stably unusual

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Stably Unusual
Artistic Labor and Aesthetic Autonomy
thomas waller
In what was originally planned as part 7 of Capital, volume 1, but

only later published posthumously as “The Results of the Immediate
Process of Production,” Karl Marx identified two distinct moments
of the capitalization process, which he termed “formal” and “real”
subsumption. Where the former of these categories alludes to the
takeover by capital of preexisting modes of labor, the second phase
is contingent on the first and indexes that process by which capital
revolutionizes these modes of labor in accordance with the produc-
tion of relative surplus-value.1 Over the past decade or so, debates
have raged within communization circles over whether the catego-
ries should be understood in historical terms as a periodizing shift
that marks the rise and decline of “programmatism” (Théorie Com-
muniste),2 or whether they might not rather signify an intertwined
process that is constitutive of the internal dynamics of capitalism as
such (Endnotes).3 In literary and cultural studies, an adjacent discus-
sion has unfolded over the possible autonomy of works of art under
capitalism, with some critics stressing the political import of auton-
omy in the age of art’s real subsumption,4 while others have queried
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doi 10.1215/10418385-10832228 © 2023 Editorial Board, Qui Parle
396 qui parle december 2023 vol. 32 no. 2
the extent to which art’s productive process could be technologically

rationalized.5 According to postwar Marxists like Jacques Camatte,
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Antonio Negri, and Fredric Jameson, the development of capitalism
since the 1960s and 1970s has seen the process of real subsumption
reach a state of near total completion,6 so that one might posit a
third category alongside Marx’s famous dyad7—“total subsump-
tion”—which would correspond to the argument that capital’s eco-
nomic domination is now so complete that it has become coexten-
sive with society as such.8 To take a position in the debate over
aesthetic autonomy—the ability of art to resist the market pressures
of the commodity-form—therefore requires taking a theoretical and
historical stance on the subsumption debate, as well.
The purpose of this article is comparative and synthetic rather
than contentious or polemical. It offers an extended meditation on
two approaches to the question of autonomy in order to evaluate the
fraught relationship between labor and aesthetics, economy and form,
art and the market. What Dave Beech’s Art and Value and Nicholas
Brown’s Autonomy share is the impulse to reconsider these old prob-
lems from vantage points that are theoretically new. Instead of offer-
ing an exhaustive discussion of these critics’ theories of artistic
autonomy, however, the following pages shall attempt to recenter
their differences around Marx’s categories of subsumption and the
problematic of productive labor. The two hinge points of the article
come at the end of the discussions of each of the two books. After re-
constructing Beech’s persuasive account of art’s “economic exception-
alism,” I argue that to exclusively focus on the qualitative irreducibil-
ity of artistic labor risks losing sight of what is socially unique about
aesthetic production. Likewise, and inversely, although Brown’s orig-
inal account of art’s internal overcoming of the commodity-form pro-
vides a generative way to rethink aesthetics in modernism’s wake, it
rests on a periodizing claim for the total domination of the capital-
ist market that equivocates on whether artistic labor can truly be
“really subsumed” under capital. What is missing or unclear in the
one is thereby supplemented with what is persuasive or original
in the other (and vice versa). Through this critical cross compari-
son, the article joins the ongoing conversation about how to think
Waller: Stably Unusual 397
the overlap or divergence between materialist studies of culture and

the Marxist theory of value.9

Unlike Beech and Brown, who also consider digital forms like pho-
tography and film, the kinds of art objects this essay has in mind
are, as a rule, those produced by individual artists in traditional
media like painting and sculpture. To limit the purview in this way
should not be taken as a normative claim for the superiority of some
art forms over others, nor is it to say that the following discussion
does not also apply to digitized cultural products or the mechanical
reproduction of artworks. As Walter Benjamin argued, the authority
vested in the “aura” of traditional art forms like painting should
be challenged in direct proportion to which the progressive politics
of mass media like film and photography should be championed.10
Yet despite Benjamin’s laudatory efforts to underscore the emanci-
patory (and, ultimately, antifascist) possibilities of art’s technical
reproducibility, history has failed to fully vindicate his prognosis
of a future decline in aura’s hold over modern culture.11 On the con-
trary, as Winnie Won Yin Wong has shown in her work on the Dafen
artists’ village in China, the industry of authenticity is big business,
with global consumers willing to pay high prices for hand-painted
copies of canonical artworks or bespoke images produced with the
auratic seal of manual reproduction.12 These “global readymades”
ask important questions of Marxist theories of subsumption. Has
the labor of the Dafen artist been subsumed under capital if its prod-
uct is made, as Marx said of John Milton, “as the expression of his
own nature” (C, 1044)? Are the Dafen copies art if they are so thor-
oughly subordinate to the logic of commodity exchange?13 Can
these paintings really possess an aura of authenticity if they are pro-
duced as reproducible commodities for sale on the world market?
Although this essay largely brackets such questions to treat the
relation between art and subsumption on a higher level of abstrac-
tion, the fact that the ambiguity is centered on a medium like paint-
ing is not lost on my (more or less implicit) focus on traditional forms
of art and aesthetic labor. For Theodor W. Adorno, the autonomy
that art achieved in the high-bourgeois era is “shattered” by the mas-
sification of the culture industry, thereby becoming something “irrev-
ocable.”14 Just as philosophy “lives on because the moment to realize
it was missed,” so art “seeks refuge in its own negation, hoping to

