[microsound] Marxist aesthetics and Marxist aesthetics...

[Charles Turner]

Hey all-

One thing that's been implicit in these recent postings, but not 
directly remarked upon, is the variety of work that might be termed 
"Marxist Aesthetics." This isn't something I've thought a great deal 
about, and many of you will undoubtedly already undertand my point, but 
here goes.

Just to keep things brief, let's consider that there are at least two 
strain of Marxist aesthetics: the first might be characterized as a 
dialectical, historical materialism applied to the entire historical 
and global universe of artworks. This category applies aspects of 
Marxist thought to better understand cultural products of which only a 
minority of have been produced under contemporary socialist conditions. 
In our future classless utopia, presumably we would still want to 
appreciate and discuss artworks of the capitalist bourgeoisie. 
Presumably, Duchamp's "Fountain" won't be restocked at the local 
plumbing supply house.

The second might be characterized as the elucidation of an aesthetic, 
or theory of production, of culture designed to express solidarity with 
the proletariat. This is the kind of Marxist aesthetics explored in 
Mao's celebrated Yenan Talks, which book should not be dismissed too 
quickly. The relation between artists and representatives of the 
proletariat has never been simple, but art is not a revolutionary force 
on its own, and the most significant socially-concerned art has been 
produced in alliances with revolutionary avant-gardes.

I'm not here to make an argument for a preference for one type of 
Marxist aesthetics. Any art work coming from a person grappling with 
their contemporary material conditions evinces social concern. But I am 
critical of my class, and frequently wonder about how to honestly 
approach a wider audience in both content and form.

But who today is the proletariat? In the United States, although we 
have always masked class distinctions with racial characterizations, 
our industrial workforce is weak and has been shrinking for the last 
30-odd years. Andrew Ross has recently published an essay, however, 
that suggests a redefinition of the proletariat, and most interestly, 
speculates on the possibility of mutual recognition of the precarious 
"creative class," and the typically migrant service worker at the 
bottom of the economic ladder.

It's worth a read if only for the very good portrait of temporary 
creative labor conditions, and the predicament that I imagine many of 
us find ourselves in:

<http://www.vze26m98.net/anechoic/ross-2008.pdf>

"Not surprisingly for a policy-intensive paradigm, statistics generated 
about the creative sector have been legion. By contrast, there has been 
precious little attention to the quality of work life with which such 
livelihoods are associated. No doubt it is ritually assumed that 
creative jobs, by their nature, are not deficient in gratification. If 
anything, their packaging of mental challenges and sensuous 
self-immersion is perceived to deliver a surplus of pleasure and 
satisfaction. Proponents of this line of thinking may well concede that 
the life of creatives, in the past, has also been associated with 
misery, frustration and deprivation, but the given wisdom is that those 
pitfalls were primarily the result of economic inattention and social 
marginalization. In a milieu where creativity is celebrated on all 
sides, such drawbacks will surely dissolve.

Yet the ethnographic evidence on knowledge and creative industry 
workplaces shows that job gratification, for creatives, still comes at a 
heavy sacrificial cost – longer hours in pursuit of the satisfying 
finish, price discounts in return for aesthetic recognition, 
self-exploitation in response to the gift of autonomy, and 
dispensability in exchange for flexibility. If policymakers were to 
undertake official surveys of the quality of work life, they would find 
the old formula for creative work very much alive and well in its newly 
marketized environment. In this respect, arguably the most 
instrumentally valuable aspect of the creative work traditions is the 
carry-over of coping strategies, developed over centuries, to help 
endure a feast-or-famine economy in return for the promise of success 
and acclaim. The combination of this coping mentality with a production 
code of aesthetic perfectibility is a godsend for managers looking for 
employees capable of self-discipline under the most extreme job 
pressure. It is no surprise, then, that the ‘artist’ has been seen as 
the new model worker for high-skill, high-reward employment."