, theory grasped for more concrete characters for its story. Bourdieu’s work must be located within this transition from critical to traditional theory, even as it is an attempt at a mediation. [6] He combines an objectivistic orientation, emphasizing external, coercive structures confronting the subject, with a Weberian conceptualization of rational practices and ideal types. Social practices constitute the objective structures of society and, on the other hand, these objective structures constitute the conscious and unconscious behavior of individuals in their habitus, a dialectic which makes the social world appear to be natural. Bourdieu’s theory of a mutually constituting dynamic has affinities with the Marxian conception of ideology, but it fundamentally misconstrues key categories of the critique of political economy. The dialectic in Marx’s work is necessary for a thoroughgoing critique of capitalism’s contradictory categorization of social relations, but in Bourdieu it is ultimately subsumed to categorizing positivism. For Bourdieu, a concept is useless if it fails to classify and explain observable phenomena and the ever changing power relations. The theory’s strength, its emphasis on empirical detail, ultimately gives way to a spatial conception of society—society as a field. The dialectical theory of social relations and their conflictual, fetish character is replaced with a spatial conceptualization, i.e., relations constituted by a struggle between different groups for the formation and protection of positions, practices and power. Bourdieu sees characters but not character masks. Thus the sociologist’s subjectivism is smuggled in—social relations operate by exclusion—even as semi-conscious forms of habitus—as opposed to being conceived as forms of abstract domination structured by commodity directed labor. It is no wonder, then, that the fundamental categories that grasp this form of abstract domination, such as value and capital, are precisely those most problematically construed in Bourdieu’s analysis. Social position is determined by different forms of “capital” possessed by members of various factions in the division of labor. Capital as symbolic indicator and social positioning, like “power” in Foucault, replaces capital as social subject and substance, self-valorizing value in motion, and the process of endless expansion that regiments all facets of life and nature in societies producing in this mode. Bourdieu, the sociologist of sociology, always reflecting on the conditions of his own field, sociologizes society.

VIII.

This has ramifications for Bourdieu’s theory of art. Culture can be synonymous with cultural capital only after the critical category of capital has lost its position in the critique of political economy and when that element of culture which is not reducible to ideology has been disregarded. In social theory, culture wants to assign everything its place, and has lost any claim to operating as a plenipotentiary of a world no longer dictated by a logic heteronomous to things in themselves. Bourdieu’s masterpiece—Distinction—is the definitive statement of sociologized art, the goal of which is to delineate the hidden determinations of aesthetic preference. By criticizing Kantian aesthetics, Bourdieu argues that the assumption that products of the spirit can be approached as autonomous and self-contained objective moments is a form of power belonging to a particular habitus. The bourgeois can take the aesthetic autonomy of taste seriously only because of the ideological blindness inherent in their class, a position whose consciousness is based on the disavowal of any awareness of the socio-historical emergence of wealth from labor and, by extension, aesthetic production from its concrete socio-historical framework. The Kantian theory of disinterested pleasure, the basis of the aesthetic’s ostensibly pure form of sensual contemplation, is, in fact, a social derivative anchored in the bourgeois’ “elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world.” [7] Culture becomes cultural capital, and the special ideological function reserved for art—that more than anything else it exists as a sanctuary of the true subject and the private individual—is traced back to objective structures of domination. But sociologized art thus restricts art’s ideological character, the way it functions in the maintenance of the status quo, to the sphere of reception. This is a reflection of a propensity inherent in Bourdieu’s social theory as a whole.

IX.

