The Problems of Art
“In every epoch the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling classes” (Engels, F. Marx, K. (2022)
In the 2020 video game “Umarangi Generation” set in a futuristic Tauranga City New Zealand the player takes on the role of a package courier and photographer. Over the course of 12 levels the player is asked to deliver a package and photograph various items from a list. The first level takes place in a penthouse party where fashionable young people are partying and listening to music, but as the game unfolds it becomes clear that the world of “Umarangi Generation” is actually Collapsing. Over the course of the game the player learns that the earth is being destroyed by large jellyfish-like monsters and because of an occupation by the U.N. and government mismanagement it is turning into an dystopia. The player visits such scenes as an underground sewer society, a blockaded train station and in the last level at a protest at which the police beat unarmed protesters. The creator of the game is of Māori background and “Umarangi” is Māori for “Red sky” and the Kaiju (large Japanese monsters i.e. Godzilla) in the game are clearly metaphors for climate change. What I want to focus on here is the level “Gamers Palace”. The player finds themselves in a large video game arcade presented with all the energy and seediness of a casino or a brothel. The people inside are either dancing to drum and bass music produced by a DJ who is also a cyborg dolphin, drinking alcohol in the vip area with models or playing video games mostly through virtual reality goggles. The player is also able to walk outside of the arcade. Outside the music stops and is replaced by the sounds of distant artillery fire and the player is reminded of the dire circumstances of what is going on in the world of the game (and also in ours). Several people outside of the appear to be homeless and two men appear to be in a VR headset induced stupor. The technology of the video game works to pacify both the rich and the poor. We see here a not unfamiliar kind of antagonism within the artwork. An anxiety that the artwork is nothing other than a distraction from the thing it tries to critique or draw attention to, there is even a very direct comparison between the medium of the art (I.e video games) and the effects of an opioid.
In his book “Capital” Marx makes an important distinction between how the worker reproduces their wealth and how the capitalist expands theirs. The worker starts with a commodity that can be sold on the market (their labour-time or something they have created etc…) And then turns this commodity into money in order to buy, again, a different commodity (Food, rent etc…) and the formulation Marx gives is C-M-C. On the other hand the capitalist starts with money purchases a commodity (to them it doesn’t matter what it is as it is not valued for its use value but its exchange value) and then sells this commodity for more money than they started out with, giving this the formula M-C-M’. In this schema it may seem at first as though for the most part the artist falls under the first category. The artist starts with an artwork they have created and sells their art on the market as a commodity turning its exchange value into money which is then used by the artist to purchase further commodities. Whilst in many cases individually this may in fact be the case in my approximation the artist plays a very different role in society similar to that of a financial worker. The financial worker as well might seem to be a worker in the sense that they sell their “labour time” to their boss in return for money but the difference is that the financial labourer does not produce surplus value but instead aids in the overall circulation of commodities and use values already created by the working class. The inordinate salaries and bonuses payed to people at the top of these industries comes not from anything produced by them but from the surplus value created by the working class. In this way we see a parallel in the inflated prices of various artworks having nothing to do with their use value (i.e. the Qualities inherent in the object itself) but instead with their usefulness as investments essentially as containers of surplus value. They are often times hidden away in storage as a kind of fictitious value. Art as a commodity cannot escape the kind of fetishism involved in such a relationship. Art, more importantly for a critique of its formal elements, can also have a more ideological role in the circulation of commodities in much the same way as an advertiser does. For the most part the advertiser produces no real use value, but only aids in the circulation of commodities in society. These problems, despite capitalism’s initial revolutionary effect, make the arts (especially the visual arts) subject to a commodified kind of degeneration.
Much contemporary art seems to be returning to a kind of religious or magical attitude. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.” (Marx, K. (1970) In his 1972 book “Ways of seeing” John Berger includes a table in which members of the public are asked what institution seems to most approximate the museum for them.The most common answer especially among the working class was a church. Art has always contained a strong ethical component. Even those who would try to escape this, such as a nihilist like Duchamp, have never really managed to. The nihilist places an ethical significance on nihilism ands scorns those who do not understand the meaningless of things. Art today in many ways works as capitalisms conscience. Many of the largest cultural institutions in Britain began as ways of legitimising the violence of early capitalist primitive accumulation and today many act as institutions for the laundering of the reputations of oil companies and genocides. Yet many of these institutions use language adopted from political left and showcase art that claims to embody these ideas. I think this can be explained in terms of the recuperation inherent in medieval Christianity. Crucifixion was originally reserved for political crimes and many people believe that Jesus may have been in some way a revolutionary. Yet when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire it had little effect on class relations, slavery or gender roles. The older gods of classical paganism were essentially amoral aristocrats who ruled because they were powerful. In Christian religion god rules because he is good. The older religion worked well in a smaller society in which people would be more aware of their rulers presence but in a larger society, or in a feudal context, the reigns of power become more abstract and legitimising power solely through violence becomes much more difficult. Power instead legitimises itself through rhetorically espousing the values of the oppressed. This is why god in Christianity appears as a beggar in rags riding on a donkey rather than as a muscled king throwing lightning bolts from atop a cloud. I should say that my critique of religion here is different from that of Nietzsche who seems to see priests (and intellectuals including artist) as serving a class interest all of their own seeing them as a hindrance to the total domination of the ruling class which he sees as The ideal. On the contrary these groups serve the interests of the rulers and the very rhetorical and practical concessions they make actually serve the longevity of class rule. For instance think of social democratic institutions without which the capitalist system would quickly oppress and exploit the lower classes to such an extent that they would be unable to work or buy commodities And without their rhetoric they would be overthrown. It must also be made clear that this pseudo-socialist religious class ideology is also somewhat precarious. By co-opting the ideology of the oppressed and essentially adapting it to the dominant rhetoric of the state they leave interpretation open to a kind of socialist reading. This religious artistic role in my opinion is however becoming less important and is being replaced by a kind of magical ideology in which a person’s wishes can be achieved here on earth and bases its ethical content less on moralism and rather on Hedonism. This religious kind of art I would also associate more with patronage in that its primary function is to launder reputation of powerful individuals, institutions and systems and therefore allow for the circulation of commodities rather than to stimulate desire which i would associate with a more direct relation to the market as in the case of what i will consider as magical art.
