Art in the Midst of the Implosion of the Republican Form of Bourgeois Governance

• In Event: 4166 - Section on Marxist Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 1. Et tu, Art? Art as a Capitalist and Imperialist Tool

Abstract

Marx's critique of "capital" implies that the full realization of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) destroys the very condition of producing "value" sufficient for reliable exchange and the progress of accumulation, one that must always express the unmanageable contradiction of finance capital (fictitious capital) and productive capital. Marx shows that this negative dialectic is the logical realization of the CMP as described by its defenders, therefore the foundation of its irrationality. But at any moment in the course of the progress of capital, it is possible to specify a range of possible counter movements, the negation of capitalist socialization by the progress of the society of the producers as a society. To clarify those possibilities, with their strengths and weaknesses, it is necessary to take account of the form of governance, beyond what the concept of "the state" allows, that links the society of the producers to the anti-societal socialization of labor required by capitalist accumulation. I suggest that the key is to understand the immanent contradictions of both the idea of a republic and the idea of a social contract on which the concept of modern and contemporary republicanism depends. The question addressed here has to do with the relation between "new art" , the magnification of an already existing crisis to which it corresponds, and the sort of public that validates the newness of "new art" according to the requirements of political action itself. There has always been an art that corresponded in one way or another to extra-institutional politics, but I will try to show what is different about the present situation of the arts and politics taken together.

Author

• Michael E. Brown, Northeastern University