This determines the limitations of both Bourdieu’s social critique of art as well as his theorization of art’s social character. The subjective orientation that predominates in Bourdieu’s concept of capital is reproduced in his understanding of art’s ideological character. He replaces the insight that culture bears an internal relation to the dynamics of value production, and that this dynamic finds its way into the inner character of artworks, with its elaboration as an expression of social position. That culture is not simply one fact among others but possesses, by dint of its location within the real subsumption of capital, a precise and diagnostic object of critique, as well as a fundamental role in the reproduction of capitalist social relations, is lost to an analysis that often amounts to little more than a sociological schematic of the pseudo-differentiation that structures the culture industry. The theory takes as decisive the “nuances in the monotony of supply” [8] within the culture industry, forms of consumption, behavior, and market production which are of objective import for the maintenance of capitalist society and not merely a matter of socially derivative “taste.” That the culture industry regiments individuals and defines the parameters of what they are able to experience, that it structures an exploitative economy of affect, that it re-organizes the individual’s instincts and sense of inner intuition along the lines of integration and conformity, and that this process takes place as a socially rationalized material force acting upon us even as we take it be stemming from our freedom—in a word, everything that makes culture an expression of capitalism’s peculiar form of abstract domination—is lost in Bourdieu’s theory. This perspective integrates the ideology of the culture industry instead of criticizing it. Because everything is fundamentally the same, the minute differences, perceptible only by those in possession of the codes of the niche, become magnified in importance. Bourdieu reflects the regimentation of consciousness, that socialization has “immigrated to its immanent consistency,” without understanding this process as part of the way capitalism must necessarily subsume individuals to its process of valorization or its obverse—that aesthetic experience could amount to the determinate negation of the violent subsumption of the particular to the needs of the universal. [9] It reproduces within the theory precisely the administrative regimentation of taste the critique is supposed to expose: “In an epoch in which bourgeois social science has ‘plundered’ the Marxian notion of ideology and diluted it to universal relativism, the danger involved in overlooking the function of ideologies has become less than that of judging intellectual phenomena in a subsumptive, uninformed and administrative manner and assimilating them into the prevailing constellations of power which the intellect ought to expose. As with many other elements of dialectical materialism, the notion of ideology has changed from an instrument of knowledge into its strait-jacket. In the name of the dependence of super-structure on base, all use of ideology is controlled instead of criticized.” [10]

X.

This problem is expressed most clearly in Bourdieu’s reduction of distinction to a “code,” aesthetic experience as socially administered knowledge distinct from the irreducible, non-conceptual character of experience which philosophical aesthetics claims for it in its non-identity to practical or theoretical forms of consciousness. [11] Bourdieu takes this bit of idealism to be a residue of bourgeois philosophical aesthetics. Bourdieu’s account is indispensable for any attempt to understand the way culture functions as coded knowledge recognizable to a particular group, an insight that finds its most advanced confirmation in the professionalized realm of art today—a division of labor held together not as a manifestation of the most advanced forms of spirit, but rather by a solipsistic reproduction of a set of cues no one outside this professional sphere would independently pursue—a sort of cultural-knowledge ponzi scheme which in its form could be said to imitate capital’s meaningless expansion for its own sake. Not only does it reduce the philosophical-aesthetic concept of experience, previously that through which art’s socially critical character was perceived, to a socially administered form of knowledge, but by reducing discernment to class the analysis fails to recognize how its configuration of culture becomes another code. Sociologized aesthetic consciousness not only blocks the possibility of a form of aesthetic experience that might permit the subject to cultivate a capacity for discernment irreducible to social position, but the recognition of this block, its cynical registering in aesthetic production and discourse, makes sociologization into its status indicator—a standardized response which can be learned and employed in a market increasingly dependent on information. Such a theory proves essential to a generation whose aesthetic capacity for imagining anything different has been systematically handicapped by regimentation, infantilism, and distraction. A code can be applied only to codified works, a fact which accounts for Bourdieu’s continued relevance to cultural production today. Art that is not produced solely as culture industry trash to be consumed without experience is in large part produced as a codified set of objects to be interpreted and marketed by a newly emerging class of critical critics: “What is forgotten however is the fact that the puzzle of Mallarmé's La Derniere Mode is lost by the degradation of the mysterious and the marvelous to the moot and merely misshapen, regrettably championed under the banner of crass ambiguity whose crowning achievement is irony without satire.” [12] This coded reflexivity, while it amounts to contemporary art’s particular mode of advancement, is also a mark against its quality as well as why it is hated by the reactionary and aesthetically illiterate, who look at its combination of saturated complexity and sardonic blankness with confusion and disgust. This connects an aporia of criticism to art’s sociologization. Criticism coupled itself with theory because faith in the autonomy of pure culture, one of bourgeois criticism’s preconditions, became untenable. The dynamic of artistic production and judgment by an elite cabal was replaced by cultural journalism and integration to the academy, long since in thrall to theory and other forms of legitimation through professionalized historicism—“Indoctrination camps for the homeless intelligentsia where it can learn to forget itself.” [13] Opposed to this is a quizzical everyday consciousness that confronts what seems to be an art world in which judgment is inseparable from marketing, oscillating between a guilt-ridden desire to “do some good in the world” and a reactionary cynical acceptance of its reduction to commerce in a dubiously overvalued luxury market. There is not so much criticism as networking, brand production, and publicity. If it could be said that at a certain moment in the 20th century, “as a result of the social dynamic, culture becomes cultural criticism, which preserves the notion of culture while demolishing its present manifestations as mere commodities and means of brutalization,” then this dynamic has been introduced to a dialectic of its own. [14] Just as culture became “cultural criticism” as a way of maintaining the idea of culture against its particular manifestations, compromised by their commodity status, so art has since internalized cultural criticism at the moment when criticism took on the visage of theory as a new source of legitimation and a palliative for art’s guilt and irrelevance.