Ludwig Fuerbach says “religion makes you want what is. magic makes you think that what you want will be” (Feuerbach, L. (2008) In this sense if religion is a depressant, magic is a stimulant. Before Freud and Marx fetishism was originally used by European social critics to refer to artefacts early modern European traders bought back from Africa. The term is generally considered as a way of dismissing African beliefs and art as being superstitious and as placing too much meaning on inert objects. Marx and Freud, both ethnic minorities themselves and therefore sceptical of such racist notions and re-applied the concept to Western European society. In freud the concept is employed as sexual fetishism in which a person is attracted to an inanimate object or to a specific part of the body due to ideas that it has come to represent through what he calls “Condensation.” For Marx fetishism is primarily conceptualised as “Commodity Fetishism” in which a commodities “Exchange value” is mistaken for a quality of the thing itself its “Use Value” rather than as a product of social relations between people, as Marx says “under capitalism relations between people become or are mistaken as relations between things”. Marx uses the example of a table to underline his point: “The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing on its own free will.” (Marx, K. (1976) And so we see in advertising an idea that a commodity contains elements other than its physical properties or functions, the most obvious example being the Marlborough cowboy who represented a kind of rugged individualism which is presented as an element of the cigarette itself. If religious art is associated with the older form of patronage, magic art is more associated with the market and therefore more directly with the commodity form. Art as commodity is its dominant mode in advanced capitalist society and art cannot escape the fetishism implicit in this. The most obvious implication of this is the exorbitant prices for artworks with little to do with their use value or inherent qualities but perceived as such under the effects of fetishism. This in the past was closely followed by and remarked upon in the press but in recent times it has become so common that any individual case is considered of little note. And in the instances in which it has been remarked upon in the tabloids online etc it is unable or unwilling to see that this is a microcosm of our larger and equally ridiculous economic system as a whole (one may even think the reason it inspires such outrage in capitalism’s sycophants is because it so beautifully illustrates the arbitrary and irrational nature of the commodity form.) Reducing art to exchange value only succeeds in degrading it, even with such exorbitant prices. In recent times artwork has tended towards the magical in its formal qualities as well; the course of surrealism over the course of the latter half of the 20th century for instance. In the work of Ithell Colquhoun we see an move away from the Marxist and Freudian materialism of the old surrealists and towards a more occult vocabulary of symbols. Not only does this act as a way of creating a certain type of in-group, it also mystifies the way symbols really function. By ascribing a transcendent meaning to symbols outside of the material world. This attitude to symbolism can easily be seen in Carl Jung’s work and his idea of an archetype. For instance in his book “Man and his symbols” Jung gives the example of the returning artistic subject matter of a caring mother throughout art history. The reason that such a symbol has repeated throughout history is that mothers that are at least somewhat caring have existed throughout history and are considered important trans-historically rather than because such an image is inherently baked into us from birth. This attitude inevitably leads to a type of uncritical conservatism in which everything that is currently present in society is inevitably the outcome of an immutable higher nature rather than because of any contingent political factors. This again is a type of fetishism similar to that of commodity fetishism in which the meaning is immanent to the symbol rather than as an effect of social relations. Commodity fetishism can also be seen in the seemingly opposite right wing ideologies of Martin Heidegger and Italian futurism concerning technology. Although the beliefs are different in their conclusions as to how positively or negatively its effects are to be viewed, their beliefs about how technology works in society and its effects are essentially the same. Both see technology as essentially having an autonomy of its own separate from the political systems of society. Take for example the painting “five o clock tea” by Julius Evola. Does this painting not remind us of Marx’s writing about the table with the “wooden brain”? the tea pot has ideas of its own that exist outside of what one thinks of it or its material qualities. In this way the futurists argue for a decreased human agency over society to allow for a type of progress controlled by the very technology itself. But the technology has no will of its own it is just that the agency of society is rendered unconscious and alienated from itself. Because of the commodity fetish people seem to be ruled by the things they have produced. Heidegger also sees technology in this way but instead advocates for a kind of abstinence from technology and a submission to nature, but by not having a critique capitalism he does not see that it is the alienated character of the worker’s labour that has the effect of a runaway technology seemingly outside of human agency. One way of somewhat overcoming such a problem may be found in the sculptures of Edwardo Paolozzi. Although in many ways Paolozzi is a pop artist he does not stop at the surface of things as many others do (Rosenquist, Warhol). Many of his artworks have a what look like broken circuit boards and rubbish sticking out of them that breaks up a certain facade. His works are as industrial as they are shopping mall and he often allows for a cosmetic exterior to be broken up which gives a sense of peering beyond the given presentation of a commodity and allows us to imagine the commodities own coming into being which is exactly what commodity fetishism obfuscates.
using a post-Kantian lens one may understand that it is indeed true that one can find truth in the reading of tea leaves or a reading of the I Ching, but the truth that is found lies rather in the subject rather than in the object itself. The randomness of the tea leaves or the vagueness of a reading from the I Ching lend themselves to being projected onto. In the case of the I Ching a reading can allow the subject to do what they subconsciously wanted to do beforehand. In the case of the tea leaves we can see a subject matter that has been repressed. In short the insight lies not with the object itself but in the illusions created by free play of the faculties when presented with randomness. In the modern period a certain deceitful quality has been ascribed to the use of illusion when it comes to art, most famously perhaps in the critique of perspective given by Clement Greenberg and the abstract expressionists. I think that this idea is somewhat mistaken, the fact that the picture frame is flat and only appears a to have 3 dimensional depth is something people are not unaware of whilst looking at a picture. If perspective is a lie it is essentially a banal one, and one that can be set in the service of truth. In cinema as well we see a turn towards breaking the fourth wall or focusing on the act of movie making as a subject. The proletkult in the Soviet Union for instance attacked Sergei Eisenstein for making movies using actors, stages and sets advocating for documentary to be the only acceptable form of soviet filmmaking. This is a grossly empirical materialism that does not see how fictions are produced by real material conditions. As Georg Lukacs pointed out, marxism sets its philosophical project against “The two extremes of crude empiricism and abstract Utopianism.”(Lukacs, G. (2000) Many of the problems of modern art including many of the magical and religious aspects I have written about do not necessarily lie as problems within the art as thing-in-itself but with the way we interpret them an interpretation that is always tinged by the illusions created by capitalism.
