Worlds to Win: A Novel with a Critical Introduction to Insurrectionary Aesthetics
ABSTRACT
This thesis consists of a critical introduction and a novel that explore the relation of contemporary narratives to late neoliberal ideologies and material conditions, climate change, and discursive practices that might disrupt neoliberal hegemony, and theorize the possibility of imagining utopia through narrative and aesthetic experimentation. The introduction examines the historical aesthetics and politics debate within Marxist aesthetic theory, analyzing past theories and practices within the context of neoliberalism and its attendant climate crisis in order to theorize potentially emancipatory, insurrectionary aesthetics. The novel, Worlds to Win, attempts a parallel, embodied solution to the same theoretical problems. It interweaves several narrative threads—a contemporary global socialist revolution, an interrogation at the end of time concerning trillions of years of class struggle across the universe, a reverse history of capitalism glimpsed through tableau vignettes, and the formation of the universe—each rendered in its own idiosyncratic formal strategy. This novel attempts to map our real relations of existence, negate ideologies and aesthetics of capitalist realism, and articulate glimpses of and produce desires for a future of Full-On Fully-Automated Luxury Green Interspecies Feminist Queer Space Communism of Color.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been working on this novel and critical introduction, in one form or another, for nearly four years. In that time, the concept, content, and formal strategies constituting it have undergone a number of reconsiderations and reconfigurations, all informed by the many productive readings, seminars, guided independent studies, office hours visits, informal conversations, relationships, and institutional support of which my time in the Cal State LA Department of English has consisted. It might seem a bit cliché, but the intellectual, creative, and personal debts without which this project would never have come to fruition amount to an enormous sum, and to give a full account of this portfolio would require at least another full book. Therefore, my hope here is to briefly acknowledge those individuals and institutions who have played significant roles in this project’s development, and to ask forgiveness of any whom I might fail to specifically name in this space that is all too insufficient for the task at hand.
Among the many individuals who provided intellectual stimulation, mentorship, and, at times, friendship, of fundamental importance to this project, none played more significant roles than my thesis committee members: Andrew Knighton, committee chair, who introduced me to literary theory in general, and Marxist critical and aesthetic theory in particular, thus forever changing the course of my intellectual, creative, and personal life, as well as critically reshaping the concerns and form of this novel, and who always made himself available to discuss some theoretical nuance, literary observation, or nascent creative possibility; Patrick Sharp, who guided my development as a scholar and theorist of science fiction, who introduced me to the science fiction studies community, who read several early drafts of sections of this novel, and who always made himself available for some of the most stimulating and thought-provoking discussions of science fiction literature and theory I have ever had; Alex Espinoza, whose mentorship as an author was invaluable for developing an approach to creative writing attentive to the challenges of theoretically-informed development of character, plot, setting, and narrative, and who provided guidance regarding creative writing process, without which I never would have produced the current manuscript; Benjamin Bateman, whose interest and willingness to discuss problems of contemporary theory, particularly those of speculative and new materialisms, prepared me to explore many of the issues and problems this novel attempts to productively engage. Much of the credit for this novel’s successes belongs to them, but the blame for its shortcomings or failures are mine alone.
Many other individuals provided counsel, conversation, comradery, and feedback that in some way nurtured and shaped this project, in various ways and at various times, whether knowingly or not (presented here in no particular order): Erik Vargas, Jana Schmidt, Alfred Rodriguez, Isabel Jaramillo, Andrew Verdekel, Bianca Johnston-Marquez, David Higgins, Atef Laouyene, Maria Karafilis, Jun Liu, Michael Calabrese, Mary Bucci Bush, Jim Garrett, Bidhan Roy, Hema Chari, Graham Harman, Elisabeth Fairchild, Carrie Cole, Jen Gunnels, Mark Bould, Josh Pearson, Katherine Bishop, and others still whom I have undoubtedly failed to mention, and of whom I would ask forgiveness. I must also acknowledge my mother, Mary Shipko, my stepfather, Gary Smith, and my brother, John Shipko, for their love and support throughout my graduate studies. And of course, I owe my lifelong fascination with and love of science fiction to my now-deceased father, David Shipko, Sr.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge the vital support of the Cal State LA Office of Graduate Studies, whose monetary grants enabled me to purchase many of the literary, theoretical, and historical texts that guided and informed my research and writing, as well as to travel to several conferences to present early versions of arguments and concepts critical to the development of this project.
Without these individuals and institutions, this project would not exist.
INTRODUCTION
Toward an Insurrectionary Aesthetic
The novel you now hold in your hands, or perhaps have laid on your desk, or perhaps are reading on some screen, is offered not only as a story but as an act at once aesthetic and political, political because aesthetic, aesthetic because political. All writings are political, perhaps most especially those which present themselves apolitically. This novel is not of the latter variety. It makes no attempt to disguise or dissemble its politics. While historical contingencies, especially those uniquely American, have in the past imposed upon revolutionary praxis a certain necessity for camouflage and disguise, the time for privileging such tactics has passed. As social, political, identity, and class antagonisms are everyday made more visible by the maturing crises of late neoliberalism—climate change, intensifying exploitation and injustice, resurgent fascism, and so on—emancipatory thought is ethically bound to step forth onto new battlegrounds, not abandoning its hard-won guerrilla skills, but adopting new strategies, confronting its nemesis directly, wherever it may without exposing itself to destruction. As a realm in which social perceptions, consciousness, and relations are (re)produced, literature is key terrain, which must be fought for, seized, and held against counter-attack.
The purpose of this introduction is to acquaint the reader with a tradition of thinking aesthetics and/as politics that this novel has inherited and into which it seeks to intervene, in order to both account for this particular novel’s narrative and aesthetics, and to condition further thinking about the aporia presented by the broader questions this novel engages.
The debate constituting the tradition of Marxist aesthetic theorizing has left little doubt as to aesthetics’s political nature. And yet, the same debate, especially the line running from Nikolaj Chernyshevsky through Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Fredric Jameson, has also revealed that identifying particular aesthetics with particular politics remains difficult. However, historical disagreement has revealed common ground: the recognition that certain aesthetics, within certain historical circumstances, can participate in political and social revolution. In this essay, we will attempt to theorize a contemporary revolutionary aesthetic, specifically with regards to literature (although developed concepts might be productively translated into other artistic mediums), and specifically from the perspective of literary production. A revolutionary literature must consist of a particular content and a particular form. Certain contents—e.g. plots of class struggle or overthrow of the ruling class, characters developing class consciousness or fighting oppression, utopic renderings or distopic critique, and so on—can be useful for such a literature, but they are insufficient. As aesthetics must also be conceived through questions of form, our point of departure is a two-fold inquiry that encompasses the total process of literary production: What to represent, and how to represent it? This question is immediately complicated by the analysis that language’s ideological aspect and the maturation and globalization of the culture industry under neoliberalism together produce a historical situation in which the medium of literary production—not to mention mediation itself—can provide no access to anything like a position purged of ideology. However, although an ideologically uncompromised aesthetic is today less attainable than ever before, re-reading a thread of the Marxist aesthetics and politics debate through a simultaneously positive and negative dialectic synthesizes a concept of aesthetics, which, placed within a constellation of our contemporary material conditions and ideologies, produces a point of departure for developing aesthetics which might be correctly identifiable as revolutionary. The measure of revolutionary aesthetics will not—as it cannot—be ideological purity but capacity to sabotage the reproduction of one world while simultaneously working to build another.