survive through its death.”15 The spontaneity and romantic self-

expression that had formerly characterized art is now registered in
reverse by the ever more rarefied experimentalism of the late mod-
ernists. In this way, the traditional art object is held up by Adorno
as a kind of negative index for what the current era is supposed
to have lost. Clearly, this is a historical argument fully as much
as an aesthetic one, but what Beech and Brown show, in different
ways, is that autonomy is less the referent of a bygone period of
history than it is grounded in what is qualitatively exceptional in
the process of artistic labor.16 Another, more optimistic insight of
Adorno’s was that every successful work of art holds out the promise
of things being otherwise.17 In the conclusion to this article, accord-
ingly, I ponder the political dimension to Beech’s and Brown’s theo-
ries of aesthetic autonomy by drawing a parallel with debates among
communization theorists over subsumption, programmatism, and
the aesthetics of revolution.
Economic Exception
Roughly speaking, Marxist scholars have approached the problem

of autonomy from two distinct but interrelated perspectives: one eco-
nomic, the other aesthetic. The first approach highlights the differ-
ence between the process of artistic production and value-producing
labor as such. This is Dave Beech’s argument in Art and Value, which
makes the provocative assertion that “art is bound up with capitalism
but does not conform to the capitalist mode of commodity produc-
tion.”18 Presenting the case for art’s “economic exceptionalism,” Beech
argues that artists, while reliant on the capitalist for the circulation
and exchange of their product, are not subject to the same condi-
tions as wage laborers, for the former “own the products they pro-
diferença duce and their own means of production” and thus, unlike the lat-
artista ter, “are capable of working independently of the capitalist” (AV,
x trab. 274). Whereas most commodities are reproducible, Beech points
comum out that fine artworks are “inseparable from how and when they
were produced,” since, even in the case of two apparently identical
pieces, they are always separated by their sequence in time (AV,
359).19 The progressive rationalization of production that marks

the real subsumption of labor under capital is, furthermore, incom-
patible with artistic labor, which is unproductive in the sense that it is
not productive of value. As Beech asks rhetorically: “What would the
real subsumption of artistic labor under capital look like? . . . Would
artistic labor be broken down into Fordist chunks of unskilled la-
bor? Would the studio be reorganized according to Taylorist prin-
ciples? Would the means of production be constantly revolutionized,
employing the latest technology and scientific knowledge?” (AV, 255).
The implied answer is that there is some quality peculiar to artistic la-
bor that differentiates it from the labor-power expended in value pro-
duction. This argument finds some justification in the work of Marx
himself, who famously described Milton as a dealer in commodities
when he sold Paradise Lost for £5, but not a productive worker,
for he produced the text “in the way that a silkworm produces silk,
as the expression of his own nature,” and was at no point coerced
into selling his labor-power to a capitalist (C, 1044). For Beech,
then, “artistic autonomy appears to have a material basis in the eco-
nomics of artistic production” (AV, 274).
While the argument of Art and Value is strictly applicable only to
irreproducible works of fine art, it nonetheless provides a thought-
ful counterpoint to narratives of the “total subsumption” of culture
under capital, which have become a commonplace of Marxist criti-
cism in the postwar period. Adorno’s remarks on the culture indus-
try, for example, are unambiguous: “Cultural entities typical of the
culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commod-
ities through and through.”20 Yet even within Adorno’s thought there
is a tension between the agonistic recognition of the capitalist sub-
sumption of culture and a more optimistic defense of tributary back-
waters within capitalism that have retained “a measure of freedom
from the forces of power which dominate the market,” and that
have thereby “strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict
of supply and demand.”21 These backwaters were, for Adorno, to be
identified with modernist works of art—an argument that Pierre
Bourdieu arrived at by a different route with his concept of the “field
of restricted production,” which answers not to the unpredictable
forces of the capitalist market but to “a public of equals who are
also competitors” (read: modernist autonomy, not the heteronomy
of the culture industry).22 After the historical disappearance of these

