Symbolic Form and Real Abstraction, or: Panofsky with Sohn-Rethel
Outlines of a critique
What follows is meant to be an “extended abstract” that I’m circulating in advance of an online workshop for contributors to a journal issue on Marxist aesthetics. Unfortunately I’ll miss the workshop itself, as I have a prior commitment that day. I thought it might be useful to get a few more pairs of eyes on it by posting it here. This is a bit condensed and technical, but may be of interest to friends and readers who follow art-theoretical discussions in the vaguely left universe. A full-length article is meant to come out sometime next year.
Marxism possesses an endogenous aesthetic theory in its critique of forms of appearance. Even if we bracket the question of Marx’s relation to Hegel, Capital unmistakably develops a phenomenology of such forms, from the apparently simple unit of the commodity at the start of volume 1 to the “trinity formula” consisting of capital—profit, land—ground rent, and labor—wages in volume 3 (the importance of which Beverly Best has recently underscored in her book The Automatic Fetish; as opposed to Marx’s account of the commodity, the trinity formula has conspicuously failed to make an impact on the disciplines of philosophical aesthetics or art history, even though it likewise expresses essence / appearance relations in capitalism). Marxist critique demonstrates both the untruth as well as the objective social necessity of these economic forms.
Over the past two decades or so, work in value-form theory, communization theory, and Marxist approaches to gender, sexuality, and racialization have controversially attempted to derive further—that is, “non-economic”—categories from the “moving contradiction” of capital. Analogous efforts with which I am personally less familiar have been made in theorizations of law and the state, building on forerunners such as Evgeny Pashukanis and participants in the “state derivation debate” of the 1970s. Resistance to these tendencies emerged on two basic grounds. First, it was argued such approaches are narrowly formalistic and evacuate class struggle from theory (as is explicitly the case in the German Wertkritik school). Second, it was argued that these approaches neglect either, or both, 1) the historical origin of certain such forms outside the capitalist mode of production (as for instance gender and race are categories that capital instrumentalizes but did not itself invent), or 2) the continuing reliance of capital on non-market-mediated spheres of social reproductive labor, primitive accumulation / accumulation by dispossession, and/or “cheap nature” (per Jason W. Moore).
These objections were not surmountable. The collapse of the more totalizing manifestations of communization theory, value-form theory, and gender abolitionism after approximately 2012 and more precipitously after 2016 (Trump and Brexit) correlated to a resurgence of identity politics in activist contexts as well as academic interest in Afro-pessimism and decolonial thought: that is, theoretical modes that tend to posit absolute incommensurability between class struggle and racial (or “epistemic”) antagonism, as likewise does the older lineage of Subaltern Studies. I am heuristically assuming a Euro-American perspective here because it happens to be mine; obviously a story told from elsewhere would be different. These developments coincided with a period of capitalist stabilization after the 2007-2008 financial crisis and the “Movement of the Squares” of 2011. The uprising for black lives that culminated after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 was followed by four years of liberal counterinsurgency. We are now in yet another moment. The reelection of Donald Trump seems to be serving as a belated alert that the “dealignment” of class from so-called identity concerns (which I would suggest is more adequately described as a defection of anti-systemic affect from the liberal forms of representation that attempt to contain it) has long been underway, though whether the effect on the left will be to produce renewed and once more totalizing materialist critique, chauvinist anti-“woke” reaction, or some hybrid of the two remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the war on Palestine has made the issue of settler colonialism’s imbrication with global capitalism and state power far more concrete.
My paper does not address these current events directly. Rather, I will revisit and in some modest way attempt to reanimate an analogous trajectory in the theory and history of art. Around 2008, the recovery of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s notion of “real abstraction” seemed to offer the key to an aesthetics adequate to the insights of communization and value-form theory. The reception of Sohn-Rethel’s book Geistige und körperliche Arbeit. Zur Theorie gesellschaftlicher Synthesis (1970, translated as Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology in 1977) was mediated by a series of articles by Alberto Toscano that considerably extended its purview. Real abstraction is distinct from conceptual abstraction because it is effective in and emerges from practice. Its paradigmatic instance—indeed, perhaps the only instance to which the term properly applies—is the quantitative equivalence between unalike things that is the effect of commodity-money exchange. Sohn-Rethel’s extraordinary maneuver was to derive conceptual abstraction as such from its “real” a priori. Specifically, he claims, the emergence of philosophy in ancient Greece followed upon the invention of coinage. Sohn-Rethel further argues that the “social synthesis” that accounts for the unity of bourgeois society in both practice and cognition is likewise founded on real abstraction. This is meant to be a materialist rewriting of Kant’s description of the transcendental unity of apperception. That is, Sohn-Rethel locates the transcendental not in the subject but rather in social practice (commodity exchange).
In light of the financial crisis, it was tempting to apply the idea of real abstraction rather indiscriminately to commonalities between evidently immaterial (yet no less banefully real) financial instruments and cultural phenomena such as abstract art. It became common to speak of “real abstractions” as plural nouns rather than “real abstraction,” in the singular, as practice, process, or effect; it was possible, for instance, for Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton to describe gender as a real abstraction (thus grounding Judith Butler’s notion of performativity in the harder stuff of the critique of political economy). At the cost of stretching its original exchange-centric signification to its limit, then, real abstraction came perilously close to subsuming conceptuality per se, thus making it difficult to provide a materialist account of cognition that would not reduce everything to a reflex of specifically capitalist social forms. This was also to beg the question of whether any abstraction whatsoever is tautologically and thus trivially “real” once materialized in practice, institutions, or ideologies, thus only apparently positing the primacy of the material “last instance” while in fact making abstraction so labile that it itself becomes an imperious agent (once again displacing class struggle). In taking up this specific parsing of Sohn-Rethel, art theoretical tendencies of the 2010s to some degree simply redescribed the complicity of modernist and contemporary art in the “colonization of everyday life” as the wholesale subsumption of phenomenality to capitalist abstraction. The late Marina Vishmidt developed one of the most powerful and still-illuminating versions of this line of thinking in her sustained parallel between artistic and economic speculation.