To arrive at this destination, we will trace and analyze a tradition of thinking aesthetics and politics, from Plato to Fredric Jameson, in order to develop an understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, particularly for Marxist aesthetic theory, where the debate came to pivot around the heavily contested categories of realism and modernism, especially as each related to the problem of totality. I intend to demonstrate how realism and modernism produced certain representational possibilities, how each failed to achieve its ends, how these failures revealed the necessity for and path towards a new modality, and, finally, how neoliberalism and its attendant ecological crisis demand attempts to develop this new modality through synthesizing realism and modernism into an insurrectionary aesthetic. We will briefly explore how this new aesthetic modality suggests certain generic alignments and experimentations, particularly with speculative fiction and eschatology, before finally turning to consider one attempt to realize this new aesthetic in praxis, the attempt that is this novel.
1. A (Pre-)History of Aesthetics and(/as) Politics
Although the question of the relation between aesthetics and politics runs throughout—indeed grounds and shapes all—Marxist aesthetic theory, this question was not first posed by Marxist thinkers. The Marxist school inherits and intervenes in a deep history of thought as old as aesthetics itself, for the question of the relation of aesthetics and politics arose simultaneous to the aesthetic object and the polis as their objective, if unconscious, mediation within the historical social totality. Marxism’s intervention and contribution was to introduce self-reflexivity and thus self-consciousness that denaturalized what previous theorists had taken as givens: their social orders. Thus, given this particular historical situation, the Marxist aesthetic tradition under consideration becomes most legible when approached through its pre-history.
Every historic attempt to understand aesthetics has engaged with its contemporary politics, just as every politics has always produced an aesthetic. When Plato declared in his Republic that the Ideal Republic must eject poets for the danger they pose to the development of state-approved morals, allowing the continued existence only of poets-degraded-to-propagandists, he was articulating not only a political position but an aesthetic one as well, not through positive outlining but by the negative rejection of poetic and aesthetic practices dangerous to the development of state-allegiant consciousness. When Aristotle theorized the cathartic function of tragedy in his Poetics, he was describing not only a social function of tragedy but a political one, for a population purged of negative emotions through theater might be less able and thus less likely to sublimate such negativity into political action against the polis, while also implicitly articulating an aesthetics, for aesthetic practices which might impede a tragedy’s movement towards catharsis could become seen as undesirable. When Longinus theorized the sublime, he defined it as the transportive effect of elevated language that “bring[s] power and irresistible might to bear, and reign[s] supreme over every hearer,” identifying this powerful aesthetic moment as domination by the sovereign aesthetic object over its subjected audience, transposing a politics into an aesthetics, simultaneously using each to validate and elevate the other (97); to support his theory, Longinus judged Sappho’s poetry “excellent” for its “uniting [of] contradictions” into a “single whole,” implicitly arguing that Sappho’s powerful affect derived from her aesthetic reproduction of the (Roman) imperial political structure (104); in light of this theorizing, it should come as no surprise that Longinus concluded by denouncing freedom in favor of totalitarian domination: “Nay, it is perhaps better for men like ourselves to be ruled than to be free, since our appetites, if let loose without restraint upon our neighbors like beasts from a cage, would set the world on fire with deeds of evil” (Longinus 108). For Longinus, art most succeeds where it most completely rules.
This inextricable twining of aesthetics and politics runs through every major pre-modern critic and theory: e.g. through Saint Augustine’s theory of interpretation; through Christine De Pisan’s critical evisceration of The Romance of the Rose for its representation of women; through Sir Philip Sidney’s proscription in “An Apology for Poetry” that the ultimate goal of all art is right action; through Samuel Johnson’s declaration in “Preface to Shakespeare” that “the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing” (219); through Kant’s theorizing in Critique of Judgment of the beautiful in relation to the good, the useful, the ugly, and necessity; through Kant’s theorizing of the sublime vis-a-vis the emerging bourgeois conceptions of nature and subjectivity. These critics do not all agree on which aesthetics or politics are most desirable, but their disagreement reinforces their commonality, expressed consciously or unconsciously, implicitly or explicitly, that to discuss aesthetics is to discuss politics, as well as vice-a-versa. Thus, as we move in to the immediately pre-Marxist period, we might shift from conceiving of the relation as “aesthetics and politics” to “aesthetics and/as politics,” for aesthetics becomes recognizable as politics even as it remains outside politics, seeking its own autonomy.
Indeed, the central problem of aesthetics’ autonomy from the social partially structures the aesthetic paradigm into which the Marxist tradition emerged. L’art pour l’art, “art for art’s sake,” the thought and movement that wanted to make art stand entirely apart from moral, ethical, or political categories, emerged (tellingly) and was embraced in the early-19th century within the nation-states where the bourgeois revolutions were most advanced, and thus where the material conditions necessary for the dominance of bourgeois thought had been most firmly established. Often credited to French novelist Théophile Gautier, but also championed by his contemporaries, including Victor Cousin, Benjamin Constant, Oscar Wilde, and Edgar Allan Poe, l’art pour l’art was the theoretical projection into the aesthetic of the Kantian in-itself, an idea which—perhaps more so than any other—reflected the emergence and underwrote the perpetuation of the commodity form by authorizing the reification of processes into things, which could then become nothing more than empty vessels to be filled by the perceiving (individual) subject, who Kant conveniently placed at the center of the universe. To make art for art was to make of art both object and subject, eliding the subjects creating and perceiving art, eliminating art’s constitutive mediation, both its possibility and its connection to the historical social totality. That the literary and philosophical figures in question might have had little to no contact, whether direct or indirect, does nothing to undermine the thesis that l’art pour l’art reflected and sought to reproduce bourgeois social forms and relations, including, but not limited to, the commodity form, bourgeois individualism, and the mystification of the capitalist order; in fact, were it demonstrated that every adherent of l’art pour l’art never interacted or exchanged ideas in any way, this would only strengthen the argument, for to explain their shared theoretical destination we would be left with recourse to their only remaining commonality: their lives within the advanced bourgeois orders.
However, l’art pour l’art inadvertently revealed its own limit and laid the foundations for its own overthrow, for the proposed ideal of absolute autonomy revealed at once its own impossibility, insofar as such autonomy could only ever be predicated on autonomy from and thus remain a relation undermining autonomy’s ideal, and that this failure always drove art back into the folds of that from which autonomy wanted to extract art, namely the social, of which art was always-already the crystallization. Alongside, and entangled with, l’art pour l’art, neo-classicism and romance endlessly mined the past for narrative and aesthetic forms, reproducing and re-experiencing the past(-as-past) in order to construct the bourgeois order as the end of history, while simultaneously creating an additional curtain to obfuscate contemporary relations of existence. That the artworks of these movements inevitably reproduced the contradictions of their time, and therefore failed to achieve full identity with the movements’ respective ideals, in no way undermines our critique of these movements as movements. Together, these aesthetic movements—unified by the theoretical reflections embodied by l’art pour l’art—constituted the bourgeois regime of art, against which the emergent Marxist tradition would take aim, beginning with the realist theory of the pre-Marxist, Nikolaj Chernyshevsky.
Chernyshevsky’s “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality” (1853) provides a particularly useful point of departure for tracing the development of the modern Marxist aesthetics and/as politics debate, largely owing to his historical importance. It is no coincidence that Lenin named one of his most important writings by borrowing the title of Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is To Be Done? (1863), wherein Chernyshevsky’s theory found concrete expression that, “far more than Marx’s Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution” (Frank 68). Chernyshevsky’s literary theory was revolutionary and contributed much to the development of the revolutionary theory and praxis that produced a world-historic, socialist revolution. Any project theorizing contemporary revolutionary aesthetics would ignore Chernyshevsky at its own peril.
Chernyshevsky’s theory defined and championed a certain form of realism: “The essential purpose of art is to reproduce everything in life that is of interest to man. Very often, especially in poetical works, the explanation of life, judgment of its phenomena, also comes to the fore” (Chernyshevsky 9). His theory turns on the phrase “of interest to man,” by which is meant “everything in reality (in nature and in life) that is of interest to man not as a scholar but as an ordinary human being” (5). For Chernyshevsky, interest was determined by necessity, and the value of the artwork was determined in relation to satisfying some need, for “the things man makes must have their end in the satisfaction of man’s needs and not in themselves” (3).