One way that artists have sought to escape from their mystifying role in society is to turn towards a paradigm of science. In her book “The Dialectic of Sex” Shulamith Firestone compares the artists position in society to the position a scientist takes in an experiment. In an experiment the scientist will try to remove themselves from the phenomena which they are trying to observe. It is in her opinion this attitude applied to art that accounts for the artists withdrawal from the world and desire to escape into the fringes of society either in the form of the ivory tower of the high society elite or in the form of the down and out bohemian. It is this, according to Firestone, that accounts for the common conception of artistic creativity as being tied to mental illness and suicide (a common idea of scientific genius as well). If the artist is to take up a position of science they cannot do so in the way that the natural scientist does. The natural scientist must develop a useful and necessary delusion, the view that human consciousness is an obstacle to understanding reality. For the natural scientist, subjectivity is something apart from the material world something that stands between the scientist and the object of their study, but for the Marxist or the German idealist, consciousness is something produced by the activity of society and nature and its logic cannot be totally distinguished from the object of its interest and so this can also be true for the artist. In my opinion the main obstacle for art to achieving a symbiotic relationship with science lies with the mistaken philosophical stance of what Hegel termed “Sense Certainty” the idea that we can have immediate (what must be here emphasised as a NON or UN-Mediated) understanding of the world through our senses. We may be able at first to arrive at some scientific data that is largely independent of ourselves (for instance mathematical data) but when this is in anyway collected into some kind of comprehensible worldview in order to be understood by us we cannot escape the fact that such ideas have been mediated by ourselves and society. In Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” the world is first received by us as what he calls ‘the manifold of experience’, this is the incomprehensible data of sensory experience (i.e light and sound waves that we see and hear, chemicals that we taste and smell etc… ) these are then categorised by the understanding and therefore made comprehensible for us. Unfortunately Kant views these categories of the understanding as something unchanging and inherent in the mind, taking Aristotles metaphysical categories of being and psychologising them, therefore creating an enormous epistemological problem by bifurcating reality into the world of in-themselves unknowable things and our perceptions. Hegel and Marx on the other hand would go on to claim that, far from being internal and unchanging, our categories of understanding actually come from the world from the changing circumstances of history or from the laws of nature. For an instance of how science denies subjectivity take the examples of the documentaries of Brian Cox. In these programs he often marvels at the size of enormous things in the universe forgetting that they are only really large or small in relation to ourselves. The documentaries of David Attenborough in which he seems mostly only to take an interest in animals when they are killing each other or mating and even dares to suggest that the answer to climate change and environmental collapse is population control without reflecting on the class nature of such problems. Think of the way that the concept of the multiverse, whether it is scientifically valid or not, has been so jumped upon in pop culture so often mirroring our own Neo-liberal conception of ourselves as isolated individuals driven through time by our own isolated choices. Of course it would be hard to turn the manifold of information about animals and the universe (hours of footage, data, co-ordinates etc…) into something totally neutral and unmediated by social and historical forces. The point is not to say that these representations of science are hopelessly mediated and that this should be such a problem but that the pretensions of un-mediated access to the world science seeks as its object should themselves be abandoned. Exemplary of this desire for immediacy in scientific representation is a short clip from the classic 70’s BBC science documentary “Connections” by James Burke. In this section James is at first in frame looking over a book of medieval and renaissance artworks and then a photograph of microscopic amino acids is presented on screen.
“And before you say, “What about the Beethovens and the Michelangelos? Let me suggest something with which you may disagree violently: that at best the products of human emotion: art, philosophy, politics, music, literature, are interpretations of the world, that tell you more about the guy who’s talking than about the world he’s talking about. Secondhand views of the world made thirdhand by your interpretation of them. Things like that: (Picture of medieval Christian art) As opposed to this: (microscopic photograph) Know what it is? It’s a bunch of amino acids, the stuff that goes to build up a worm, or a geranium, or you. This stuff’s easier to take, isn’t it? (Points at art book) Understandable; got people in it. This, scientific knowledge, is hard to take because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion, ideology, and leaves only what is demonstrably true about the world.”
Burke fails to include subjectivity as something that exists in the world and is formed out of it. As if society and thought could exist completely outside the laws of the universe and had nothing to do with it. Another interesting and probably the most famous instance of science and the problem of mediation comes from the interpretations of Darwin’s “On the origin of species”. The most famous political interpretation being that of the right wing social Darwinists in which a moral element is placed on the “survival of the fittest.” It is also well known that Marx and Engels were deeply influenced by Darwin although not necessarily for the reasons many would believe (I.e. that it lends itself to a vision of linear progress through history as was sometimes believed in soviet marxism.) On the contrary Marx valued Darwin’s theory precisely because it took teleology out of natural history just as Marx tried to do with social history. Compared to previous conceptions of evolution Darwins stressed the role of random mutation and also the fact that organisms are not becoming more or less “evolved” over time but are suited to their environment. Engels had a certain literary critique of “on the origin of species”. Although he agreed with Darwin’s theory he claimed that Darwin stressed to much the antagonistic competitive forces within an ecological epoch rather than the degree to which organisms are codependent with one another. This he claims is due to Darwin’s own debt to Adam Smith and other political economists in his theory of selection and competition. It is important to note that just because Darwin’s theories are deeply influenced by political social forces this does not make him wrong. In a society like ours, where a hyper-individualist ideology reigns supreme, the idea that anything could be known and understood socially and as mediated as such is often considered a terrible kind of scepticism. It is important as well that Engels critique is literary rather than scientific and goes a long way to show how our interpretation of scientific facts is inherently political and in some ways also literary and artistic. Darwin himself believed that it was impossible to draw ethical ideas from the natural world and in fact many of the ethical ideas social Darwinist found in his work may have more to do with the political economists that influenced him than to do with evolution in and of itself. In his “Critique of Pure Judgement” Kant has the idea that the reason we find so much beauty in wild nature is because of our inability to make a judgement. For him nature has a “Purposiveness without Purpose” that in some ways mirrors the non teleological conception of evolution that Darwin later layed out. Adorno believed the beauty of nature for this reason (that we can make no judgement from it) is secondary to the beauty of art in which we can find ethical/political interest.