XI.

"But if stubbornly immanent contemplation threatens to revert to idealism, to the illusion of the self-sufficient mind in command of both itself and of reality, transcendent contemplation threatens to forget the effort of conceptualization required and content itself instead with the prescribed label, the petrified invective, most often ‘petty bourgeois’, dispatched from above. Topological thinking, which knows the place of every phenomenon and the essence of none, is secretly related to the paranoiac system of delusions which is cut off from experience of the object. With the aid of mechanically functioning categories, the world is divided into black and white and thus made ready for the very domination against which concepts were once conceived. No theory, not even that which is true, is safe from perversion into delusion once it has renounced a spontaneous relation to the object. Dialectics must guard against this no less than against enthrallment in the cultural object. It can subscribe neither to the cult of the mind nor to hatred of it. The dialectical critic of culture must both participate in culture and not participate. Only then does he do justice to his object and to himself." [15]

Bourdieu’s social theory of art does not contain any way to distinguish the social effect of art from that of the culture industry. He understands art as a coded form of communication when it is precisely communication that is problematized by art’s attempt to overcome the predominance of effect over every other element. Artworks countermand ideology by speaking to the non-reified elements of the subject, not by replacing one ideology with their own. This sets them apart from every other “field” of sociologically explicable behavior. Bourdieu’s under-elaborated concept of aesthetic experience leads to agnosticism about the possible objectivity of art over and against society’s objectivity. This extends to the possible objectivity of aesthetic judgment and experience. But even on its own terms, i.e., as a critique of ideology, it is inadequate to the socio-historically predominant forms of subjective conditioning and integration. Tracing taste to social position affords insight into objective factors that condition the subject’s ostensibly free forms of reception, but it overlooks the fact that aesthetic incompetence is not monopolized by the undereducated; it infects all layers of society. Cultural proficiency as socially administered knowledge disregards what is obvious today: that “deep down and contrary to its better judgment, the bourgeois character tends to cling to what is inferior,” that the aesthetic preference of the bourgeois, like every other class, has been reduced to the same inner qualities of the object buttressed by pseudo-differentiation. [16] This is a problem for all ideology critique along the lines of the sociology of knowledge. The ideational content of ideology is irrelevant when it is no longer conceived as the conditioning of mental contents by social position, but as a totality whose reception is fundamentally indifferent to class, social position, or identity: “The suspicion held by earlier cultural critics is confirmed: in a world which denies the mass of human beings the authentic experience of intellectual phenomena by making genuine education a privilege and by shackling consciousness, the specific ideological content of these phenomena is less important than the fact that there should be anything at all to fill the vacuum of the expropriated consciousness and to distract from the open secret.” [17] Ideology now functions as the tendency to reduce all experience to the equalizing parameters of the value form. While Bourdieu is critical of the regimentation of taste, his theory unintentionally functions as a sociological elaboration that would today amount to market research. He begins his book with a quote intended as an exemplar of the cynical, elitist underpinnings of the bourgeois cultural apparatus: “And we do not yet know whether culture can exist without servants.” [18] The element of truth in the statement, unfortunate as it might be, seems to have been lost. It is a real question whether culture can survive in a world in which every individual, in private and public life, is reduced to an appendage of objective processes. [19] With the advent of the culture industry, art’s possibility became an anthropological question. A more thorough conceptualization of art’s place in the maintenance of capitalist social relations cannot, therefore, limit its analysis to the perspective of reception within the division of labor. The move to consider the social dialectic within the objects themselves is motivated by an interpretation of art’s form as the determinate negation of the form of works conceived for the production of value. The very concept of reception is problematic when it is synonymous with a set of calculable responses. The culture industry is significant not merely as an impoverished form of culture, a concept which has been illegitimate for decades, but as late capitalism’s preponderant form ideology. Theories of ideology limited to reception gloss over the fact that the culture industry is not merely a smorgasbord of items to be freely chosen along the lines of one’s particular predilections, but is a socially necessary, objective force that regiments all individual psychology, leveling it to a moment of the cycle of manipulation and retroactive need. The relations within its products thus have a determinate connection to the commodity form as well as the psychological constitution of late-capitalist subjects, which these products increasingly produce and reinforce. While one of Bourdieu’s strongest points is the recognition that art’s universality is a lie, he does not recognize how its universality has been negatively reclaimed by the calculability of consumption patterns. Everyone, down to the minutest details of their subjectivity, is a target audience. A critique based on reception likewise fails to make a connection between art’s relationship to the individual and the logic of accumulation. Higher forms of art are not immune from this development even when they attempt to bypass art’s commodity character. Art that is not reducible to cultural trash still has its own peculiar relation to value, even if it is not in immediate conformity with the general logic of the commodity form. It requires mediation with the concept of personality as the art-commodity’s particular condition of circulation, i.e., “identity formation as born from the exchange relation.” [20] This analysis is not the same as the critique of the culture industry, but it is not completely separable from it. It approaches the dialectic from the other direction—the subject not as a victim of the external manipulation of needs but rather as the internalization of the alienated essence of the commodity form of value into its own self-relation, expression, and comportment to the world. Only then can we understand Adorno’s comment that “culture has become ideological not only as the quintessence of subjectively devised manifestations of the objective mind, but even more as the sphere of private life.” [21] Bourdieu recognized that the concept of private life was ideological; habitus captures this despite its affinities with the concept of “lifestyle.” The sphere of private life as a condition not only of the development of the autonomous individual, but also of discerning aesthetic experience, has become problematic along with its inner connection to the concepts of self and identity. Bourdieu’s theory calls into question the ideology of free, individual aesthetic choice as a means of self-creation just as some contemporary art registers it in the way it seems to address a subject that is not fully human. The rebellion on the part of ostensibly higher forms of art against their most crucial social role—as property and instrument of bourgeois interests—is a counterpart to the dissolution of the significance, religious or otherwise, once attached to it as a form independent of the existence of a market. The division of labor hobbles art’s universality. Art is now as much as ever an affair whose inner workings are known mostly by those for whom such knowledge is integral to self-preservation: cultural capitalists and their employees, collectors, and artists struggling to produce demand for their particular brand of semblance. That art is no longer of objective, universal concern has long been recognized as part of its natural-history. Hegel’s thesis is now a cultural cliché. Part of the violence capitalism perpetrates on objectified humanity is the production of false needs—a psychological compulsion as the subjective counterpart to the maintenance of objective irrationality—which over time amounts to the impossibility of fulfilling experience. What the culture industry has managed to do is resuscitate in reified humanity the universal need for culture as a form of administered falsehood. That art’s most advanced forms, in order to distinguish themselves from this process, become comprehensible only to a sociologically definable set is a social contradiction within art that is not grasped by art’s delineation as a habitus. Within the purview of capitalism, everything true becomes a dead language spoken by initiates.