What need did art satisfy? Against those who claimed art satisfied a need for beauty, Chernyshevsky argued that art’s beauty could never surpass reality’s; instead, the need art satisfied was the need to comprehend, to understand life in a manner complementary to the other study of life, science (including the special science of history): “Science and art (poetry) are manuals for those beginning the study of life” (9). Though Chernyshevsky primarily discussed what he saw as art’s proper content, he also implicitly argued for a form unified with its content, fully identified with art’s defined purpose. For example, Chernyshevsky dismissed the inclusion of excessive details of natural beauty or of details in general which are not essential to representing the truth of reality. In this theory, literature occupied a privileged position for its capacities for explanation and elimination of non-essentials from representations.
Even this cursory reading of Chernyshevsky’s theory makes clear its rejection of the theoretical basis of the bourgeois aesthetic regime, especially l’art pour l’art, in favor of an aesthetic that, rather than obfuscating present real relations, labors to render those relations legibly. Rather than struggling for its own autonomy from the social, reproducing life-as-lived became art’s highest calling. The vitality of this theory, and its connectedness with its time, is made evident by the scene of Chernyshevsky’s dissertation defense, as reported by Nikolaj Vasil’evich Shelgunov, “a leading progressive writer of the day,” worth reproducing in full for the wealth of contemporary perspective it provides on the reception and thus theoretical and political orientation of the new realism (Scanlan 4):
The small auditorium reserved for the defense was jammed with spectators. Some were students, but there appeared to be more outsiders — officers and young civilians. It was so crowded that spectators (I among them) were standing in the windows….Chernyshevsky defended the dissertation with his customary modesty but with the firmness of unshakeable conviction. After the defense, Pletnev (who presided) turned to Chernyshevsky and remarked: “That certainly is not what I taught you in my lectures!” True, it was not what Pletnev had taught; what he taught could not have transported the audience into the ecstasy to which Chernyshevsky’s dissertation brought them. Everything in it was new and alluring — its ideas, is arguments, its simplicity, its clarify of exposition….Only Pletnev and the professors sitting with him remained unmoved. (Scanlan 4)
Of this scene, philosopher James Scanalan observes, “it was not so much the thesis of realism as its precise conceptual surroundings that gave Chernyshevsky’s views such force” (5). What Scanlan overlooks is that those conceptual surroundings acquired much of their situational potency from the theory, which was itself a condensation of and revolution within those conceptual surroundings. Scanlan argues that “[less] important…than the idea of reproducing reality were the qualifications Chernyshevsky attached to that idea,” which he synthesizes as: (1) The artist must employ his realism selectively in the service of human needs, (2) The artist should treat his subject in such a way as to explain the reality he reproduces, (3) In addition to reproducing and explaining reality, the artist should evaluate it, and (4) The artist, in reproducing reality, may project a desirable future situation that does not now exist (Scanlan 5, 7, 9, 10). The division that Scanlan draws between the “the idea of reproducing reality” and “the qualifications” reproduces precisely the aesthetic ideal against which Chernyshevsky was revolting, namely that one could reproduce reality except through the process Scanlan reduces to “qualifications”; against this, Chernyshevsky demonstrates that the reproduction of reality is a conscious, subjective act with specific political dimensions, aims, and responsibilities. Chernyshevsky had identified and theoretically claimed literature as a realm of class struggle. No wonder he was met with such popular excitement and institutional unease.
2. Marxist Aesthetics: Realism vs. Modernism
Through embracing rather than disavowing art’s social character, Chernyshevsky helped establish the theoretical articulation, examination, and defense of realism that would become a central concern of the Marxist tradition, whether affirmatively, as with Georg Lukács, or negatively, as with Theodor Adorno, who would return to l’art pour l’art and there discover something which could become, under the twentieth century’s late capitalism, revolutionary. Thus, realism was born from conflict with a tradition that would one day be inherited by what Marxist aesthetic theory would hold up as realism’s theoretical antithesis, modernism, against which realism was theorized and advanced by Lukács.
In “Realism in the Balance” (1938), Lukács argued for a realist aesthetic by both positive and negative routes, asserting realism’s capacities and critiquing what he called anti-realist movements, including Naturalism, Expressionism, Surrealism—and modernism, the “so-called avant-garde” (29): “A vital relationship to the life of the people, a progressive development of the masses’ own experiences—this is the great social mission of literature” (“Realism” 55). Luckás argued that literature should aspire to reflect “reality as it truly is, and not merely…confine itself to reproducing whatever manifests itself immediately and on the surface,” the latter operation being the great crime of which he convicted Expressionism and other “literary schools of the imperialist era…[who] take reality exactly as it manifests itself to the writer and the characters he creates” (33, 36). Thus, Lukács continued the Chernyshevskian realist tradition even as he transformed it through the method and analysis that had been unavailable to Chernyshevsky’s pre-Marxist theory.
However, breaking from Chernyshevsky, Lukács argued that realism’s end was not the reproduction “of everything in life that is of interest to man” but rather of totality. Realism’s great promise was its ability to pierce the veil of chaotic immediacy characterizing life—particularly under advanced capitalism—and reveal the mediated real relations constituting that life. Thus, the realist’s “goal is to penetrate the laws governing objective reality and…uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society” (38). Expressionism and other movements of the so-called avant-garde remained trapped at the level of immediacy, of appearance, and so could ultimately do nothing except reproduce that immediacy and its (false) consciousness. Realism achieved its promise through abstraction, but an abstraction contrary to that of the so-called avant-garde; while the latter abstracted away from reality, the former used abstraction to produce “a new immediacy, one that is artistically mediated…sufficiently transparent to allow the underlying essence to shine through” (39). For achieving this end, one particularly important and vital realist tool was the creation of types, characters constituted by representing “the lasting features in people, in their relations with each other and in the situations in which they have to act…those elements which endure over long periods and which constitute the objective human tendencies of society and indeed of mankind as a whole” (47). For Lukács, types embodied the general relations and contradictions constituting their society, and as these type characters interacted with other characters within unfolding situations, their interactions—action, dialogue, conflicts, resolutions, and so on—their development, and their fates revealed their real relations of existence. Lukács claimed that the “true literary avant-garde” was in fact the realists, for they alone possessed the artistic capacity to represent real relations and lead the charge against ideology, which in the works of the “so-called avant-garde” was merely reproduced, whether consciously or unconsciously (48). Realism was re-affirmed as the aesthetic of correct consciousness and, by extension, revolution.
Realism’s historical appearance as the initial paradigm for Marxist literature should come as no surprise. Realism first emerged in a moment in which neo-classical aesthetics mystified contemporary relations into naturalized inevitabilities, extensions of ancient and supposedly timeless forms of life reflected in and reproduced by ancient and supposedly timeless forms of art. Against this, realism presented itself as a means for producing consciousness of contemporary life by revealing real relations of existence. Chernyshevsky’s realignment of art away from philosophy and towards science prefigured the general orientation of Marxism, which from its beginning sought to develop scientific knowledge of real relations of existence, what Marx termed relations of production. This scientific impulse helped produce the realist aesthetics defined by Lukácsian types and what Jameson later identified as “the threefold imperatives of depersonalization, unity of point of view, and restriction to scenic representation” (emphases added; Political Unconscious 90-91). These aesthetic imperatives were meant to cleanse the artwork of subjectivity, yielding a clear rendering of objective relations that could be explained and judged. For this reason, Lukács saw in this aesthetic a crucial means for reunifying reified consciousness into proper class consciousness, while modernism was written off for reproducing only fragmented appearances. However, so constructed, realism’s aesthetics came into contradiction with its ends. Purging itself of subjectivity, realism perpetuated mystification of subjective mediation’s nature as objective relation. Restricting itself to types, realism became blind to aspects of social reality revealed in the so-called non-essential or incidental particularities of people. Restricting itself to unity of point of view, realism reinforced the bourgeois sealing-off of the supposedly unified individual subject. Restricting itself to scenic representation, realism aspired to an empiricism that could never hope to pierce appearances. Thus, realism-as-dogma helped calcify the very appearances and real relations that realism-as-revolutionary-aesthetic sought to demystify and overthrow. Against this realism-as-dogma, present as object of critique in his statement “the whole is the false,” Theodor Adorno championed the aesthetics of modernism, which he saw as rather than aspiring to wholeness, embraced—as means toward an end of reconciliation impossible for the artwork itself—brokenness.
