Acid Fiction Manifesto, Part 3

Identifying the Specter that Haunts Us Today

This is part three of an ongoing series. For part two, click here.

Now that we have properly examined and venerated bourgeois art, we must examine why our adherence to the form inhibits us. Specifically, we need to consider the possibility that what we think is the continuity of the same bourgeois art produced in earlier centuries is actually a perverse mutation of art itself.

In her writing (cited in part two), Wark presents one vision of an alternative, contrasting her impression of “proletarian literature” against its bourgeois predecessor. In her words, this form “presented itself as the cultural wing of an historic avant-garde.” It is the artistic expression of a culture which is collective rather than individualized. It is art which is collaborative, rather than didactic, in the creation of meaning; transformative and revolutionary, rather than static and backward-looking. However, external forces were already in place to undermine this attempt at a break with bourgeois artistic standards.

The Recouping of Rebellion

The algorithmic function of capital was well-prepared to muddy the waters, leading people to confuse revolutionary aesthetics for genuine revolution. This rendered the new art as digestible and ripe to be recuperated by capital:

“What displaced [the bourgeois novel] in the west was another avant-garde, a modernist one that declared its ‘freedom’ from historical allegiance, all the more easily to be coopted [sic] by American empire. McCarthyism suppressed the former; the CIA promoted the latter, as is now well established. The source of the decline of the bourgeois novel into mere lit fic was not ‘Protestantism’, let alone avant-gardes. The novel was impoverished by extra-literary means.”

The works of many mid-century Western artists were financed by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a Cold War propaganda campaign. This was done in an attempt to invent a culture that could present a counterbalance to the attempts at constructing proletarian art within the Soviet sphere of influence. Abstract artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, as well as the literary publication The Paris Review, were just a few of those who enjoyed funding provided by the CIA. In essence, it was petty—yet effective—psychological warfare. The aim was to sell the virtue of liberal capitalism as a political economy which fostered free expression and must, therefore, be the best system possible to foster human creative flourishing. It didn’t matter that the works were the artistic equivalent of a Potemkin village.

This tipping of the scales was one of the forces disrupting the dialectic process of the discovery of new art forms. Bourgeois art was consciously transformed, rather than being subsumed by a new and more revolutionary form. The aesthetics and subjects changed, yet the subjectivity remained. We, by and large, persisted in imagining art as a medium through which meaning is conveyed to the viewer by the artist. Later, after the 1967 publication of Roland Barthes’s essay The Death of the Author, art became a medium through which meaning was constructed at the level of the individual; the very meaning of a work itself became a subjective matter to be customized by its consumer. In this way, the illusion of free-spirited individualism with which postmodern Western art was branded became a tool to reinforce bourgeois values and hierarchies by obscuring those structures and making them harder to see.

There were alternatives to this approach of constructing atomized meaning on the level of the subjective individual even at the time. Brazilian thinker Paolo Freire presented a revolutionary approach to education and the construction of meaning in his 1968 work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire’s book presented a revolutionary counterstrike in regards to the conveyance of information. One of the author’s foremost suggestions was that the receipt of information—and therefore, the construction of meaning—was a collaborative process between teacher and student. Transitively, this could mean that the construction of the meaning of a work of art was not necessarily subjective to the individual, but a collaborative process between artist and audience. Meaning is subjective, but not to the point that each individual could invent their own bespoke meaning, divorced from the insights and perspectives of others.

Freire’s work, in turn, inspired Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal to develop a participatory form of theater which he dubbed “Theater of the Oppressed.” We will delve deeper into these theories in a later section.

The Inmate is Running the Asylum

In the Twentieth Century, there was an active campaign to promote works of art that were revolutionary in their aesthetics, but liberal in their politics. There’s no evidence to suggest that this practice did not end; however, it’s no longer black-suited G-men that provide the impetus. Now, it is the internal logic of capitalism itself which propels the process.

As Kushner (also cited in part two) explains: 

“That probably has to do with the all-encompassing nature of capitalism at this point, where accumulation is no longer seen as something new and vulgar, as in Balzac’s time, but rather all there is.”

We can laud bourgeois art as a form that decentralized the act of conveying meaning, taking it from the hands of religious authorities and monarchs and democratizing it. However, that same focus on the individual takes a different context in an era defined by such profound degrees of atomization and alienation. Like capitalism itself, bourgeois art persists today as a zombie. The inward gaze that was once hailed as revolutionary is now little more than vacant, glassy-eyed navel gazing.

In short, this force which refuses to let bourgeois art die is that familiar and distinctly post-modern malefactor: capitalist realism. And, as in other areas, capitalist realism applies a programmatic logic to the creation of art.

As noted in part two, art has never been fully the product of a passionate creator as we like to envision it. Going back centuries before capitalism emerged, artists were still motivated by what their patrons would be willing to finance. Now, however, not even the nominal patrons who consume art can dictate what cultural works get made on any meaningful scale.

Individual bourgeois consumers do not dictate the cultural works produced for their consumption. The internal logic of the capitalist-realist algorithm determines the most agreeable works to be produced, then shovels them into the market for consumption. In effect, our creation and consumption of art is dictated by market logic. As is the purpose of capitalist realism, it keeps us trapped, largely unable to imagine any different artform.

Scoured of Imagination

There are exceptions, of course; to people who were generationally marginalized and excluded from the pursuit of bourgeois identity, the inward focus can still have some liberatory value. However, the can is highly contingent. In general, contemporary art on the mass-produced scale is totally distinct from the bourgeois art of earlier generations. It is what we could very reasonably describe as “capitalist-realist art.” The novel, as we receive it today, is indicative of a form that was meant to give way decades ago. However, given our own state of arrested development in capitalist realism, it persists long past its artistic necessity.

I want to echo my earlier reference to the dearth of dystopia stories that occupy our collective imaginations, and what this suggests about our inability to imagine a future. In essence, as Wark explains, “[The bourgeois novel] is about making something of this world, not transcending it in favor of another.” If this is the case, then the bastard offspring of the bourgeois novel, the capitalist-realist novel, is about ensuring that our definition of “something” is an immutable constant. We’ve been robbed of our ability to imagine a different world; all we can envision are increasingly dire and bleak visions of the world we already know.