XII.

Critical theory’s corresponding aesthetic, on the other hand, locates art’s role in the expansion of value and not merely as the modus operandi of cultural capital, two functions which the critique of the advertised personality shows are inseparable. [22] The question remains whether it can be anything more. The theory of autonomy assumes that through its material elaboration art is able to reject a society that submits everything in existence to a heteronomous logic. Directed by the concept of contradiction, critical theory’s philosophy of art implies the possibility that aesthetic experience takes place and is perhaps even specifically constituted by the gaps which emerge in society’s failure to resolve its contradictions. In this sense, it would be an aesthetic expression of crisis just as one might interpret the culture industry as society’s assuagement of crisis. Modern art expressed these contradictions without naming them, but art, insofar as it develops through self-determination, contains a utopian dimension that points out the contingency of capitalism by merely existing. The recognition that what appears as natural is a second nature flash up in the reflective experience of the contradictions inherent in art’s construction. Its psychological counterpart is the relaxation of the tension of self-preservation, a tension which is today hardly perceptible so much does it pervade the phenomenology of contemporary life. That art is its own corrective to ideology is implicit in the dialectical character of the concept of appearance, pointed out in the early stages of the Phenomenology, as an emergence that implies its negation. Just as the argument in that work is driven by the despairing attempts of consciousness—the categorical form of otherness to the object—to grasp its object until it is reconciled with it in Absolute Knowing, so the telos of aesthetic experience is the reconciliation of the subject with itself and with the nature within and outside the subject. [23] This places Hegel’s philosophy in an even closer connection to art than those who read it as the philosophical counterpart to Emile. But if art is an ideology that is able to become more, this occurs when it is able to produce new experience, something that today, for objective and subjective reasons, is a dubious concept. It does so by elaborating its configuration of time. Relations based on the preponderance of abstractions over human life, mediated by value as the hegemony of abstract time, are replaced with a form of self-relation wherein the work’s elements stand as an objectivated complex not determined from without. The experience of the transformed time sedimented in art, obvious in all its major forms, is the establishment within art of time as the determinate negation of abstract time and, by extension, society mediated by labor. On the one hand, this makes art a cultural imitation of the being-in-and-for-itself of natural things, specifically the natural-philosophical concept of life. Art conjures the language of nature without vacuously reflecting it. On the other hand, if art’s method of relating to society is by appearance as negation as well as reflection, it does so not by mirroring society or by impotently pointing out its falseness, but by constituting a semblance world over and against the existing one. The development of expression through its attempt to resolve its antinomies registers the contradictions of capitalist society without explaining them, making it the aesthetic counterpart to critical theory’s taboo on any non-contradictory theory of society. [24] It amounts to an imitation of nature’s self-moving and self-generating autonomy as well as society’s existence as a second nature, a petrified overgrowth. From this perspective, art’s relation to society becomes ambivalent, so mediated with its opposite does it become.