“That is the secret of aesthetic sublimation: to represent fulfillment in its brokenness” (“The Culture Industry” 111): in a sense, this statement contains the whole of the modernist aesthetics Adorno would spend the rest of his life theorizing and advancing. Whereas the aesthetics of Chernyshevsky and Lukács privileged content, specifically the accuracy of that content vis-a-vis reality, Adorno’s aesthetics privileged form, conceived not as constructive but destructive. Rather than restricting art to functioning as reality’s direct mirror, Adorno argued that art’s formal operations conferred upon art a unique status and function:
The truth of the matter is that except where art goes against its own nature and simply duplicates existence, its task vis-a-vis that which merely exists, is to be its essence and image. This alone constitutes the aesthetic….In the form of an image the object is absorbed into the subject instead of following the bidding of the alienated world and persisting obdurately in a state of reification....Art is the negative knowledge of the actual world (emphasis added; “Reconciliation Under Duress” 159-160).
Art became understood as a means not for reflecting reality but for disrupting it, intervening in the smooth, unconscious circulation of objects characterizing reified existence by unifying subject and object to produce consciousness of reality’s negative, not what reality claims to be but what it is while claiming itself otherwise: “to represent fulfillment in its brokenness” inverted realism’s implied dictum “to represent brokenness in its fulfillment,” that is brokenness as brokenness, a positivistic self-identical rendering. For Adorno, the development of this negative knowledge of the world was art’s highest calling and was realized only through an aesthetics of high modernism.
Just as Lukács theorized realism through the double-gesture of critiquing the “so-called avant-garde” and asserting realism as the liberated aesthetics, so Adorno developed his aesthetic theory of high modernism through simultaneous negative critique of realism—and Lukács—and positive description of modernism as the only path beyond the unacceptable aesthetic and political regimes of the on the one hand the the Scylla of the emerging total world system of “the West” (his codeword for the capitalist countries), and on the other hand the Charybdis of the totalitarian betrayal of the revolution in “the East” (his codeword for the post-Stalin Soviet Union). Adorno convicted Lukács of speaking always as a Cultural Commissar, lamenting what he saw as Lukács’s self-imposed intellectual and ideological degradation, his submission to Stalinism, for the sake of his “entry ticket to history” (“Reconciliation” 153; “Reflections” 202). By the time of Adorno’s writing, Lukács had indeed served—and begun transitioning away from—a career within Stalin’s USSR, serving in various roles where he wielded great influence over intellectual and cultural policy, and as Jameson observes, as a theoretician of literary realism, Lukács’ works had been “easily assimilable to the official socialist realism of the time” (Marxism and Form 162). However, while Jameson argues that Lukács’ “successive positions proved to be a progressive exploration and enlargement of a single complex of problems,” and that therefore his thought should not be dismissed out of hand due to historical facts of his career, for Adorno, Lukács’ Stalinist service significantly undermined his credibility, to which he sees Lukács himself as delivering the fatal blow by “pontificat[ing] about art in a manner [which could not be] more alien to it” (Marxism and Form 162; “Reconciliation” 153). Reading his critiques of Lukács, one finds no joy in Adorno; rather, one senses he lamented the fall of the great dialectical materialist of History and Class Consciousness, “the first…to apply the category of reification systematically to philosophy” (“Reconciliation” 151). For realism, however, at least the socialist realism advanced by Lukács, Adorno seems to have harbored no positive sentiment: “Rather no art than socialist realism” (Aesthetic Theory 53).
For Adorno, (socialist) realism’s irreconcilable flaw was its naive view of the form by which it presumed to represent reality: the empirical form of reality itself (“Reconciliation” 162). Whereas Lukács and Chernyshevsky wanted art to become a science, Adorno argued that art’s relation to science was as its other; art concretized not rational knowledge but the irrational remainder which rationalization could not absorb (162). Lukácsian realism wanted to produce reunified consciousness through attaining identity with science and its empirical mode of representation, but “in art nothing empirical survives unchanged” (163). For Adorno, all content that entered the artwork was transformed by the artwork’s form. Adorno acknowledged that art could never escape its mimetic impulse (a phrase Adorno used both to name art’s tendency and implicitly as a codeword for realism), indeed art’s existence depended upon it, but the desire towards which this impulse strove could never be fulfilled. Instead, art manifested truth content not through successful empirical rendering of totality, not through “the sort of direct statement found elsewhere in the realm of knowledge,” through a logic not of “subject and predicate, but of internal harmony” (168); art adopted a stance vis-a-vis reality “by means of the relationship it creates between its component parts,” that is by means of its form (168). Art was “a synthesis which utters no propositions” that “only becomes knowledge when taken as a totality, i.e. through all its mediations, not through its individual intentions” (168). Only through its mediations could the artwork manifest its truth content, “the objective solution of the enigma posed by [the artwork]” (127-128). Unlike the Chernyshevskian rendering of truth directly or the Lukácsian revelation of truth through clear reproduction of totality’s essence, Adornian modernism posited truth content as something which did not inhere in the work directly but existed as something towards which the work pointed negatively. Truth content appeared through the artwork’s form, which produced an obstinacy towards “contrived semblance, and this obstinacy is the negative appearance of [the artwork’s] truth” (129). “[Contrived] semblance” was identified as the form of false consciousness, so by revealing the contrived semblance as such, the obstinate artwork critiqued and renounced false consciousness. Thus, at the nexus of its formal elements, “the actual arena of transcendence,” a truth content beyond the artwork itself could be glimpsed, not through what was positive in the artwork but through its negativity. Insofar as Adorno’s aesthetic theory could be identified with a single technique, a single moment—which is to say significantly but not absolutely—the name of that moment is determinate negation, without which “[artworks] have no truth” (129).
Adorno’s aesthetic of determinate negation turned Lukácsian and Chernyshevskian aesthetics on their heads. Realism, especially socialist realism, aimed to present truth and class consciousness through positive assertion of what reality is; modernism sought truth through negation, through the tearing apart and annihilation, of how reality seems in order to glimpse what reality could be within the rubble of what reality is not, that is what is not inviolable even though it so pretends. At the same moment, determinate negation realized that which already inhered in realism as its unconscious possibility, for realism’s insistence upon fixing aesthetic practices within a narrow band of acceptable modes spoke of an underlying anxiety regarding language’s inherent capacity for deception, for producing false consciousness, for reproducing ideology. What realism failed to recognize was that this capacity also inhered within its own preferred forms, where, as realism calcified into dogma, it receded from consciousness, ascending to absolute control. In a sense, determinate negation turned realism against itself, tasking realism with developing a consciousness of its own form analogous to the consciousness of reality which it sought, thrusting it into a self-reflexive search for form beyond ideology, an impossibility forming a horizon towards which realism moved, its movement producing modernism.