The idea of a scientific attitude as being unmediated is reflected in art and media and also through phenomenological and new materialist philosophy. The 2025 film “Warfare” directed by Alex Garland and former US Navy seal Ray Mendoza is a good example of how a phenomenological attitude can obscure rather than illuminate the object of its depiction. The film is a true story and follows a platoon of Navy Seals in Iraq as they find themselves surrounded by enemy combatants and must fight their way out of the building and into a tank escort they have called for. The film focuses on what one may consider the phenomenal aspects of warfare the ringing in the ears after an explosion, the dust and dirt that covers the soldiers and obscures their view, the confusion that is felt by the combatants who are frequently unsure of what is going on or what should be done and on the excruciating pain felt by the injured and dying. In this respect the film is somewhat a success however by focusing only on the surface of sensory perception the film obscures a political understanding of the war. The point of view of the enemy combatants and the civilians whose house the soldiers are staying is not explored. By focusing only on the banter and friendly relationships the soldiers have with one another we hear little of their thoughts about the war as a whole. In his 1936 work “Crisis of the European sciences” Husserl tries to grapple with the rejection of scientific rationality and the turn towards fascism in Europe (it is speculated that it is also a grappling with his protege Martin Heideggers turn towards Nazism.) To greatly simplify Husserl’s ideas he believes that by focusing science solely on objects in the form of physics chemistry etc… we have failed to turn our scientific rationality towards subjectivity itself and this in turn has allowed room for the kind of irrationality that allowed fascism take root in European society (similar but not the same as Horkheimer and Adornos critique of what they called “instrumental reason.”) The essential problem with this it that he believes that a science of subjectivity must be a science all of its own separate from the science of society and nature. This attitude essentially splits reality between subject and object leading either to a kind of scepticism in which our understanding is hopelessly removed from the external world or towards a reliance on immediacy in which external things yield themselves instantaneously to our understanding of them without the influence of history or society. This latter stance is on display in the movie “Warfare”. The film assumes that the reality of war is most present in its immediate revealing of itself to those closest to it, when in fact the unreflected upon opaque surface of phenomena does more to conceal than it does to illuminate. Sensory experience can only be a starting point and must be extrapolated from in order to understand the world. Another approach, that of new materialism which at first appearing to be an extremely different kind of philosophy is actually more of the same. In new materialism is the idea that we must set aside subjectivity which has been given in their view an inordinate amount of significance in philosophy (especially continental philosophy) and instead look towards the material world around us. This approach again tries to separate subjective experience from the world as though it is not a part of it as though our subjectivity was not itself material and a product of matter internal and external. By trying to bypass subjectivity or believing they have already done so they have in fact only entrenched themselves in a dogmatic sense certainty believing their seemingly instantaneous sensory data as being un-mediated and unformed by society or history. subjectivity is not a hinderance to our knowledge; we can only know anything because of our subjectivity. In their quest to eliminate the subject they have taken up what they call a “flat ontology” in which every material thing is given equal significance wether it be a rock or a human brain. Of course, to begin with, the idea of “importance” can never be separated from subjectivity but they have (as they are destined to do so with so many concepts when taking such a pre-critical metaphysics) only projected their ideas onto exterior things and seen them as elements of the thing in themselves. I don’t think it is unfair to suggest that much of what makes this approach seem possible is widespread commodity fetishism which is also prone to this kind of misplacement. This i also find to be an extremely spatial ideology inserting spatial ideas where they have little relevance does this not also give larger things more important than smaller things, enormous clouds of hydrogen gas in space the same importance or interest as the ecosystem of the sea floor or the inside of a brain. We see also in the popular concept of the ribosome as ideal, the same problem of flatness. In this view by giving any specific thing more importance or meaning than any other thing is equated with authoritarianism. Looking at ribosomal art is therefore like looking into the grey of television static. It is because of this urge to attempt at flattening reality in part that so much art with scientific or especially ecological pretensions appears so deadpan and inert. I would oppose the scientific art of phenomenology and new materialism with realism and science fiction two art forums that try to extrapolate from and move beyond immediate sensory data. Although Stendhal, one of the originators of french realism in the 19th century, said of his novel “Scarlett and Black” that he was trying to create the effect of a hand mirror poking out of the top of a handbag reflecting “the blue of the skies and the mire of the road below” but he also admitted that such a thing could not really be done and the philosophy or realism is in fact rather more subtle. In fact literary realism by building a world using the third person is able to show the kind of slippage that happens between a character and their immediate circumstance all the while portraying the degree to which their selfhood is shaped by the material world. Science fiction perhaps is able to extrapolate from science in as much more obvious sense. By abstracting into the future or into the improbable science fiction can portray science as a social force and depict its interplay with our everyday life. We see in much earlier science fiction for instance in Isaac Asimov’s “I Robot” a real tension between the scientific-technological ideas put forth and the artistic literary aspects of the work. In a way the stories act as a kind of puzzle and the consciousness of the characters is often treated as secondary. Their exists a concept of “Hard science fiction” in which a supposedly plausible science and its effect are explored however these stories tend to actually be less powerful and interesting than the science fiction that focuses primarily on literary quality and subjugates imaginary science to the purposes of art.