XIII.

"For while the mind extricated itself from a theological-feudal tutelage, it has fallen increasingly under the anonymous sway of the status quo. This regimentation, the result of the progressive societalization of all human relations, did not simply confront the mind from without; it immigrated into its immanent consistency. Not only does the mind mould itself for the sake of its marketability, and thus reproduce the socially prevalent categories. Rather, it grows to resemble ever more closely the status quo even where it subjectively refrains from making a commodity of itself. The network of the whole is drawn ever tighter, modeled after the act of exchange. It leaves the individual consciousness less and less room for evasion, preforms it more and more thoroughly, cuts it off a priori as it were from the possibility of differencing itself as all difference degenerates to a nuance in the monotony of supply." [25]

Sociologized art lost this utopian dimension by taking bourgeois society as its only horizon. It reflects the way commodity society informs everything but does not see through it. Society becomes an absolute and art becomes, against its better intentions, a second order form of ideology even as it attempts to reflect its ideological character in itself. The same limitations of Bourdieu’s theory have immigrated into sociologized artworks. Just as the gap between ideology and consciousness disappears in the sociology of knowledge, so for Bourdieu the “more” art harnesses from the beauty of nature when it “appears to say more than it is,” and that through which it is able to become more than a registering of the status quo, is reduced to false consciousness. [26] The obliquely conceptual, ineffable, and socially irreducible quality of aesthetic experience is replaced with explanatory power, cultural habitus, and the maneuverings of cultural capital. The analysis is complete once the social cues are traced back to their context. One perspective is no better than any other, and the social content contained in art is addressed in a positivistic manner—as information. This is reflected in Bourdieu’s famous charts. This type of analysis is indifferent to any non-superficial concept of form—either as a sedimented sociohistorical seismograph or a bearer of non-standardized experience—categories which, if they were ever appropriate to art, have today become compromised as another set of taglines in the schema of cultural capital. Bourdieu’s theory, like the society it wants to explain, is capable of integrating even what seems to be its antithesis; radical autonomy is another ploy for the advertised personality: “the prerogative of the society of the generic is to perpetually reproduce the innovatively unique for greater and greater yield, displacing conformity as an inadequate concept for comprehending its dynamics.” [27] Sociologization became a form of regimentation. Whereas previously society was figured in works as a set of forces transfigured in their construction, that which allowed them to become something more than is the case, sociologized art made society into a theme. This change influenced art’s inner character as well as its expression of social truth. Not only has art’s social content, which exists in its form, been reified, but it has also reified the very element of its object—movement—whose contradictory dynamics it previously reflected. By trying to faithfully reflect society, it lost its grasp on it. Even art’s resistance to society now operates as a schema. From all angles, art’s “sociality” has taken on characteristics of an idée fixe. Just as the rat man had his stone, so artists, critics, and theorists cannot but position themselves and their objects in ever more mediated, nuanced logics of art’s ensnarement in power. By introducing into its orbit reflection on the social situation and its place within it, art risked overwhelming itself immanently with what it ultimately opposed. Like atheists who cannot stop speaking about God, art cannot stop pointing out its guilty place as a passive moment in the maintenance of the status quo. The sociological outlook operates with such ubiquity today that it borders on constituting contemporary art's a priori. Contemporary art’s desire to endlessly demonstrate art’s ideological status makes it as monotonous as the commodity culture it only half-heartedly tries to distinguish itself from. The expression of suffering, the historicity of nature, the illusions perdues of the bourgeois subject, these are either naive relics or fodder for the culture industry.