I am now returning to these issues from what may seem an unpropitious angle: the art historical method known as iconography or iconology, which Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and likeminded German scholars developed in the early twentieth century. Although I still need to do a lot of work, I expect that my article will, maybe a bit perversely, offer an art historical inflection of Marxism rather than a Marxist inflection of art history. Iconology was programmatically Neo-Kantian, at least as Panofsky practiced it. I arrived at this interest via Neo-Kantian deviations of my own. I was for some time in the 2010s involved in demonstrating the relevance of value-form analysis to art theory, specifically by demarcating the production of art from other sorts of production on the grounds that the former is not directly regulated by socially necessary labor time. Artworks rather exchange at prices that reflect unique monopoly privileges.
So far, so good. But the categorial determination of art in bourgeois society as exceptional with respect to standard commodity production remained an abstract and in this sense transcendental (Kantian) claim insofar as it boils down to an account of the conditions of possibility for something like “art in bourgeois society,” rather than an account of that art. In other words, my work, as well as that of Dave Beech and a few others involved in these debates, answered the question of art’s place in modernity by saying “this is the sort of thing that can occupy a gap in capital’s reproduction”—a correct but deflatingly negative determination. A positive, properly Marxist account of art’s autonomy would by contrast move from the abstract to the concrete through an “anamnesis of the genesis” (Adorno) of modern art’s constitutive inclusion in / exclusion from an evolving totality of bourgeois social forms. To my credit, I did cursorily point this out in a review of Dave Beech’s book that I wrote with Jasper Bernes in 2016. That is, the value-theoretical account of art’s exceptionality takes as given the conditions of possibility which it ought to reconstruct and thereby historicize in a speculative phenomenology, as Gillian Rose does for Neo-Kantian social inquiry in her book Hegel Contra Sociology (or, for that matter, as Marx does for classical political economy in Capital). This might, finally, make possible an interpretation of the mediation of historical subjectivities in specifically artistic “symbolic forms” that neither posits their unconditional autonomy from the material “base” nor—just as idealistically—identifies them unreservedly with “real abstraction(s)” which can be derived willy-nilly from the naked definition of capital. Such would be Marxist art history, rather than Neo-Kantian marxisant art theory.
Still, an art historical recuperation of Sohn-Rethel might pass through its more expressly idealistic counterpart, the doctrine of “symbolic form” that Panofsky adapted from the Neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer. In contrast to recent Sohn-Rethelian art theory, iconology as a Neo-Kantian project lacks even a nominal practical/material substrate because it derives “symbolic forms” circularly from culture, which is composed of nothing but symbolic forms. (I wrote about this circularity in an article called “Panofsky’s Antinomies,” which came out in 2021.) Per Cassirer, symbolic forms are “aspects of the intelligent organization of reality,” or “characteristic ways of ‘structuring’” perception. They have no ground other than mysteriously innate “tendencies” of the human mind. This Neo-Kantian expansion of the transcendental simply appends regions of value (culture) to Kant’s necessary conditions of experience. Thus, for example, the a priori principles of mythic thought are derived from observation of actual myth, which in turn is supposedly only possible thanks to the mythic a priori. Yet despite the weakness of Cassirer’s and Panofsky’s etiology of cultural expression, iconology at least develops the autonomous, active, and subjective side of the interpretation of artifacts, as Marx, in the “Theses on Feuerbach,” says that idealism abstractly developed this side of the cognition of sensuous reality in contrast to “contemplative” materialism. Panofsky delivered unsurpassable accounts of the transformation of symbolic forms in his writings on topics such as perspective, the “Hercules at the Crossroads” motif, Dürer’s Melencolia I, and Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego. These are monuments that it behooves Marxists to reclaim, not to abandon. Whether the hermeneutic model I’m proposing is compatible with the “cultural techniques” school of German (post-)media theory, which inherits and generalizes the notion of the “technical a priori” of cultural practices from Friedrich Kittler, is a question I’d like to investigate, as it seems to me that these tracks have been kept separate mostly due to contingent political/academic allegiances.
This is about as much as I have been able to get down concretely so far. In the final version of the article that I have previewed above, my aim will be to work more carefully with the shared Kantian frameworks of Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour and excerpts from Panofsky, perhaps by narrowing in on the problem of the methodological melancholy that results both from the inherent belatedness of art historical interpretation (a topic prominent in recent meta-art historical literature such as Michael Ann Holly’s The Melancholy Art) as well as from the annexation of conceptuality to capital in the more apocalyptic variants of real abstraction theory. Another crucial point is that art historical interpretation even of modern and contemporary art is unimaginable except as an account of capital’s work against previous aesthetic totalities, such as the long-lived European representational space that I have recently taken to calling the “picture-world” (stretching roughly from Giotto to Manet), as well as modern attempts—however desperate or deluded—at aesthetic counter-totalization. These aesthetic totalities offer perspectives beyond the more disciplinarily palatable lines of flight, pockets of provisional autonomy, and moments of irreducible indeterminacy that we have come to associate with aesthetic resistance.