In the last analysis, for Adorno, the high modernist aesthetic produced the possibility of the authentic artwork through refusing foreclosure by the reifying commodity form, both within the artwork and of the artwork itself as it emerged and circulated within the total system. Deploying self-reflexive semblance to undermine contrived semblance, forming to negate static forms, and using other strategies grounded in embracing and representing its own nature as process, the artwork could prevent its own solidification into a reified thing; because it could not solidify into a static thing, it could refuse its own reduction into a use-value and, by extension, an exchange-value. Thus, in both its constitution and its circulation, the artwork could short-circuit reproduction of the commodity form, of which realism-as-dogma had become the unwitting reproducer. However—as Adorno seems to sense whenever he observes that not even the authentic artwork can fully escape its own constitutively ideological nature—for any artwork produced by any subject with any objects contained within a capitalist system, there can be no full refusal of the commodity form. Even determinate negation leaves a remainder. Even the most apparently authentic artworks can become commodities.
Thus, just as realism had, modernism found itself unable to extract itself from the capitalist world system it wished to turn against. Just as realism’s commitment to reveal real relations became the foundation of its own dogma of formal blindness (and thus acquiescence to default-perception), so did modernism’s renunciation of producing consciousness of real relations pave the way for its own co-opting by leaving mystified the very form which all of its own formal experimentation could not fully undermine. Just as realism’s failure demanded modernism’s self-consciousness of aesthetic form, so did modernism’s failure demand realism’s consciousness of social forms. The failure of each aesthetic to achieve its own ends pointed, ironically, towards a need to incorporate within itself precisely what it had expelled from itself into its other. However, from the perspective of each, to attempt reconciliation with its other would have been to abandon the position of ideological purity which formed the very condition of possibility for its own success. Realism and modernism had both become co-opted by capitalist production, and the implicit solution to their capture would, from their perspectives, only further solidify their fallen states. It was this stalemate that set the stage for the interventions of Fredric Jameson.
Jameson argued that while realism and modernism both emerged as radical, revolutionary aesthetics in their own moments, history had assigned each a fate which left whoever entered the debate near the end of the twentieth-century with the sense that “each position is in some sense right and yet…neither is any longer wholly acceptable” (“Reflections” 196). Realism had gradually reified into “an asphyxiating, self-imposed penance” that served more to reinforce naive perceptive experience, while modernism’s fate was “consumer society itself[, for] what was once an oppositional and anti-social phenomenon in the early years of the century, has today become the dominant style of commodity production and an indispensable component in the machinery of the latter’s even more rapid and demanding reproduction of itself” (Political Unconscious 91; “Reflections” 209). Realism and modernism were running the machine they had hoped to destroy. These fates resulted not from each aesthetics’s failures but rather as an undesirable result of their successes. Realism could only become a perceptive prison because of its capacity for reproducing a knowledge and experience of reality, while it was in modernist determinate negation’s generative capacity for producing mediated glimpses of the truly new in the mode of not-yet that capitalist reproduction found a bottomless well for dreaming and producing new images, desires, and commodities. With capitalism’s co-opting of both realism and modernism—“the perfected poetic apparatus of high modernism repress[ing] History just as successfully as the perfected narrative apparatus of high realism did the random heterogeneity of the as yet uncentered subject”—a new aesthetic paradigm became necessary (Political Unconscious 270).
For Jameson, the aesthetic solution was found in romance. Jameson’s return to a preeminent feudal form against which realism arose might seem from a certain perspective regressive or at least retrograde, but this movement’s trajectory followed the path that the Adorno of Negative Dialectics argued as the true graphic form of the dialectic: a circle. The return to romance via the aesthetics that arose as its dialectical opposition was simultaneously a return via the non-identity which was always-already inherent in romance, and also a penetration into realism and modernism’s shared negative image and essence. The resulting romance was no longer identical to its historical predecessor. Rather than serving to mystify real relations it “seems to offer the possibility of sensing other historical rhythms, and of demonic or Utopian transformations of a real now unshakably set in place” (Political Unconscious 91). Jameson arrived at his theory of romance by developing Northrop Frye’s theory of romance as “wish-fulfillment or Utopian fantasy which aims at the transfiguration of the world of everyday life in such a way as to restore the conditions of some lost Eden, or to anticipate some future realm from which the old mortality and imperfections will have been effaced….a process of transforming ordinary reality” (Political Unconscious 96-97). Whereas “Frye’s entire discussion of romance turns on a presupposition—the ethical axis of good and evil,” Jameson historicized and problematized that presupposition as “an ideologeme that articulates a social and historical contradiction,” ultimately arriving at a theory of romance wherein the transformation of ordinary reality was grounded in and concerned with not the specific historical contradiction of “good and evil” but historical contradictions more generally and the politics which attempt to negotiate them (Political Unconscious 96). Developed in this way, romance became an aesthetic capable of producing consciousness of the present by way of its transfiguration into what it had been or could become.
However, while Jameson productively diagnosed the problem of realism and modernism’s capture, his proposed solution left something to be desired, for through his recourse to genre, he sidestepped much of the problem of representation. As a category defined more by narrative structure than aesthetic mode, romance offered little guidance on the question of how such narratives should be rendered. In other words, Jameson’s theorizing of romance did little to suggest, whether positively or negatively, what should constitute the non-narrative formal features of such an aesthetic. One could easily imagine his prescribed romance inhabiting fully either the realist or modernist modes as already explored. In fact, we have already witnessed the possibility of Jamesonian romance in Chernyshevskian realism’s allowance for “the artist, in reproducing reality, [to] project a desirable future situation that does not now exist” (Scanlan 10). Thus, Jameson’s critique and solution functioned to re-affirm both the historical problem realism and modernism had become, and the necessity for addressing that problem directly.
That this debate has been mostly described in the past tense should in no way suggest that the debate has been decided nor that its time has passed. Rather, this essay has used the past tense to historicize the debate’s development in order to map the dialectic driving the production of aesthetic modes. This debate’s time has not passed for at least two reasons. First, insofar as this debate arose as the result of a certain mode of production, the fact that we now live in a later stage of the development of that mode of production means that today we must contend with ideological issues closely related or even (nearly) identical to those of interest to Chernyshevsky, Lukács, Adorno, and Jameson; even if one were to argue that our mode of production has developed too far from those theorists’ historical moments, following Jameson’s analysis that modes of production overlap, we would quickly find that we are still haunted by those modes and their attendant ideologies, even if in altered states. Second, insofar as realism and modernism can be seen as paradigms crystalizing-out inherent qualities of representation and language—on the one hand hand communicative mimesis, on the other hand non-communicative withdrawal—the problems posed, explored, and tentatively ‘solved’ by each paradigm will remain relevant for any language or system of representation. This is not to ascribe an ahistorical status to these phenomena; rather, it is to rename within the aesthetic special case language’s constitutive relations: identity and difference. In other words, at the fundamental level, we discover that the problem of aesthetics reveals itself as a problem of the dialectic between identity and non-identity. Thus, no matter how much we search, for any given historical period we will not find any aesthetics absolutely identified with this or that politics. A revolutionary aesthetics cannot be as simple as “realism is radical because it reveals real relations” or “modernism is radical because of its formal disruptions of reified forms.” Instead, what can be worked out is a dialectical aesthetic process through which in a given historical situation an aesthetics might negotiate and deploy identity and non-identity toward some historically-defined end.