Capitalism arose alongside the scientific revolution because capitalism as a mode of production relied on increased productivity. By paying a set wage and taking a surplus rather than by taxing the lower classes the ruling class were incentivised to make the cultivation of nature more effective thereby increasing the surplus. However now that neo-liberal capitalism has begun to hollow out previously publicly owned institutions and focus more on a kind of primitive accumulation and rentism, the scientific veneer that has seemed to shroud capitalism is beginning to peel away with some Marxists even going so far as to call our age neo-feudal. Modern science has in many ways become less compatible with the illusions of capitalism. Biology has undermined common ideas about gender that have been useful for capitalist social reproduction. Climate science has changed our ideas about our relations to nature that have been useful to capitalism in its pursuit of accumulation. Modern physics undermines the kind of naive empiricism that naturalises capitalism and modern medicine concerning the covid 19 epidemic undermines the individualist ideology that makes capitalism palatable. Science is set in the service of predetermined goals governed by capitalist laws of reproduction and accumulation. Heidegger says in introduction to metaphysics “Even if we can’t do anything with it, may not philosophy in the end do something with us, provided that we engage ourselves with it?” (Heidegger, M. (2000) Heidegger compares philosophy’s seeming pointlessness with the utility of science but in so many ways the truths of science butt up against the ends of its employment. The scientific revolution demolished many of the received truths of the feudal system in a capitalism that has become somewhat feudal is it not surprising that we see such antagonism between science and the bourgeoisie and under these conditions it is most fruitful for Science to be insisted upon and for the artist to engage with it.
Visual art cannot adjust to commodification in the same way literature has (or for that matter the mediums that have never been anything else i.e cinema, video games etc…) Although visual art can in many cases can be reproduced (although not always perfectly compare for instance a reproduction of a painting to a screen print which can be reproduced exactly because it has no original.) people buy visual art primarily to put on their walls which is most often not an enormous space and usually expect the art to be up for a long period of time, compare this to a book or dvd where one will usually spend a couple of hours or days with the object and then put it to one side or get rid of it. The art object hen must be sold for a higher price focusing on making more per unit rather than selling as many units as possible at a low one. The book form also has the library in which people can request books for free or for a small fee (the film and other media formats also have the streaming service) this library form makes no sense in the case of visual art. The gallery is in the case of visual art the equivalent of the library in the sense that it allows people access to much more than what they would be able to buy outright. But the gallery is in many ways inherently less democratic than the library as people cannot simply request whatever artworks they want (partly for obvious logistical reasons.) Visual art in this way is not only negatively effected by market forces in the sense in that poor quality work will be produced intended to have a high commercial success and saleability rather than for its inherent qualities (as is the case with literature and cinema) for instance but also in the way people can have access to it after the work has been produced. The problems of art are not predominantly formal in nature and cannot be solved through formal innovation. Ideas in society can have no social power without corresponding political economic power and in a situation in which the means of production (including artistic production) are privately owned art will continue to be largely a tool of the ruling classes regardless of its inherent qualities. Why then continue to see any political potential in art at all? Because of what Hegel calls Retroactivity in which a things can only be understood through a kind of recollection. A good way of explaining this phenomenon is through the always popular apocalypse narrative. The word apocalypse comes from a Greek word meaning “to uncover”. The apocalypse does not just entail a rapid change in the present, but the present also re-contextualisation of the past. the most obvious example is the book of revelations, but i think perhaps a better example in our case, is John Wyndham’s 1951 novel “Day of the Triffids”. In “Day of the Triffids” there has been an incident in which most of the people on earth have been blinded by what appears to be a meteor shower. Gigantic plant based monsters called Triffids are let loose on society and most of the people on earth are killed. Near the end of the novel it becomes clear to the protagonist that the blinding event was caused by some kind of man made device created for use in the Cold War which has been triggered accidentally. With this information the protagonist learns the true causes for peoples blindness, and truly unveils to our hero the barbaric nature of pre-apocalyptic society. This kind of idea can be seen everywhere in apocalyptic literature and cinema for instance the iconic scene in Planet of the Apes, in which the protagonist sees the Statue of Liberty on what he had previously thought was another planet. The scene acts as a re-contextualising of the prior setting of the film as being apocalyptic. not only is this a revelation it also shows the past to have already been apocalyptic to begin with. We know that the future will contain a catastrophe that is currently in the making (hopefully not being apocalyptic in the sense of the world ending.) When people look back on our own time they will have a very different understanding of it as compared to those experiencing it directly And so too will they view the art we have produced differently and its significance will have changed the way we look at any historical artefact. So much of the hysteria that has come to exemplify modern cultural politics comes out of the impotence of class politics. In the USA (and until recently in the UK) voters have been forced to side with different factions within the bourgeoisie rather than organise around their social class. This is not to say that the Republicans are no worse than the Democrats or that no one should vote, just that a working class person who votes Democrat is siding with one segment of their class enemy over another (the Democrats tending to represent smaller capitalists, urban capitalists, black capitalists and until recently tech capitalism.) This has lead to the total cultural dominance of the bourgeoisie and almost all of the cultural conflicts that have played out in media and art have been internal to the bourgeoisie (between the Codependent categories of “liberal” and “conservative”) rather than conflicts between classes. But in Britain it seems like the two party duopoly is coming to an end and there may be an opportunity for large scale class politics to become prominent again. If this is the case then there may be opportunity for cultural politics to tie itself to real political power. And the art that was previously lying dormant will be reconsidered again.
References
Asimov, I. (1950). I Robot. New York: Gnome Press.
Balzer, D. (2025). This is Not New. London: Pluto Press
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London: Penguin.
Bernal, J.D.(1965). Science in History Volume 1 The Emergence of Science. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bernal, J.D.(1965). Science in History Volume 2 The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Cassegard, C (2021). Toward a Critical Theory of Nature. Dublin: Bloomsbury.
Catherine, Malabou. (1996). The Future of Hegel. New York: ROUTLEDGE.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1996) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press.
Engels, F. (1964). Dialectics of Nature. London: Progress Publishers.
Engels, F. Marx, K. (2022). THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY. London: Repeater press.
Feuerbach, L. (2008). The Essence of Christianity. USA: Dover publications.
