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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.