XIV.

Only once we all to some extent became Bourdelian could his theory gain its greatest claim to truth. If topographical thinking could never grasp the myriad ways art transcended its narrow social-theorization, today art’s socialogization has in fact reduced it in many cases to precisely the social registering and codification Bourdieu claimed it was. “The materialistic transparency of culture has not made it more honest, only more vulgar. By relinquishing its particularity, culture has also relinquished the salt of truth, which once consisted in its opposition to other particularities.” [28] If his theory was not true then, it has become so now that art has integrated his insights. Only when art became a form of social theory could the narrow conceptualization of it from that perspective conform to it. Artists who do not have some understanding of social critique, in however muddled a sense, seem capable of capturing the most advanced networks of the contemporary art market only when they function as a sort of heritage brand. Today the remnants of critical social theory are part of the very cultural capital Bourdieu was outlining in Distinction. But whereas Bourdieu was trying to prove that an appreciation of art as a sphere separated from the mundane and practical was precisely its socially ideological function, and thus a form of domination, today the opposite is the case. Cultural capital lies in a socially critical attitude to art, an ironic knowingness and canny manipulativeness of its ideological character. Much has been said about the collapse of criticism conceived as the disinterested judgment of a work’s aesthetic properties. Sociologized criticism was not wrong to call this form ideological. But even today, after the death of the great generation of “theory,” the integration of its insights into criticism is so complete that it often serves as little more than jargon for publicity statements. Today artists are theoreticians and critics of their sphere of activity. They’ve co-opted not only the job of the critic, but the social theorist of art as well. It is no longer bourgeois era “art criticism” alone that can be used as a tool for the production of a discerning consumer base. The move from disinterested art criticism to social theory inflected “critique” has by no means saved criticism from this compromised role. The ‘critical’ sociology of art is itself another schema to be employed for pseudo-differentiation and the creation of new demand—for instance, of artists whose work allegedly problematizes art’s “commodification.” The artist’s bothered conscience, stemming from the inevitable commodity status of their work, and attempts to advertise its disenchanted status as nothing more than an object for sale, both function as new value-indicators. While a “loss of self-evidence” probably characterizes all art since its removal from the realm of magic, it takes on a manifest, existential significance in modern art’s preoccupation with its ideological status, its dubious existence in a world where Geist is expressed in the movement of capital alone, where the social relations that constitute it appear as an immutable second nature. The integration of aesthetic consciousness is a social-theoretical demonstratio potissima of art’s loss of self-evidence. It confirms this uncertainty with the acuity of scientific method. Added to art’s guilt at being a weekend escape for the bourgeois, it is also shown to be an essential weapon of social stratification. Before Bourdieu traced taste to social status, Veblen elaborated a theory of conspicuous consumption that is true in a sense it did not intend. Art’s utopian dimension is inseparable from its uselessness, and the entire realm of authorized culture could be said to be fueled by people paying more than something is worth. But art’s uselessness is also inseparable from its existence as apparition—an object of experience that is incommensurable with previous, standard experience. Once the element of art’s alterity is removed, it becomes, for those able to afford its luxury options, an investment opportunity and a conspicuous display for the production of prestige. Bourdieu confirmed this function with the seal of scientific evidence.

XV.

