This is the second post in a short series I’m writing about culture under capitalism. In subsequent posts, I’ll complete this discussion about daily life in capitalism, take up the topic of imperialism and culture, and conclude by reviewing the concept of “cultural revolution” in the 21st century.
I ended my first post about the relationship between culture and politics by noting that “the world” isn’t just the big or abstract realities of an era, but also the ordinary objects that surround us day-to-day: our laptops and phones, the bikes and buses we take to work, the apartments and houses that shelter us, the spare New Yorker tote we bag our groceries in as well as the New Yorkers we spread on the endtable to impress guests. We could do worse than starting with these objects in making sense of culture under capitalism. After all, they’re exactly where Marx started: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails,” Capital begins, “presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.”
As a buyable, sellable, and more or less fungible product of some usefulness, a commodity is “an extremely obvious, trivial thing”; we “know” what it is the same way we know what a table or Happy Meal or length of copper wire are and how each relates to our life. But, Marx says, a commodity is ultimately “a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties,” and one way of uncovering these subtleties is by marking the differences between our material world and that of previous centuries.
I tried to do this myself a while back on visits to the Royal Ontario Museum and the Met, where I walked through the galleries dedicated to modern Western and historical European design. Consider this folding-top desk, or bureau-brisé, made for King Louis XIV around 1689. Roll the words to describe it around your mouth like wine: “resplendent marquetry,” “red-tinted tortoiseshell” or “exotic tortoiseshell,” “boulle work,” a “première partie” and “contre partie,” “inlays of cutout brass,” “royal symbols, strapwork, and acanthus scrolls,” "openwork fleurs-de-lis.”
It both depends on and visually projects the power of an entire social-economic system. It was produced by the Gobelins Manufactury established by Louis XIV expressly to “bolster the French economy” and “to turn the focus of French art on the glorification of the king, a strategy that was part of a long struggle for power between the monarchy and the aristocracy.” Just as to make an apple pie you first need to invent the universe, this desk presupposes a universe of consumption built around several highly-restricted guilds working in clockwork coordination to produce one-off, boutique items for deep-pocketed royals. And it has a function, it works: first, as a little cog in the economic engine of France; second, as a little cog in the machine that whirls the nobles through “a pattern of expensive daily living that kept the aristocracy [who were] seeking preferments constantly occupied.”
Third function: you can write on it.
My point here is that even the most conventional, utilitarian items are marked by and propound a certain politics: they give us a specific idea of the good life, solicit certain behaviours from us, synchronize our “day-to-day” with the “big and abstract realities” of our time. So, however ridiculous it is, there’s more than a little truth to Adorno’s fogeyish lament in Minima Moralia that technology “is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.” “Which driver is not tempted,” he asks, “merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists?” Would Travis Bickle have felt so all-powerful if he didn’t have an engine roaring under him and a hulking industrial carapace between him and the “trash'“ of New York—soft flesh waiting for hard metal to crush and subdue it?
The bureau-brisé was ultimately a victim of the prosperity that produced it. After all, who exactly was making all that money in France? Just gentry living off land rents, or, increasingly, merchants, workshop owners, the “city people,” nascent industrialists, and financiers? And who bought the bureau-brisé when it was sold at auction in 1751? The insurgent Paris bourgeoisie, in an effort to assimilate into the aristocracy, spared no expense in filling its homes with the same furniture that the aristocrats own; but if you can “buy” aristocratic status on the market, you’ve already stepped out of the world (and value-system) of aristocracy proper. From now on, money will talk more than heraldry and the consumer economy’s centre of gravity will shift from the craftsman masterpiece to the commodity.
Yet in our own society, capitalism and the commodity, far from erasing distinctions of status, have multiplied occasions for its purchase and display across all the rungs of the social hierarchy: now we’re all 24/7 guests in the court of the Sun King with no way out. The attendant materialistic social judgement is well-satirized in a scene from Succession where the social striving CEO Tom mocks a woman’s “ludicrously capacious” Burberry handbag. “What's even in there, huh?” he asks. “Flat shoes for the subway? Her lunch pail?”
We’re more like Tom than we like to think. After all, aren’t Succession and an HBO subscription also status symbols? Judging from the number of Reddit threads where people making 60k discuss the coding of the Roy family’s pared-down clothing like canny insiders, noting that the ultra-rich believe in “stealth wealth” or that “money talks, wealth whispers,” I think so. The show’s set designers took pains to make the Roys’ surroundings antiseptic and impersonal, but don’t we also look at them out of an envy-tinged fascination? How do the ultra-rich live? What do they own? What’s chic, what’s passé? The score, with its dark classical colouring, is an ironic comment on the grandiosity of the characters. But wholly ironic? These people are all stupid blowhards; they’re also King Lear, and we become better by watching them since King Lear is high-class, capital-C Culture.
This is one of the pernicious things about capitalism: form seems to overtake content, so that all kinds of objects and practices that might signal different things—a New Yorker tote bag, bike-riding instead of car-driving, a Che Guevara shirt, a set of Penguin classics, recycling—all end up signalling one big thing: my value is defined by the things I own. The liberal Succession viewer and the conservative MAGA-hat wearer have different political stripes but are both playing the same game, which has both a material, economic dimension and an expressive, cultural one, with the two worlds welded together in the commodity. “A very strange thing” indeed!
In my last post, I enjoyed enumerating all the things we might consider culture, from Modern Times to Coke bottles to Tik Tok videos to Ode to Joy. Not all of these are or began their life as commodities, but commodification has altered how we relate to them. In the age of mechanical reproduction, as Walter Benjamin shows in his famous essay, the “aura” of an object, its ritualistic charisma (think the chalice in the Catholic Mass), the value of its authenticity, all ebb away. It’s hard to reconstruct the mindset of peasants impassioned by Andrei Rublev’s Trinity, come in from a feudal world that Fredric Jameson describes as “poor in that rich background of continuous aesthetic sensation which makes it so hard to define art in our own society of images and spectacles, but which here is limited to the specialized and discontinuous moments of performance, of festival, of chorale, and even of sumptuous space… still limited to churches and palaces.”
We live in a qualitatively different sensorium, a world where the most incongruous things are thrown together as if in a big garbage heap of History or (there it is again) one massive New Yorker tote. We can adore Rublev, but might be better off meditating on Richard Hamilton’s 1994 collage, titled, Just what is it that makes today’s home’s so different, so appealing? The answer to that question is “an extremely obvious, trivial thing.”