Freud, S. (1975). INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHOANALYSIS. London: penguin.
Harman, G. (2018). Object-Oriented Ontology A New Theory of Everything. London: Penguin.
Harvey, D. (2005). A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALISM. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Heidegger, M. (1978). Basic Writings. New York: ROUTLEDGE
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (2000). INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS. New York: Yale University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Husserl, E. (1931). IDEAS GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO PURE PHENOMENOLOGY. Collier books: New York
Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press: USA
Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols. Garden City, N.Y., Anchor Books/Doubleday.
Kant, I. (1790). Critique of Judgement. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Kant, I. (1781). Critique of pure reason. London: Penguin.
Lukacs, G. (2000). History and Class Consciousness. USA: the MIT press.
Marx, K. (1976). Capital Volume 1. London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1970). CRITIQUE OF HEGEL’S ‘PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT’. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Marx, K. (2019). The Political Writings. London: Verso.
Morris, P. (2003). Realism (the new critical idiom) London: ROUTLEDGE
Morton, T. (2018). All Art is Ecological. Dublin: Penguin.
Nietzsche, F. (1996). On the Genealogy of Morals. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Norris, K. and Chambers, E. (eds.) (2025) Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds. London: Tate Publishing.
Sedgwick, S. (2012). Hegel’s Critique of Kant. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Shulamith, E. (1970). THE DIALECTIC OF SEX. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.
Stendhal. (1955). Scarlet and Black. London: Penguin.
Wyndham, J. (1951). THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Zahavi, D. (2003). Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Artificial Nature
The 2009 film “Avatar” exemplifies a certain type of technophobic disavowal that is endemic in late-20th and 21st century culture. Avatar is set in the mid-22nd century in which earth is on the brink of ecological collapse. Jake Sully a disabled man is sent to pandora, the habitable moon of a gas giant, which is in the process of being colonised by humans. Jake has been chosen because he has the same genetics as his deceased brother and because of this is able to control the synthetic body of one of the 10 foot tall humanoid aliens known as the Na’vi. He uses his Na’vi body to conduct reconnaissance on the native Na’vi peoples for the purposes of allowing the earth forces to conquer the land and gain control of the precious minerals underneath the Na’vi’s holy site, despite the fact that this will lead to the destruction of the entire planets eco-system. Jake instead becomes infatuated with the native peoples way of life and idyllic relation to nature and decides to side with the Na’vi against the humans and eventually becomes one with his Na’vi body.
I do not suggest that avatar is worthy of contemplation based on its artistic merit so much as because it was so immensely popular and seems to so succinctly convey so much contemporary ideology when thinking about ecological politics or lack there of. Consider the way in which the protagonist of the film is able to find meaning in and enjoy an idealised “primitive” way of life devoid of high technology. In contrast to this the futuristic comparably technologically advanced world of human-beings is shown to be environmentally destructive and nihilistic in reaching its goals of mineral extraction and the film ends with many of the humans either being vanquished or assimilated into the non-human native population. Although the message of the film is nominally progressive, (killing native people is bad) formally much of the film is a standard orientalist fantasy in which a western protagonist is supposedly able to experience a more authentic relation to nature as an indigenous person, or a “Noble Savage” as the trope is commonly referred to. However what makes avatar different and worthy of note is the way in which the protagonist is only able to gain access to this world of low-tech oneness with nature is actually facilitated through the kind of high-technology the fantasy seeks to disavow. The protagonist is able to become Native only because of the human technology that within the logic of the film is to blame for the destruction of an authentic natural way of life. This disavowal happens not only within the narrative of the film but also within the relationship between the film and the subject. When Avatar was first released it was considered a major technological breakthrough for computer generated imagery and was generally considered a big step forward, and yet the vision this technology was set toward bringing into the world included a denial of its own technological coming into being. The viewer of the film is able to enjoy a nostalgia for the lost past through the very technological means they supposedly seek to escape. I think it is important to see a how a critical Kantian approach can be important in such cases, an approach that always acknowledges the presence of the viewer and not just the thing being viewed as is the case in pre-critical philosophy and who’s ecological importance I will try to flesh out over the course of this essay along with other German idealist and Marxist approaches.
This technological attitude is common in many forums of new media that have arisen over the last half century. Take for instance the 2009 video game Flower in which as Alfie Bowen describes, “the user plays “the wind” and moves through the natural environment collecting beautiful petals in endless dromena-like cycles. It looks as though the player is free to let their mind wander, and indeed the game is designed to encourage relaxation and contemplation. Yet, of course, Flower is full of ideology, evoking the beauty of the natural world, fetishizing the “uncontaminated” pre-human environment and showing all sorts of resistance to any form of technological advance.” (Bown, A. (2018). Although the developers of the game are clear about their intention to create a game that is ideology free the game again exemplifies a technological disavowal. This intention to create an artwork that is ideology free itself leads the game to present its political content as being completely objective and natural again regressing to a pre critical view of the world, in which the subject is lacking in self consciousness and inevitably misapprehends its own particularity as being universal. For instance think of the way a medieval peasant would experience a walk through forest as compared to an office worker who spends an enormous amount of time sitting at a computer in both neither has a perception of the natural world that can be separated from their outlook.
So much of this ideology is present in video game and new technological media culture, consider how prevalent the motif of a protagonist of a video game beginning in a lush untainted pasture and slowly as the game becomes more hostile and difficult entering a landscape that is dominated by man made infrastructure and machinery ( the most famous example being Super Mario Bros.) An array of popular video games are set on fostering a fantasy of a less technologically mediated relation to the wilderness in which the player is able to wrestle with the nature either through post-apocalypse or medieval fantasy settings or increasingly with popular survival or farming simulators such as Minecraft or Stardew Valley. So we can see again technological innovation immediately being set in service of the denial of its own desirability. This can also be seen somewhat in the development of social media and the way in which it has been so instrumental in popularising scepticism towards medical technology and dietary science, as seen in growing online anti-vax sentiment or the trend of promoting unpasteurised milk consumption both based on a folk-political distrust of technological institutions. Such ideas foster an de-politicised view of the society by conceptualising the main ecological antagonism as being between a reified “humanity” and a fetishised “nature” instead of seeing ecological socio-political problems as being expressions of contradictions within society itself specifically between social classes.
