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[microsound] essay by Esther Leslie



http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/adorno/Indeterminate.htm

an interesting excerpt from the essay:

> Private property is the mainstay of capitalism. Before it was  
> hijacked by Soviet state capitalism, communism meant the ‘positive  
> supersession of private property as self-estrangement, and hence  
> the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man’,  
> In capitalism, property ownership (which was, and in many ways  
> still is, the bourgeois pre-requisite for political representation)  
> cannot be thought separately from the division of labour. Division  
> of labour and private property are identical, notes Marx in the  
> German Ideology and elsewhere.

> Division of labour is activity, while private property is the  
> product of that activity, which is alienated from the producer  
> through the process of commodification or expropriation. The  
> division of labour is the parcelling up of the productive process  
> into smaller processes, but it is also characterised in the split  
> between manual and mental labour. This split marks itself across  
> labour, including the specialised form of labour that is artistic  
> production. The 'primary alienation', the split in species being  
> occasioned by the division of labour accompanies the unequal  
> division of cultural access and benefit. Art marks the site of a  
> wounding. The common perception of art reinforces this split.

> Art’s existence as product of manual labour, a process of  
> production, is overlooked. It is seen rather an intellectual or  
> divinely inspired manifestation, which has a physical form, that  
> comes to life only through the artist’s inspiration and which is  
> convenient for the process of it becoming property.

> Art is produced to be a commodity, like any other, though it is  
> also a strange one. Its power resides in its actual re-combination  
> of mental and manual labour. That is art’s actual critical moment.  
> Its simultaneously sensuous and intellectual existence is never  
> simply use value or exchange value, but an effort at universal  
> human values or a reminder of their absence.

> Cultural form is slashed by, negatively formed by or located in  
> relation to social division. That art exists as a specialised area  
> means that it can only be an alibi for the guilty portion of non- 
> cultural life. It is an unfreedom for a few people to be charged  
> with the task of being an artist, bearing that social role, while  
> others are excluded from it.

> Conversely, marred by commodification, artistic practice today is a  
> deformation of the sensuous unfolding of the self in solidarity  
> that indicates real human community. Marred as such it succumbs  
> increasingly to the commodity. The taste of advertising man and  
> collector Charles Saatchi only made stark the link between his  
> trade and the ‘sensationalist glamour laced with wit’ aesthetic of  
> all that came after Young British Art, or YBA.