Transcending the Aesthetic

Can we forget the ideas of progress and dialectics by which, in its own eyes, modern tradition has redeemed itself? If the expression of modern tradition has a meaning — a paradoxical meaning — the history of this modern tradition will be contradictory and negative: it will be a story going nowhere.

— Antoine Compagnon

In the case of the King's tallies, Redemption Day was tax day when the King's representative (the exchequer) arrived in the village, spread cloth on the ground, and matched stock and stub. Hallelujah, the tax was paid. The tally stick had value because it could be used to "redeem" oneself on tax day.

— L. Randall Wray

In the beginning of the modern era, there was money. The aesthetic arose to mitigate money's insufficiencies. Various modernisms and avant-gardes declared the split between political economy and aesthetics false and labored to sublate this antagonism on the latter's terms.

Since then, however, historical avant-garde's defiant breach of the levee protecting the aesthetic from everyday commerce has been engulfed by an aestheticized money relation. Or so the story goes. As Peter Bürger laments in his now canonical Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), "During the time of the historical avant-garde movements, the attempt to do away with the distance between art and life still had all the pathos of historical progressiveness on its side. But in the meantime, the culture industry has brought about the false elimination of the distance between art and life, and this also allows one to recognize the contradictoriness of the avant-gardiste undertaking." Some forty years later the same grand narrative seems to have accelerated and intensified for the worse. What Bürger's generation confronted as an uncontrollable flood now looks like a manageable tributary compared to the global deluge of today's hyperaestheticizing information capital.

Media theorist McKenzie Wark's account of hyperaestheticized commerce epitomizes the post-apocalyptic mood that colors the contemporary experience of this story. Wark is critical of information capital's seemingly total cooptation of the aesthetic. However, he abjures Bürger's nostalgia for modernity's lost dialectical gambit. Instead he confronts neoliberal capital's sensuous imagination straightaway, moving variously with and against its dizzying heterogeneity and boundary-crossing fluctuations.

Today sophisticated techniques are gathering to make ever more complex projects instantly and constantly comparable and assessable — from refinancing News Corp. to invading a country to selling sneakers. The development of vectoral flows of information is what makes possible the space of flows, in which jobs, troops, money — anything — can be redirected from one interchangeable address to another. The aesthetic is part of this emergent terrain ... whether it likes it or not. The vector enables an ever more rarefied aesthetic economy.

Few contemporary aestheticians will adopt Wark's theoretical apparatus, which sees neoliberalism's digital and networked exchanges engendering a globalized space of potentially hackable "vectoral flows." Wark is not likely to face disagreement, however, in his grim diagnosis of information capitalism's "rarefied aesthetic economy."

That the aesthetic has become a primary vehicle for an unjust and uncontrollable global exchange regime is now a foregone conclusion. Somewhat paradoxically, this presumption underwrites a contemporary efflorescence in critical aesthetics, which continues to answer and reciprocally shape the neoliberal order it generally opposes. Despite an avowed opposition to neoliberal logics, contemporary aestheticians take as given the fact that the aesthetic no longer legitimately stands opposed to commerce. This is perhaps most marked in the work of critics who persist in making the case for aesthetic autonomy. For instance, Nicholas Brown maintains that "aesthetic autonomy today is ... locked in a life or death struggle with the market." Yet Brown distinguishes his assertion of autonomy within neoliberal aestheticization from the "rear-guard" sentimentalism that lingers in Bürger. Brown insists that the heroic enmity modernity posited between monetary and aesthetic spheres was itself more or less fallacious and that, fallacious or not, this historical antagonism is now buried in the past.

Despite such ritualized burials, the modern dialectic between money and aesthetics finds no resolution in the neoliberal period. Instead, modernity's failed dialectic sinks to the bottom of contemporary aesthetic consciousness, and its enduring irresolvability continues to orient critical encounters with neoliberalism's hyperaestheticized "flows." The crux of the problem is that while the social need to overcome monetary alienation intensifies in the neoliberal period, critical theory has developed no alternative to the money/aesthetics dialectic, and its past incapacity imbues present aesthetic thought with a dire relationship to the future. The result tends to undercut the contemporary aesthetic project with feelings of political hopelessness and historical fatigue. Thus, while the old dialectic between money and aesthetics may have lost its heroic promise, money's neoliberal triumph threatens theoretical interventions with social inconsequence and meaningful artistic practices with what critic Sven Lütticken has called "collector-pleasing irrelevance."

In the present book I mean to redress this neoliberal malaise by rethinking the historical relationship between money and aesthetics from which it ascends. My primary contention is that the contemporary heterodox school of political economy called Modern Monetary Theory provides the critical leverage necessary for doing so. Whereas the hegemonic view treats money as a private, finite, and alienable thisness, MMT conceives money as a public, boundless, and politically answerable relationship that has the capacity to support every person and environment it mediates. The approach of MMT to political economy makes imaginable a host of transformative political projects. In this work I ask what MMT can do for critical theory and mobilize its intervention to answer the neoliberal era's political and aesthetic discontents.

Specifically, I contend that critical theory must transcend the utopian wager of the aesthetic's expansive and sensuous thisness if it is to advance beyond the historical deadlocks of the neoliberal era. It must embrace money's abstract boundless center as the source of social and ecological redemption. Modern aesthetics arose as a means to repair and resist the privations of the "Liberal money form," my term for the orthodox monetary ideology that dominates bourgeois modernity. Rather than treat the root of monetary alienation, the resulting antinomy between the economic and the aesthetic foreclosed money's emphatically abstract...