Consider for instance the 1955 photography exhibition “the great family of man”. in which 503 photographs were presented depicting scenes of people from around the world involved various “human” activities and experiences in an effort to show humanity as a unified whole. Take for instance the image of an Inuit mother kissing her daughter as if to say “look even someone who lives in seemingly such a foreign way also has this universal experience.” As Roland Barthes notes about the exhibition “True, children children are always born: but in the whole mass of human problem, what does the ‘essence’ of this process matter to us, compared to its modes which, as for them are perfectly historical?”. Whilst some of the individual photographs show some merit and this attitude is superficially better than a reactionary approach that presents humanity as inevitably bifurcated due to racial difference. the exhibition instead seeks to overlook real contradictions that exist in society such as between social classes and between imperial citizens and imperial subjects instead dwelling inconsequential similarities. As Barthes says “but why not ask the parents of Emmet Till, the young Negro assassinated by the whites what they think of The Great Family of Man?” (Barthes, B. (1957) More importantly for our focus on ecology, this way of conceiving of the Human results in a reified conceptualisation of a unified and unique human interest, set in contrast to the supposed interests of nature. There is a vast difference between the kind of materialism that posits political-consciousness as determined by biological or species-being as opposed to being determined by contingent social-being. The interests being pursued by Oil companies and Bourgeois political institutions are are in fact inimical to the interests of the vast majority of people on earth and therefore not exemplary of a universal human interest.
In contrast to this, take the approach taken by Henry Moore in his 1942 drawing “Miners at work” in which the subjects depicted are seen in the particularity of their specific situation as underground dwellers rather than through the lens of a unifying human experience. The miners are squashed into the space of the drawings as though they have grown to fit into their surroundings the texture of flesh is rendered similarly to the texture of the cave itself. This attitude therefore fosters a more critical approach to towards the miners predicament and their specific interests. One objection to this viewpoint is the idea that it is dehumanising. However I would suggest that the ability to dehumanise is already dependent on a normalising conception of humanity, consider for instance in the nazi regime in which the supposed “Arian” peoples are associated with an unchanging nature as opposed to Jews, communists and homosexuals who were associated with “culture” and therefore with a free-floating contingency, in short you need to value the idea of comprehensive humanity in order to dehumanise others to begin with.
To take a closer look at how the conservative view of nature functions aesthetically I think it would be enlightening to compare two soviet artworks, Alexander Rodchenko’s (1929) “Shukhov transmission tower” and Boris Vladimirski’s (1949) “Roses for Stalin”. In Rodchenko’s photograph the Shukhov Tower is pictured from an extremely acute angle almost to the point of rendering the picture abstract, the image is clearly meant to venerate technological dynamism standing above and transforming the land rather than being tied to it and subjugated by it. In contrast to this “Roses for Stalin” embodies a more conservative, normative position both in relation to artistic form, towards political authority ( with Stalin occupying a position similar to the tzar ) and towards nature ( the image is framed by an idealised nature and therefore implying that the scene embodies is natural and correct order of things.) my aim is not to simply point out that that the latter image is more conservative than the former which is obvious. The interesting thing is that the historical period between “Shukhov transmission Tower” and “Roses for Stalin” is one of the biggest technological and industrial leaps in human history and in a relatively short period in time. Boris Groys makes the case in his book “The Total Art of Stalinism” that rather than consider the Russian Avant-Garde and Socialist Realism as opposites it is better to consider the latter as a strategic retreat that allows for perusing of the formers ideals. The aesthetic of unchanging natural order essentially acts as an anaesthetising supplement that manufactures consent for enormous and rapid socio-political and technological changes and therefore changes in peoples relation to nature. Another example of this could be the suppression of futurism under Italian fascism or the veneer of traditionalism that allowed for the restructuring of British society under the thatcher government ( again a type of disavowal. ) For this reason I would suggest that rather than considering conservatism as specific political position we consider it as a type of rhetoric not tied to any specific political programme, after all if the people in our society who commonly refer to themselves as conservative were left in charge what element of society would be preserved other than the very class domination which is itself the very agent of social acceleration and environmental destruction they claim to be against in their rhetoric.
In the communist manifesto Marx and Engels write of the contradictory nature of capitalism’s relation to superstition and religion. On the one hand capitalism has a disenchanting effect, under capitalism “all that is sacred is profaned” (Marx, K. (2019) but despite capitalisms initial ability to wash away feudal superstitions the bourgeoisie increasingly find the need to maintain such illusions even as they are undermined by the system they support, in order to justify their domination of the lower classes and increasingly to shift the blame for ecological catastrophe the capitalist class has begun to erode the enlightenment ideals they exposed when they were an ascending class. Marx writes in The German Ideology “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” and this is no less true for dominant environmental ideology. I should also like to point out that a political or artistic outlook is to be found primarily in its supposed positions, stated aims or content but In its form and method and it is in these elements that unhelpful ideology most often able to fester and passify the masses.