3. Revolutionary Aesthetics Today: Insurrection in the End Times
The question of a contemporary revolutionary aesthetic therefore can only be answered by inserting our concept of dialectical aesthetics into a conceptual constellation defining a contemporary situation of neoliberalism and its climate crisis. Neoliberalism is here understood as analyzed by David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism: the form of late capitalism characterized by rampant privatization of formerly public services, intensified deregulation of industry, the financialization of every aspect of the economy, the decentralization of political power, accumulation by expropriation on both domestic and international scales, and resultant ideologies which interpellate working-class individuals—increasingly isolated from the material conditions necessary for collective organizing—as the responsible parties, even as those individuals are rendered impotent by the reconsolidation of ruling-class power. The climate crisis in question is nothing more or less than the ever-worsening anthropogenic climate change, the rapid development of which has been spurred by neoliberalism’s intensified deregulated resource exploitation, production, and waste activities. Together, these phenomena—the latter understood as a crisis revealing and interpreting the former—constitute the contemporary material conditions within which any revolutionary aesthetic must operate. Thus, our aesthetic theorizing must necessarily detour through a more detailed mapping of these conditions, before returning to consider how aesthetics today might escape the modernist/realist deadlock and become revolutionary.
Since its rise toward hegemony began in the early 1970’s, neoliberalism has consisted of “a theoretical utopianism,” never fully or coherently worked out but everywhere declaring an aim of “the well-being of all,” that has “primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve” the neoliberal goal of “re-establish[ing] the conditions for capital accumulation and…restor[ing] the power of economic elites” (Harvey 79, 19). The resulting global system has produced the least real economic growth in capitalism’s history while simultaneously generating the perception of growth through both dramatic reallocation of wealth upwards and the vampiric accumulation by dispossession, undertaken both by neoliberal centers—such as the United States—against forcibly underdeveloped states and within neoliberal centers themselves (Harvey 154, 160). Commodification has infected everything, with all relations becoming market relations; neoliberalism presumes that “everything can in principle be treated as a commodity,” from social services to interpersonal relationships (165). For the subject under neoliberalism, it has become impossible to conceptualize a life free of the categories of commodities and market exchanges.
The devastation wrought on the subject under neoliberalism finds an objective parallel in the environmental devastation which is the consequence of neoliberalism’s unchecked raw material extraction, real estate development, and waste excretion. Capitalism has always driven environmental degradation, but neoliberalism has pushed this destruction to new extremes, delivering human society into an historical moment where its own continued long-term existence has transformed from a statement into a question. The climate science community consensus is that we are now experiencing Earth’s sixth mass extinction, “an epoch during which at least 75 percent of all species vanish from the planet” (“Sixth Mass Extinction”). Researchers have begun to set dates for specific disappearances: 2048 will see the global ocean emptied of fish (Haro), the turn of the century will see half of all remaining species facing extinction (McKie), and 2119 will see the death of all insects, which, given that they constitute the most significant portion of our Earth’s biomass, would mean the collapse of whatever biosphere remains (Carrington). These extinctions are driven by the rapidly rising global average temperature, which has increased by about 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1880. An increase of 1.5 C above 1880 will have catastrophic consequences; we are currently on track for a 2.0 C increase by the end of this century (Bendell 8). Even conservative organizations like the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Monetary Fund have begun to sound the alarm on climate change, the latter estimating the current annual damage to global agricultural production at $100 billion (the market has become the measure of all things), while the former’s 2018 report concluded that human society has until 2030 to prevent an apocalypse. In “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy,” a less optimistic paper published a few months prior to the IPCC’s, Jem Bendell argues that “it is time we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today” (Bendell 5). This global catastrophe will be felt everywhere:
[When] I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbors for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death (Bendell 11).
In short, neoliberalism has devastated the inheritance of the meek to make the rich richer, the poor poorer, and in so doing has inaugurated the end times.
These developments in capitalism’s material conditions have produced and been reinforced by developments in ideology. Following the analyses of David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, we can identify neoliberalism’s dominant ideology, culture, and aesthetic as postmodernism. Because neoliberalism required “both politically and economically the construction of a neoliberal market-based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism….it proved more than a little compatible with…’postmodernism,’” which for bourgeois urban culture meant, among other tendencies, “narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity” (Harvey 42, 47). The crucial signifier in this description is “narcissistic,” for it is not exploration of self, sexuality, and identity which has structured neoliberalism’s culture and ideology, but their forms within a narcissistic subjectivity constituted to consider, be concerned with, and pursue the satisfaction of its own needs and desires, exclusively. This narcissistic subject is the bourgeois individual stripped of any lingering pretense of connection or commitment to any real collective existence, and its explorations are driven not towards self-realization but towards the opening, support, and expansion of new markets.
Aesthetically, neoliberalism’s postmodernism has further developed capitalism’s capacity for appropriating and employing even those aesthetics which might initially have seemed most heterogenous to it. While Jameson demonstrated how realism and modernism had been co-opted by consumerist desire production, under neoliberalism, even Jameson’s favored romance is easily recognizable as a dominant aesthetic within a culture industry endlessly reproducing superhero, science fiction, and fantasy films that use the romance aesthetic to stage again and again the defense of the neoliberal world system and reproduce the narcissistic subject. As Mark Fisher argues in Capitalist Realism (2009), under neoliberalism, the quantitative increase in sheer volume of incorporated aesthetics and cultural codes has produced a qualitative change: under neoliberalism, we must contend with “not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations, and hopes by capitalist culture” (Fisher 9). Fisher argues that under neoliberalism, realism has re-emerged not as “a particular type of realism” but “more like realism in itself” which he terms “capitalist realism: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 4, 2). This is the sense crystalized and communicated by the endlessly circulating Thatcherism “There is no alternative.” If the sense that there is no alternative to capitalism dominates, and if capitalist realism has already incorporated realism and modernism while also precorporating all future styles through the hegemonic formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations, and hopes, then it seems as though the possibility of revolutionary aesthetics has been lost. Neoliberalism has fully foreclosed the possibility of struggle in art, ensuring its own unchallenged hegemony. Game over.
But this answer is as unacceptable as it is incorrect. Capitalist realism’s precorporation is nothing more than the ideological condition that we have inherited, and as such it forms our point of departure without remaining our inevitable destination. A revolutionary aesthetic remains possible, and Fisher’s diagnosis contains a hint of the cure: desire. If capitalist realism precorporates all material and aesthetics that would be subversive or radical through the reproduction of capitalist desires—of which the precorporated materials become moments—then it seems that capitalist realism might be undercut by the production of desires which it cannot put to work, specifically desires for its own demolition. While this might seem at once obvious and impossible due to precorporation, it is worth considering the weakness of the Thatcherism “there is no alternative,” which signifies the logic upon which depends the perpetuation of capitalist realism. Reliance on the authoritarian absolutism of such a speech act denotes not strength but a critical weakness: capitalist realism depends upon the sense that there is no alternative remaining unbreached. Were this phrase indeed as self-evident as it presents itself, its utterance would be unnecessary. The very necessity of its utterance reveals its falsity. Furthermore, following Jameson’s argument in the conclusion to The Political Unconscious, that ideology functions by appropriating authentically Utopian impulses, we can read in “there is no alternative” the impulse to realize precisely such an alternative, for the phrase becomes legible as an attempt to short-circuit further attempts at Utopia by declaring by fiat that Utopia has arrived, implicitly appealing for legitimacy to the demands and desires it explicitly denounces. “There is no alternative” doublespeaks “alternatives abound.” Thus, a revolutionary aesthetic today would be one that disrupts the reproduction of desire for the system of which “there is no alternative” and produces desire for its alternatives. This function should be seen as something like a minimum criterion, not an all-encompassing description nor a narrowing proscription.
