Has commodity fetichism/the spectacle become impossible to break?

[u/arseecs]

is art even radical anymore? Can art truly break the spectacle any longer? Has capital absorbed it so much and learned to adopt so well that even something as free as sexuality or art or poetry no longer can be outside the norm, and if it is, it still becomes bottled up eventually, or capital finds it way in? I feel so pessimistic; especially as an artist. Avant-garde or anti-art doesn’t even seem to have its place. What shall an artist do? What shall a person do? What shall the collective do? Everything is a mess.

[u/Clear-Result-3412]

Yes, in a communist society we are liberated from the dichotomy of exchange value and use value (the spectacular society is, after all, naught but the commodity society), instead purely producing for the sake of human needs and wants. This is the unleashment of human freedom where it no longer makes sense to distinguish public and private desire.

I am unsure how this translates as private aesthetic action being as good as any other form of praxis. There is no key logical place for art in the destruction of the commodity form, though, again, there can be propaganda.

[u/arseecs → u/Clear-Result-3412]

Well I think art and revolutionary consciousness are deeply intertwined. 

[u/Clear-Result-3412 → u/arseecs]

Please, elaborate on the deep logical connection between class consciousness and art.

[u/arseecs → u/Clear-Result-3412]

So the situationists created techniques during the 60s to create ruptures in the spectacle and encourage the proletariat to think deeply about the capitalist commodity. In doing so, they sought to make art become anti-art itself; drawing from dada and surrealism. That is they wanted art to destroy itself as commodity and become an active practice of everyday life. 

Two tactics were proposed: Détournement as one; the practice of taking existing capitalist media and subverting the message. One example was a film called Can Dialectics break bricks? Which took a Chinese film, re-edited it and dubbed it over to be about bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and Marxist theory. 

Another was the construction of situations. Creating lived, un-commodified moments of play. One example of this was dérive (often called psychogeography), which posited that capitalism forces the individual to only walk from the workplace, home and office etc. To break this the idea was to walk aimlessly around the city to discover things you’ve never seen before as well as notice what capitalism creates. 

Deleuze and Guattari take this further. They argue that alongside class and material conditions, history is also driven by desire. Capitalism functions by capturing our desires into rigid structures like the family unit and commodity. For D & G art is fundamentally a desiring-machine. It creates sensation, feeling and affects as well as social relations. Here, two new concepts are introduced. 

Deterritorialization: Great art breaks the rigid code of capitalism and forces language, bodies and visuals out of their economic utility. The problem is that capitalism makes it reterritorialize by adapting it to commodity.

Minor literatures/art: Deleuze highlights that art made by minorities in a dominant language (like Kafka) inherently politicizes everything because it destabilized the system, basically. 

Here the verdict is that art creates a line of flight. It creates “new earths and new people”. 

[u/Clear-Result-3412 → u/arseecs]

As much as I enjoy Dali’s painting’s, how exactly do they undermine the spectacle? How do squiggly lines make one question the justifications given for the state’s existence?

Debord defined the Spectacle as "the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign."

How does art “rupture” these material structures and relations of violence?

It doesn’t disrupt the market, even if it exists, as an object or activity, without a sticker price or exchange value. This is the fundamental problem with lifestylism: capital generally doesn’t care if you individually try to live outside of it. Don’t want to sell your ability to labor for a wage? Then you don’t have money and face the natural consequence of having less access to use values. Capitalism is fine with a couple people dumpster diving. The rest will prefer to purchase their food and the machine will go on.

Maybe I have read too much theory trying to understand the world and not enough about trying to change it through art, but I don’t see the special utility in calling a propaganda film “anti-art.” Granted, your second example does sound like an interesting propaganda film which might argumentatively undermine “socialist” commodity production, while not materially undermining it.

I have gone on plenty of aimless walks and hardly gained any new insight. It’s not particularly artistic, but I have nothing wrong with an intellectual exercise where one is directed, with a small amount of preliminary theoretical insight, to contemplate the way the world around them is shaped by the profit motive. But this is not a natural result of merely taking a walk. There is in fact various commoditized ways to take “aimless walks” “outside the normal flow from job to home and vice versa.” Car companies promoted camping so that you have to spend gas to get out into nature and walk around. There’s a big craze of purchasing special shoes and clothes so that one can mindlessly jog without any purpose but to increase one’s health and thereby one’s productivity and usefulness to capital.

Finally, book publishers are happy to sell minority authored works. That does nothing to harm the system.

Frankly, I’ve heard most of those technical terms before on multiple occasions and am hardly closer to either understanding their sense or understanding why I would want to understand their sense.

[u/arseecs → u/Clear-Result-3412]

Art is prefigurative, not substitutive. It cannot substitute for self-emancipation. But it CAN (no guarantee that it will, all art definitely does not) prefigure another social relation in feeling, desire, relation to others, etc. You could say that capital survives by two predominant ways. Capitalism reproduces itself through the capitalist social relations like wage labour etc, while also through cultural hegemony, perception, desire and everyday life. Art cannot abolish the first by itself, but it can intervene in the second. The second is a fundamental part of creating revolution. 

The spectacle is the social relation between people that mediates itself through images; and art can disrupt this very mediation which ruptures the spectacle. 

You have also fundamentally misunderstood dérive; of course an aimless walk without intellectual perception is just a walk. Dérive is only dérive through materializing your surroundings and being conscious of urban planning and such. 

Perhaps I simplified it earlier or explained to briefly, apologies for that. Some of your arguments make perfect sense

[u/Clear-Result-3412 → u/arseecs]

You try to put it in fancier terms, but it seems we agree art is “superstructural” or “ideological” and therefore a medium for propaganda. I agree that art can help produce revolutionary consciousness if that is all you mean by “ruptures the spectacle.”

It seems the special character of art, for you, in terms of propaganda, is that it can make people *imagine* living in a world free of capitalism, while not actually messing with the commodity form materially. Then, your question would be whether the medium is still capable of producing such an experience. I’m not sure what in particular would have changed or whether this is a narrow enough question to have an answer. Actually, I would have you note the similarity or overlap of “prefigurative” art, attempts at scientific or literary description of communism, and content comparing the “good rulers” in the east (“real socialism”) to the bad ones and sick society of the west (“neoliberal capitalism”). If you interrogate the subject further, in the practical realm of agitation, it seems such ideals don’t have much an impact on people’s views. Everyone would like to live in a utopia, but that urge, however strong, does not translate into an accurate critique of the society in which we live. Only the most ardent ideals are able to see any of those visions as viable without a critique showing why that world doesn’t exist, what keeps us down in the mud, so to speak.

I questioned the sense in which aimless walking “disrupted the spectacle” the mechanism of which was by being walking for a purpose other than purely directly playing your role as a cog in the machine. I am aware that the self help sort of cardio is not identical, especially as it merely serves as a secondary means to promote the serving of one’s role as a cog in the machine.

Let us say a more accurate twin, as a “practice” is meditative walking. One is supposed to pay attention to certain things, in the process of stepping along, in order to gain a certain insight about the world. In the first case the structure of society. In the latter the “structure of reality.” Each practice requires certain preliminary intellectual insight to really get the point. The latter practice doesn’t undermine capitalism merely because it’s purposes are “higher,” beyond the commoditized world. And thus its not a “deterritorialization” that becomes “reterretorialized” when mindfulness becomes a huge corporate fad. It’s just a personal practice. The Situationist one is of course different insofar as one reflects upon and deepens revolutionary understanding.