What might be abstractly defined as the source of radical aesthetic experience, that residue of romanticism, and whatever one wants to call that moment in art that overwhelms consciousness, provokes anxiety and is therefore neither widely sought after nor considered desirable. Concepts such as non-identity and the new have also fallen under the taboo on effort during leisure time. The profiteers of the culture industry in all its diffuse manifestations, the administrators of high culture and its reception, all these play a role in making this kind of experience impossible. The experience of the teleologically ambivalent emergence of the incomprehensible from a nexus of recognizable moments, like a firework which erupts after the momentarily extinguished streak of its ascent, has been replaced by the demand for didactic material and the collection and display of exotic, abject, and puzzling objects. The logic of so much contemporary art seems to be to prohibit art’s expressive qualities, as if the aesthetic experience it is supposed to provide is passé—an easier judgment than that one is simply incapable of producing it. In both cases, the “new” is something to be recognized and swiftly integrated, not something to be experienced through an immanent working-through of an artwork’s construction. It is a trend, a cue, a piece of ornamentation. It mostly functions as a means of differentiation in the market, a piece of publicity that has immigrated into the artwork itself, a plug for its meaningless aesthetic existence. Art is not to be judged too harshly for this. Society demands that art work for a living and its administrators are tasked with finding a function for it when aesthetic experience is deemed an insufficient deliverable for its allowance. Perennially embarrassed by its uselessness and weary of its other creative friends always footing the bill for lunch, art assuages its guilt in the unfortunate but probably accurate presumption that it offers a civic education not to be found anywhere else. A trip to an art museum often feels like a slightly more bewildering, less satisfying sojourn to a museum of natural history—the attendant gathers information about a group, an oppressed identity or form of life, or is subjected to moralizing about social facts she somehow already knows or could come to more directly in another form. There are sociological and psychological reasons for the transformation of art into an ersatz political education. The individual is tired, weak, and objectively speaking, replaceable. Nevertheless, the long tradition of guiltlessly force-feeding the population trash might finally have overplayed its hand. Now that healthy eating habits have made their way into the common culture, it is perhaps time to give the higher forms a human face as well. There is a nagging suspicion that we have gorged ourselves, and the responsible among us are in the market for more nutritious forms of entertainment—something that art, with its resumé of slightly more highfalutin activities and its primitive accumulation of cultural capital, is equipped to provide. The decimation of funding for art in public schools, the fact that art teachers are the most fungible species in an education profession that becomes uglier with each passing year, does not hinder the determination of art institutions in their passionate struggle to bring art to people who do not want it. Spare time, as a counterpart to work-time, rescues the subject from boredom without requiring a concomitant effort of concentration. This remains the dual requirement of entertainment despite the fact that an entire intellectual and academic industry is based on mining the nuances of the culture industry. Concentration must be harnessed for the blessedness of the work day, at the end of whose ceaseless and interminable, but ultimately meaningless tasks, the individual’s mind is left feeling like the woolly mush that will later be shoveled into his mouth at feeding time. The model of aesthetic experience today is the overworked creative industry technocrat feasting in open-mouthed transfixion on a series of documentaries on social and political issues. New material emerges with minimum effort, giving the impression that the individual has not yet been fully reduced to the animal nature that would probably amount to a preferable form of life in any case. Art’s guilt is assuaged along with the dread that any sensitive person experiences upon waking, for the aesthetic-educational experience of the previous evening gave us something to take home with us, something to reflect upon during the hour-long commute to work.

XVI.