Thus, at least at the strategic level, the goal remains unchanged, for the aesthetics of Chernyshevsky, Lukács, Adorno, and Jameson have always implicitly concerned the disruption of some desires and the production of others. What differentiates our historical position from theirs is the reality that today we face the historical realization of a moment in which any position of aesthetic purity, in the sense of an aesthetics which might appear wholly anathema to ideology, has vanished. Perhaps such purity was never really possible, and we are able to ascertain this truth due to the vantage point provided by our historical moment. Today, the revolutionary aesthetic is found not beyond or at the fringes of ideology, but at the points where ideology reaches its greatest density. The contemporary revolutionary aesthetic thus appears as the aesthetic manifestation of changes in revolutionary praxis theorized by The Invisible Committee as a shift from centralized revolution to decentralized insurrection, resulting from the historical development that “[p]ower is no longer concentrated in one point in the world; it is the world itself, its flows and its avenues, its people and its norms, its codes and its technologies” (The Invisible Committee 131). Against decentralized power, insurrection disrupts the circulation of commodities and hierarchal knowledge through physical and discursive acts of sabotage that support the parallel development of communes in the tradition of the Paris Commune of 1871: formed not beyond the city but within its very heart (The Invisible Committee 117). These simultaneous, mutually-supporting acts of destruction and development within neoliberal power and desire circuits materially manifest the possibilities of an aesthetic conceived as simultaneous and mutually-supporting acts of mimetic representation and formal disintegration, of mapping real relations and self-reflexively attacking contrived semblance, of, in short, realism and modernism. The revolutionary aesthetic today reveals itself as the theoretical reflection of revolutionary praxis, taking the name of insurrectionary aesthetics.
With this recognition comes indications of what features of that aesthetic might be, and Jameson points the way towards their articulation with his call in The Political Unconscious for a simultaneous positive and negative critique, the recognition not only of the ideological in the Utopian but of the Utopian within the ideological. We can return to the ideologically-incorporated realism and modernism and recover their authentic Utopian possibilities. Read in this way, thinking each not as an isolated aesthetic paradigm but rather as an expression of a representational tendency, the aesthetic theories of realism and modernism can be synthesized into an aesthetic process equipped to operate within the material conditions and ideological superstructure mapped above.
Our insurrectionary aesthetic should be beholden neither to realism’s narrowly-defined formal rules nor to modernism’s renunciation of realist practices. It should neither be ashamed of its own capacities for representing the real, nor should it allow itself to fall under its own possible spell. Liberated from past requirements of attaining ideological purity, it is free to complete the synthesis of realism and modernism suggested by the historical failures of each. It should strive to pierce the veil of neoliberalism’s ideologies, reveal real relations of existence, and develop class consciousness, for as the above analysis of neoliberalism demonstrates—especially vis-a-vis the intensification of the commodification and thus reification of life—these, the aims of Lukácsian realism, have not yet become irrelevant. Our insurrectionary aesthetic should never permit itself to descend into self-naivety, and, as both a corrective to the ideological possibilities of realism and as a tactic of discursive and aesthetic sabotage, the insurrectionary aesthetic should, simultaneous to its Lukácsian mapping, practice Adornian formal self-reflexivity and negation.
Beyond determinate negation, Aesthetic Theory also implicitly suggests other useful aesthetic features and practices. Selection of this or that content matters less than what is made of that content—a painting of a stool can be more revolutionary than one of a revolutionary hero—so any content will suffice, so long as it is treated not as reified but as a particular embodying its totality; any and all of neoliberalism’s discursive material is made available to the insurrectionary aesthetic. As the totalizing impulse of realism, which ascribes to every part a function completely subsumed within the identity of the whole, is itself identified as a form consistent with ideology, montage and constructions composed of heterogenous materials—within which the relation of the parts to the whole are constituted by detours—are valorized as means of juxtaposing and annihilating ideological content and forms; and yet, for the insurrectionary aesthetic, the practice of montage and fragmentation should be practiced in relation to the concept of totality, for if climate change has delivered one profound argument, it has been the reinforcing of the concept of totality. Because the artwork is not a product making a statement but a process searching for meaning, a process not undermined but strengthened by the inclusion of heterogenous spontaneity, the insurrectionary aesthetic should not erase from its works all evidence of production, continuous producing; rather, through self-reflexivity (of which bearing marks of its own constitution is but one possible form) the insurrectionary artwork can undermine the drive of its own mimetic impulse towards congealment into ideology. Although derived from Adorno’s theory of high modernism, these aesthetic features and practices escape pure identification with their origin through their synthesis with Lukácsian features and practices, including typicality, narrative that strives to reveal real relations, and a concern with totality. Brought together within the unifying insurrectionary aesthetic, the modernist and realist modalities enter into their own non-identities, abandoning their purity in favor of the representational tactics and strategies unleashed by their synthesis.
While the categories of realism and modernism have been productive for reading certain traditions and sets of texts, these categories have also constructed a binary mystifying not only the texts, traditions, and aesthetic modalities constituting each, but also the categories themselves. Throughout the Marxist aesthetics debate, wherever either term is found, the other is present within a hierarchal structure with the potencies of the dominant term deployed to devalue those of the subjugated term. As each category solidifies, it inscribes between itself and its other a boundary it wishes to make impermeable, but in doing so it isolates itself from its own condition of possibility, i.e. its other which enables its very existence by crystalizing all that it expels from itself, but with which it must remain in contact in order to retain its relation of difference, the substances of its own identity. The more these categories strive for realization in-themselves, the more they degrade themselves by distancing themselves from what is not themselves and thus constitutes themselves. At their fullest realization in-themselves, the categories of realism and modernism cease to operate. They become dead reflections of aesthetics that have never existed. Their use-value evaporates into exchange-value, as the principle of equivalency shatters, divides, privatizes, and parcels out for commercial development the aesthetic commons.
Thus, the fatal flaw in the Marxist aesthetics and politics debate, insofar as it has sought to comprehend aesthetics vis-a-vis politics, has been its predication that realism and modernism are actually existing things rather than heterogenous moments within a unified aesthetic process of production whose boundaries are those of the historical totality. I am not advocating the renunciation of the signifiers “realism” or “modernism” anymore than I am dismissing the piercing insights produced by past debates; I am saying that the condition of possibility of past insights has been the obfuscation of the total aesthetic system, and the possibility for theorizing contemporary revolutionary aesthetics depends on demystifying that system through synthesizing the realist and modernist modes, not a false synthesis in which the two are simply added together without fundamental change, but a true synthesis in which each is destroyed as such, and through its destruction finally capable of realizing its own aspirations. Just as the proletariat can find the liberation of proletarian subjects and energies from the bourgeoisie only through the destruction of proletariat and bourgeoisie as such, and just as only through its destruction at the hands of the proletariat can the bourgeoisie ever hope to realize its own authentically utopian ideals (those animating its ideological projects, i.e. individualism, emancipation from labor, egalitarianism, and so on), so can realism and modernism approach identity with their respective aims only through non-identity with themselves, that is through achieving their mutual (self-)annihilation within a third term encompassing realism and modernism’s identity and non-identity.
In the last analysis, the insurrectionary aesthetic should internalize and synthesize both realism and modernism, using the tendencies and capacities of each representational mode to complete and transcend the other, all toward the twin aims of sabotaging the reproduction of ideology while simultaneously constructing collective narrative communes. This insurrectionary aesthetic is not limited to any particular genre, although given the temporality imposed by neoliberalism’s climate crisis, with its swiftly-approaching deadlines of extinction, including our own, two fruitful generic alignments are suggest.