decommodified zones, however, modernist aesthetics become just as
much a part of the culture industry as the old popular forms to which
Adorno maintained an opposition, thus leading us back into the nar-
rative of total subsumption. As Jameson puts it in his 1977 after-
word to Aesthetics and Politics, “Modernism and its accompanying
techniques of ‘estrangement’ have become the dominant style where-
by the consumer is reconciled with capitalism,” to the extent that
modernism has effectively “become postmodernism without ceasing
to be modern.”23 By the time of Jameson’s book on postmodernism,
this argument has taken on a more categorical form: “Aesthetic pro-
duction . . . has become integrated into commodity production gen-
erally.”24 Although Jameson does not use the term subsumption per
se, what underpins his understanding of postmodern culture is nev-
ertheless a set of assumptions about artistic production that closely
correspond with the narrative of total subsumption: that there is
now no outside to capitalist value production; that all artworks are
now nothing but commodities; that there is little difference between
the culture industry and other commodity-producing sectors.
Dave Beech calls this narrative into question by taking it seriously,
refuting the claim that art could ever be “really subsumed” under
capital through a meticulous analysis of the economics of artistic pro-
duction. To clarify the economic basis of artistic autonomy, it should
suffice to provide a brief review of Marx’s argument in “The Results
of the Immediate Process of Production.” Here Marx argues that for-
mal subsumption indicates “the takeover by capital of a mode of la-
bor developed before the emergence of capitalist relations,” whereas
real subsumption indexes the process by which capital “not only
transforms the situations of the various agents of production [but]
also revolutionizes their actual mode of labor and the real nature
of the labor process as a whole” (C, 1021). The difference between
the two terms thus lies in the nature of the relationship between labor
and capital. As Endnotes summarize, “Subsumption remains merely
formal precisely in the sense that it does not involve capital’s transfor-
mation of a given labor process, but simply its taking hold of it,”
while “the subsumption of the labor process becomes ‘real’ insofar
as capital does not merely rest with the labor process as it is given,
but steps beyond formal possession of that process to transform it
in its own image.”25 In the case of formal subsumption, capital’s

extraction of surplus-value is based on the extension of the working
day beyond the time required for the workers to reproduce the value
of their labor, and is in this sense an absolute extension.
A B C
A B C
Where line A—B signifies the labor-process as it is given, line B—C
signifies its extension over and above necessary labor-time. As Søren
Mau notes, the fact that the labor-process here undergoes no signif-
icant alteration implies two things: first, the transition from noncap-
italist production to formally subsumed production is principally a
matter of property relations, as the capitalist appropriates the sur-
plus product resulting from existing modes of labor; second, and a
fortiori, “a transition from formally subsumed capitalist production
to non-capitalist production would not require a reorganization of
the production process.”26 In real subsumption, by contrast, capital
moves beyond mere formal possession by reducing the portion of the
working day spent on necessary labor while at the same time increas-
ing the portion devoted to surplus labor. It does this, for example,
through increases in productivity and technological innovations.
A B C
A B′ B C
Real subsumption is then coextensive with the production of relative
surplus-value, wherein the increase in surplus labor may come about
through a decrease in necessary labor. Thus, while the length of the
working day A—C is given, surplus-value is produced by reducing
the amount of necessary labor A—B. If, under formal subsumption,
the relative independence of the labor process still allows for a tran-
sition out of capitalism without fundamentally reorganizing produc-
tion, real subsumption implements a form of economic power that
restricts the possibilities for such a transition via mechanisms of con-
trol like deskilling and the specialization of tasks.27
With this technical framework in place, it is difficult to defend the
argument for a total identity between aesthetic labor and the pro-
duction of commodities. Insofar as the categories of formal and
real subsumption are to be understood alongside the categories

of relative and absolute surplus-value as developed, respectively,
in parts 3 and 4 of Capital, volume 1, the concept of subsumption
is closely linked to the sorts of technological innovations enabled by
the development of the large-scale modern factory. As subsistence
commodities become cheaper to produce through cooperation and
increased industrial capacity, downward pressure is exerted on the
price of labor-power with the result that a smaller portion of the
working day is given over to necessary labor. This expansion of pro-
ductive forces is possible only on the basis of the real subsumption of
labor, which increases the production of relative surplus-value B′—C
through technological developments that restructure the technical
composition of capital, as proportionally more value is concentrated
in constant rather than variable elements.
To defend the thesis of the real subsumption of aesthetic labor
under capital would be to locate the process of artistic production
within the context of this revolutionization of industry. However,
to return to Marx’s example, artistic labor is not subject to the kinds
of technological transformations described here, since the artist pro-
duces the artwork “in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the
expression of his own nature” (C, 1044). In a medium such as paint-
ing, for example, changes to the labor process are limited to more
or less insignificant differences like the quality of paper and brushes.
Although such changes often do affect the aesthetic of the work, it
would be ridiculous to speak of them as reducing necessary labor-
time A—B. Even if some technical developments do allow artists to
work faster and produce more paintings, the fact remains that “art-
ists who perform their own artistic labor are not wage laborers em-
ployed by capitalists” (AV, 260). The reduction by half of the time
required to produce a painting, for example, does not necessitate a
proportional decrease in the value of the painting itself, as is gener-
ally the case with commodities, for there is no socially necessary
labor-time at stake in the production of artworks. As Daniel Spauld-
ing illustrates with an instructive example: “If someone were to find
a way to make Gerhard Richter–type paintings twice as efficiently
as the artist himself, this will not necessarily force Richter to sell his
own works for half as much in order to compete, because what they
actually sell for has little to no relation to their production time to