In recent times much of the ecologically inspired art that is produced serves (not to the artists knowing) the purpose of mystifying the political reality of the ongoing environmental catastrophe by accepting a religious or pagan attitude which essentially views environmental antagonisms through a moral lens by anthropomorphising nature. Again I think it would be useful to apply a kanthan lens, by eschewing a critical approach in which the subjects experience is formatted to the subjects understanding and instead viewing our perception of nature as it is given an unmediated encounter with the thing-in-itself we are liable to project ourselves onto nature. Although it may seem as though by assigning blame on ourselves as humans this approach could be somewhat empowering, as Slavoj Zizek writes “this readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives.” Not only does this attitude assume a level of democracy that really doesn’t exist in capitalist society, it tends to show itself in “frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something.” I think an exhibition that goes some way to extinguishing such illusions is Mike Nelson’s retrospective “Extinction Beacons” at the Haywood gallery in which deals with environmental and nuclear catastrophe in a non sentimental-neurotic way. The exhibition is made up of a series of instillations made up of found objects and artist created architectural elements that together paint a picture of a dystopian world made from the waste of our own. Environmental collapse is presented as unimaginable catastrophe rather than as the more familiar moralistic narrative. For Nelson the climate catastrophe is an immense In-itself something that exists as of yet outside of our attempts to narrativise it. Consider for instance another society dealing with (or be it failing to deal with) catastrophic social antagonisms : the late Soviet Union, in which the political-economic contradictions that were tearing society apart were unable to be properly articulated despite the fact everyone had an understanding of their existence. This is because the ideology produced by a system always has a tendency towards reproducing the social relations under which it was formed, in the case of the Soviet Union this had the effect of creating A kind of double consciousness known as “Hyper-normalisation” in which the subject is torn between an individual ( and therefore socially In-valid ) understanding of the systems collapsing and a hegemonic Ideological (and therefore socially validated) worldview that normalises the catastrophe and projects current social relations into the future. It is partly for this reason that as Hegel points out the correct political ideas always arrive too late. we are always guided by unconscious social forces, but we can lend credibility to the logical understanding of our systems un-sustainability by representing our unrecognised social catastrophe through art. Nelson’s walkable instillations help the viewer visualise what is mostly repressed in culture. If we compare this to a different exhibition at the Haywood “Dear Earth” in which much of the art seemed to understand the environmental catastrophe through the lens of a kind of paganism, even the name anthropomorphises the natural world. The exhibition was full of sentimental and fetishising depictions of foliage, water and other natural elements again tending towards a narrative of the kind of aforementioned narcissistic guilt. Ironically their attitude although seemingly opposite actually re creates the kind of problems that come from understanding nature solely through the lens of ultra-positivist scientific lens. This problem is caused by a return to a pre-critical philosophy in which knowledge is seen to be gleaned somehow separately from the subject. Whilst the subject tries to comprehend nature without self-consciousness the subject inevitably projects its own particularity onto its object. Consider for instance a pagan who worships a tree. The pagan transfers the particularity of his own being, a social-being for which the concept of worshiping makes some sense onto the particularity of the trees being for which it does not, the tree does not care.
I would like to finish this essay with a contradictory reading of the painting “The Sea of Ice” by Caspar David Friedrich. The painting depicts a shipwreck at the base of a large pyramid of broken ice in the aftermath of a failed arctic expedition. I want to focus on the conception of nature presented within the logic of the painting, it is easy to see presented an antagonistic relationship between subjects and nature, man has been unable to conquer nature physically ( as is obvious from the paintings subject matter ) but is also unable to comprehend nature, has been unable to subject nature to his reason. The enormous shards of ice that jut out of the earth, the extreme zig zagging angles and the barren plateau are seemingly set to defy human reason. It is well known that Friedrich’s paintings were made in part in response to the French Revolution and i think also in response to the radical revolutionary conception of nature. Famously many of the most radical of the french revolutionaries were influenced by the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau saw nature as an ideal, in the original state of nature men lived in harmony it is only with the corrupting influence of society that man has succumbed to a state of unreason. During the most radical phase of the revolution the jacobins even replaced the Gregorian calendar with their own republican calendar that would replace months named after rulers and gods (for instance July is named after Julius Caesar) and instead name them after elements of nature which was held up as rational guides in the pursuit of human freedom, for instance the month Brumaire derived from the french word Brumemeaning fog. Where as the revolutionaries see nature as a guiding hand in our pursuit of reason, for Friedrich nature is what defies reason, the explorers in their attempt to subject the arctic to their reason have found instead of a new frontier a wall of unreasonable wastes at a scale they are unable to comprehend. I would like again to circle back to German idealism.
Kants early critical philosophy focused a question; What must mind be like in order to be able perceive nature? Kant comes to the conclusion that our mind formats manifold sensory data to our understanding even going so far as taking up a position of agnosticism towards the existence of space and time as they are so necessary for our perception that we cannot conceive of a world without them (after Einstein we now know that although space and time do exist they exist in a way that defies our perception and in fact are elements of the same thing.) Because of this according to Kant when we look at nature we are unable to make a judgement because we are looking at something that has been formatted to comport with the conditions of our perception. The most important take away is to always remember our own role in perceiving the external world, we never do so passively and believing otherwise will lead to innumerable epistemological errors. However Kant’s philosophy leads to a kind of scepticism, he believes there is a un-formatted in-itself world which could be said to exist forever outside our perception. For Schelling the solution to this problem is rather than to ask as Kant does; What must mind be like in order to perceive nature? We should ask the question; What must nature be like in order to produce mind? In this reading the contradictions in our society rather than being contrasted with the supposed innocence of nature are actually expressions of the nature that produced it. On the other hand a view of nature as being outside of our understanding or as something that has to be subjugated to our reason is rebuked, because reason is not a tool we apply to the external world but something that is an element of nature itself. As Hegel writes “the rational is the actual and the actual is the rational” (Hegel, G. (1820) rather than an expression of conservative political sentiment as it is often read this should be instead be read as a dismissal of a “state of nature” in political thought as there really is no other state. So in our understanding of Friedrich’s painting, the tumultuous icy landscape, the endless plain we should try not to see this turbulence as inimical to human reason and society but try to see both as a continuous with and the birthplace of human reason and that the tension and antagonisms of nature and of society are reflections of one another.
References
Barthes, B. (1957). Mythologies. Paris: Vintage.
Bown, A. (2018). The Playstation Dreamworld. Cambridge: Polity.
Engels, F. Marx, K. (2022). THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY. London: Repeater press.
Hegel, G. (1820). Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Kant, I. (1790). Critique of Judgement. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Kant, I. (1781). Critique of pure reason. London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (2019). The Political Writings. London: Verso.
Schelling, F. (1800). SYSTEM OF TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM. Virginia: THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF VIRGINIA.
About the author
MacSen Calvert graduated from MA Fine Art: Printmaking at Camberwell College of Arts in 2025.