The first is found through a recovery operation, analogous to Jameson’s dialectical re-theorizing of romance, of a religious tradition Bendell suggests as a useful paradigm for deep adaptation to climate change: eschatology, “the department of theological science concerned with ‘the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell” (OED). The age of neoliberalism is that of last things, and it is past time to confront the death of our world and our species, to pass judgment on the ideologies and factions that have brought us here, to begin building what heaven we might yet attain, and to understand what hells await should we fail to act. The second generic alignment is suggested by neoliberalism’s techno-culture, as well as by the future-oriented task of representing its alternatives: science fiction. As a genre which has emerged with, reflected, and informed the development of techno-culture, in both its capitalist and socialist iterations, science fiction presents itself as a vital paradigm for negating neoliberal ideologies while simultaneously building and exploring its alternatives. Within science fiction, there is one movement in particular that presents itself as especially vital: the new space opera, “a movement characterized by its sophisticated reharnessing of conventional pulp-era trappings: faster-than-light starships, future wars, Byzantine intergalactic diplomacy, doomsday devices and dramatic encounters with alien planets and species” (Winter 2). As Jerome Winter demonstrates in Science Fiction, New Space Opera, and Neoliberal Globalism: Nostalgia for Infinity, the new space opera emerged in the late twentieth century as a crucial narrative paradigm precisely because of the pulp-era space opera’s close alignment with nascent neoliberalism. For Winter, the old space opera was neoliberalism’s false consciousness, providing the figurations and forms which the new space opera could turn against themselves to approach a true consciousness of neoliberalism. Given neoliberalism’s continued (unfortunate) successes, the new space opera remains as relevant and useful today as ever before, providing a wealth of material for an insurrectionary aesthetic. Synthesizing eschatology, science fiction, new space opera, and an insurrectionary aesthetic could produce literary texts uniquely suited to confronting the narrative, representational, and political needs of our present.
4. Conclusion: Worlds to Win
To eschatologically map the objective and subjective relations of neoliberal reality; to negate capitalist realist ideologies and aesthetics; to produce images of—and thus desires for—alternative, emancipated realities through science fictional, specifically new space operatic, narrative: this is what I, through this novel, have attempted.
My method has been to construct four distinct narrative threads—a contemporary global socialist revolution, reflections from the end of time on trillions of years of class struggle across the universe, an archeology of capitalism, and the formation of the universe—each constituted through idiosyncratic formal strategies unified by common, although differentiated, attempts to synthesize realist and modernist modalities. While there are many vital aesthetic considerations that went into spinning these threads, for the sake of time (and not overdetermining reading), I wish to conclude with a brief remark regarding only one issue that shaped all four threads, if to different results: the writing of sentences. Jameson has argued that for Adorno “thinking dialectically means nothing more or less than the writing of dialectical sentences” (Marxism and Form 53). It is the sentence, after all, that, as a form which has ceased to be seen as a form, a form attempting communication which it itself can never fully achieve but through the other sentences which are its non-identity, constitutes itself through the contradictions it tries to reconcile. Thinking dialectically means the writing of dialectical sentences because attempting to construct dialectical concepts through the mere accumulation of non-dialectical sentences from the outset concedes to the very form of thinking dialectical thinking would destroy. If the sentence form can be turned against itself and produce self-reflexive meaning, that is meaning aware of itself as meaning, identity aware of itself as non-identity, then dialectical thought can live. I would posit the same to be true of writing insurrectionary literature: insurrectionary literature means nothing more or less than the writing of insurrectionary sentences.
Each thread of my novel is constituted by sentences that strive to be insurrectionary through different non-standard syntaxes. These sentences reconfigure both appearance and essence, expanding the horizon of the sentence—particularly in the thread almost entirely absent punctuation—beyond the boundaries of so-called larger units of meaning, i.e. the paragraph and chapter, internalizing the latter within the former, so that the antagonism between, on the one hand the managerial paragraphs and their owner chapters, and on the other hand the laboring sentence, whose labor produces semiotic value in surplus, is transcended as the insurrectionary sentence overruns its masters to construct its world of liberated signification and in the process destroys itself as-sentence, freeing itself to become what it might be through the construction of new semiotic communes.
These sentences, the threads they spin, and the complex patterns they weave, aim to produce a glimpse of history as a totality accessed by mediation, of which we are not only the objects but the subjects as well, both crystallizations of specific moments and the crystalizing forces of moments to come, a glimpse made possible in this case through the articulation of contents of struggle against objective and subjective conditions of late neoliberalism, rendered in a style as critical of its contents as of itself, rendering semiotic approximations of struggle, utopia, and the final fate of all by an aesthetic dialectic mapping simultaneously the identity and non-identity of our moment—the moment produced by us, which is us, from which we must act and make future moments—while self-reflexively preventing the foreclosure of this map into reified ideology, not negating the map of our present, pasts, and future, but keeping it suspended between being and non-being, identity and non-identity, forcing—no, freeing it to remain in motion, remain a process processing the totality within which it is caught, which it represents and critiques and destroys and transforms, processing the subject mediating its own access to the objective totality even as it itself (re-)produces the processed, processing subject.
The life-force of this aesthetic has been produced by a creative praxis shaped by the principles of dialectical thought and aesthetics, a process of intentioned spontaneity wherein every part functions within but also beyond the whole that is never complete or without contradiction and exists and is experienced as immediate, even as it remains beyond immediate observation by the subject who does not precede the moment of writing but is produced by the emerging text’s rupturing of the society which both enters into the text and remains distant…a process not of fleshing a skeletal structure, not of embellishing and obfuscating and thus uncritically reproducing the logic of commodity production itself—(capital) dreaming a desired object, then employing skill to produce a smooth, comfortable object for exchange and consumption—but instead a process of laboring through the semiotic, categorical, discursive, narrative, ideological materials at hand to discover through their annihilation and refashioning the seeds of our desire for an alternative to capitalist realism, the embers which might ignite our hearts and light our path as the conflagration-that-is-us burns one world for the sake of others yet-to-become. But such burning seeds are not ours to grasp directly. No, for us they may be glimpsed only in their brokenness, and only through their brokenness may we ever hope to find their fulfillment.
In short, this novel is nothing more or less than the unfolding of broken subjects struggling against themselves and the broken world which encompasses them and which they are, fighting to see themselves within/as history so that they might ultimately achieve in the Real the reconciliation which has hitherto existed for them only as desire within realities whose truth has always-already been their falsity. This novel is a story; it is a weapon made to break your thinking and perception—as its writing broke mine; it is a tool made to build, collectively, from and through our brokenness, the emancipatory perception, reflection, and desires to inform and shape our practices, as individuals, as communes—as its writing reshaped me. Such, at least, has been my project. Whether I have succeeded or failed is for you, others, and history to judge.
Some years after first conceiving of this novel, many months after completing the first manuscript, and several weeks after finishing the first draft of this introduction, I attended the 40th annual International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts, where scholar and theorist Mark Bould delivered the keynote address, in which he called for the development of speculative narratives that reveal and negate the conditions and ideologies of capitalist realism and develop visions of alternative futures of what he terms Full-On Fully-Automated Luxury Green Interspecies Feminist Queer Space Communism of Color, a utopia where everything is for everyone, a utopia of emancipated difference and abundance, where the forces of dead labor are unleashed on behalf of all living, a utopia whose unattainable perfection must form the horizon of our political and aesthetic activity if we are ever to overthrow our oppression and domination. Hearing much of my own argument in his talk produced in me none of that dread usually associated with hearing someone else deliver your own ideas with great eloquence and ethos, beating you to the punch, as it were. Nor did I feel any of that vulgar self-satisfaction associated with hearing your ideas advanced by someone with significant professional and institutional capital and clout. Instead, I felt solidarity and vigor for the fight ahead, for the production and circulation of insurrectionary literature is a fight, one battle within a world war of narratives, in which the stakes are our objective and subjective lives. To the struggle of negating capitalist realism and building Full-On Fully-Automated Luxury Green Interspecies Feminist Queer Space Communism of Color, I contribute this novel, hoping that though it might appear today idiosyncratic or unique, it will not remain so for long, hoping that should it fall short or fail, others will take up its task. Our struggle requires the hands not of individuals but of classes, for there are many chains to be lost, many worlds to be won.