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The Market and Consumption as Powers in the Realm of Consciousness

Wed, May 27, 4:00 to 5:45pm, TBA

Abstract

For my presentation I propose an abbreviated reading of Marx’s Grundrisse and his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Following are some questions guiding my inquiry: how did the market and consumption (much like private property before it) become “power[s] in the realm of consciousness”, players in the field of forces within which the range of our faculties and social relations are forged, contested, exercised and dissolved? What are the overlaps and differences between using, having, possessing, consuming, appropriating, and ingesting works of art and artistic proposals? What does objectification mean in the context of contemporary aesthetic theory? How do we understand the subjectification of objects in that same context? What are the implications of Marx’s leveling of sense faculties with higher order cognitive faculties? What are the implications of conceiving, like Marx did, “the senses as theoreticians”? What is “sensuous appropriation,” defined by Marx as “the positive transcendence of private property... and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man”? What are the possibilities of resistance and contestation inherent in this idea of sensuous appropriation, and how might we redefine our relationship to consumption in light of this idea? And what material theories of the subject follow from these considerations? Together, I believe these questions shed some light on the crux between aesthetic theory as articulated by Adorno (and by Frederic Jameson's reading of Adorno) and the political economy of an art world fundamentally defined by market forces and consumer values.

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