There is something fundamentally contradictory between the objective tendency of social theory and the parameters of artistic production and reception. Always geared to the particular, the details of formal construction, art cannot but confront the subject as an individual. That artworks are expressive in a way that resists their assimilation as instruments of objectification is one of the primary factors distinguishing them from the culture industry. The expressive element has been problemlematized in recent art, largely because it is interpreted subjectively, as sentimentality. Social theory, as Durkheim took pains to demonstrate, concerns what is not reducible to psychology or human intention, those elements of objectivity, forms of domination and behavioral patterns, which stand over and against the individual, irreducible to conscious volition. The orientation to the individual, the bourgeois subject, seems to be an irreducible aspect of art. Contemporary art struggles with this insofar as this subject no longer exists. It is idealistic to assume that aesthetic experience is only directed at how human beings could be and not the state we have been reduced to. This element of utopianism risks falling behind as a residue of the enlightenment—a form of naïveté against which socially disillusioned art struggles. That some contemporary art has replaced its orientation to individual experience with an appeal to identity formations or a vague, mute, non-subject is paradoxically part of an attempt to remain adequate to the state of the subject in late capitalism. The era of surplus populations—the massification of whole portions of the proletariat tangential to legitimate access to the wage—makes the short phase of radical bourgeois subjectivity—and with it the epistemological purview of radically autonomous art—appear a brief intermission. The attitude that still believes in the naïveté of autonomous art appears conservative because it implies the relinquishment of control when it is control, calculability, and a faithful submission to the logic of the present cultural dynamics that intellectuals and artists cannot abandon without the legitimate fear that they will not survive. It is not and never has been what art can tell us about society that draws us to it. The tendency for leftists of a certain sort to stake a position on art and its theorization is so ubiquitous that it should analyzed, as Durkheim once analyzed suicide, as a fait social. That art cannot but find ways to maintain its enigmatic character even as it is saturated with conceptuality, that even in the critical reflection on its role in society it nevertheless contains the dream of nature—this is what ultimately draws those who want to see the present social form come to an end. There is nevertheless something embarrassing about introducing, at this point in art’s history and theorization, a convoluted defense of autonomous art. The concept hardly makes sense anymore, not to mention that art’s resistance to society, the resistance implicit in any activity that develops its spontaneous logic not fundamentally reducible to exchange, has never disappeared. It receives an apologia it doesn’t need. The sociologization of art is by no means absolute; it is perhaps in transition to a minority position, a genre with a relatively short history. That art is not reducible to any social theory is obvious to anyone who tries either to produce it or become consciously sensitive to the features of its peculiar modes of expression. It would be hard to outline a better framework for the resuscitation of “criticism” than that it “not stop at a general recognition of the servitude of the objective mind, but seek rather to transform this knowledge into a heightened perception of the thing itself.” [29] If art can be said to have any purpose at all, its purposelessness might be said to provide an experiential corrective to ideology no longer as a set of manipulative mental contents but as total experiential debility. Just as the psychoanalytic telos is to help the individual move from neurotic misery to everyday unhappiness, so art’s most utopian element might be to provide the feeling of transient escape for the trapped subject. This aspect does not make for interesting copy, nor does it provide a sweeping framework to categorize and subsume what might be taking place. It is also too vague or abstract to be acceptable to contemporary consciousness as a legitimate politics of art. But in the contemporary moment it is not difficult to feel how problematic art has become. This is a contributing factor both to its sociologization as well as the manic, paranoiac quality that seems to characterize its sphere in the division of labor. There are too many other problems on the horizon. Art is based on the luxury of leisure time, something that is disappearing from life. Art might do itself a favor by admitting that it isn’t helping anyone instead of safeguarding itself by making self-satisfied reference to the fact that, while it cannot escape its guilty infidelity to truth, it at least recognizes that it has a problem. The more significant problem for art is that it is no longer even providing an experience. Art now appears conservative when it merely allows for the relaxation of the objectively ludicrous tension of self-preservation that still governs daily life—precisely that which prohibits experience that might allow culture to become a dream of something other than death. It is to the resuscitation of this experience that the social critique of art ought to direct itself.

Footnotes

[1.] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 250.
[2.] Guy Debord, “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics or Art,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002) 164.
[3.] This was intended as a reference to the 1994 Whitney Biennial, but the 2017 Biennial has proven that identity remains an area of contention.
[4.] Zac Dempster, Eric-John Russell, Veronika Russell and Nicholas Vargelis, “Who, or What, is John Kelsey? A Postscript,” Mute, June 12 2014, https://www.metamute.org/community/your-posts/who-or-what-john-kelsey-postscript
[5.] Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge. 1979), 70.
[6.] Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1975), 188.
[7.] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 5.
[8.] Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 29.
[9.] Ibid.
[10.] Ibid.
[11.] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 46-51.
[12.] Zac Dempster, Eric-John Russell, Veronika Russell and Nicholas Vargelis, “Who, or What, is John Kelsey? A Postscript,” Mute, June 12 2014, https://www.metamute.org/community/your-posts/who-or-what-john-kelsey-postscript
[13.] Theodor W. Adorno, “The Sociology of Knowledge and Its Consciousness,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 49.
[14.] Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 27.
[15.] Ibid, 32.
[16.] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 235.
[17.] Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 29.
[18.] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 5.
[19.] Max Horkheimer, “Authoritarianism and the Family Today,” in The Family: Its Function and Destiny, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen (New York: Harper, 1949), 361.
[20.] Zac Dempster, Eric-John Russell, Veronika Russell and Nicholas Vargelis, “Who, or What, is John Kelsey? A Postscript,” Mute, June 12 2014, https://www.metamute.org/community/your-posts/who-or-what-john-kelsey-postscript
[21.] Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 29.
[22.] “Theses on the Personality,” Cured Quail, https://bogplot.blogspot.co.uk/p/1.html.
[23.] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 65.
[24.] Ibid, 5.
[25.] Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1981), 20.
[26.] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 78.
[27.] Zac Dempster, Eric-John Russell, Veronika Russell and Nicholas Vargelis, “Who, or What, is John Kelsey? A Postscript,” Mute, June 12 2014, https://www.metamute.org/community/your-posts/who-or-what-john-kelsey-postscript
[28.] Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1981), 33.
[29.] Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1981), 31.