begin with.”28 While the argument becomes more complicated (though

not indefensible) with digitized culture products like video games
or computer-generated films, the economic fact remains that artis-
tic labor is not productive in the Marxist sense of participating in the
circuit of capitalist value production. If the suggestion that the art-
ist’s atelier could be organized in accordance with Taylorist princi-
ples is absurd, then it makes no more sense to speak of the extension
of the working day of the artist to produce absolute surplus-value
B—C. Thus, while real subsumption does not apply to artistic labor,
it cannot, strictly speaking, be formally subsumed under capital,
either.
Without wanting to disagree with Beech—and, indeed, as Jasper
Bernes and Daniel Spaulding point out, the argument of Art and Val-
ue is so airtight that it is hard to imagine anyone who would not
agree with it29—it seems to me that the focus on the material condi-
tions that distinguish art from other forms of commodity-producing
labor nevertheless risks losing sight of those nonmaterial, more spe-
cifically aesthetic qualities that contribute to art’s social uniqueness.
For while it is indisputable that artworks do not produce value, the
aesthetic claim of the “total subsumption” narrative still holds:
namely, that where modernism could maintain some degree of oppo-
sition to the heteronomous logic of the culture industry, the dissolu-
tion of modernism’s restricted field led to a shift in the dominant
forms of artistic production that Jameson famously described as
the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” If subsumption is not the
right category with which to account for this integration of mod-
ernist autonomy into the culture industry, then how does one make
sense of the situation of aesthetics today? Beech is useful to the ex-
tent that he exposes the standard argument about the “real subsump-
tion” of aesthetic labor under capital as a misapplication of Marx’s
categories, but he is notably less helpful when it comes to the practi-
cal task of actually interpreting works of art. While one may grant
that, from the standpoint of production, art is economically excep-
tional, production is still but one moment of the artistic process. To
restrict oneself to this moment risks diminishing one’s understand-
ing of the aesthetic means by which art may mediate the impersonal
domination of capital and the mute compulsions of the value-form—

phenomena registered by artworks despite or, rather, through their
nonintegration into capitalist production. In a review of Beech’s
book, Sarah Brouillette develops this critique further:
Beech describes artworks as in important ways “noneconomic,”
but what if we were to argue rather that artworks are not “non-
economic” so much as defined fundamentally by their unusual
relation to the economic sphere? Instead of anchoring analysis
only in the conditions of production exclusive to unique fine art,
we could also claim that, well beyond such works, much of what
aesthetic production is—from what we can for simplicity’s sake
call its content or message, to claims for its ontological distinction
from other kinds of expression—emerges in some way from the
shifting but ultimately stably unusual position of many aesthetic
practices vis-à-vis the capitalist dominant.30
The salutary emphasis on art’s “stably unusual” character is a dia-

lectical one. The point is not only that the materiality of art condi-
tions its production, which any philistine empiricist could tell you,
but that this materiality is itself taken up in aesthetics as a moment
in the form. Adorno drives home this point over and over again in
Aesthetic Theory: “What is essential in art is that which in it is not
the case, that which is incommensurable with the empirical measure
of all things.”31 The question for the critic of artistic autonomy is then:
how might one account for the strategies by which artworks aesthet-
ically resist identification with the capitalist market after the argument
about the peculiarly noneconomic aspects of the process of artistic la-
bor has been accepted?
Immanent Suspension
A second approach to the problem thus has to do with the aesthetic
argument for artistic autonomy, which is what Nicholas Brown pres-
ents in his 2019 monograph Autonomy. Brown’s starting point is the
wager that, if artworks were nothing but commodities, then “inter-
pretation of the work itself would be a pointless endeavour” (A, 9).
While art commodities are interesting for sociological questions such
as who consumes them and why, Brown argues that they cannot be

interesting from an aesthetic point of view, since, in attempting to
satisfy what they imagine the consumer will want from them, they
abrogate the moment of subjective intention that is constitutive of
art as such. Because they are made solely to produce marketable ef-
fects, these art commodities cannot satisfy the minimal conditions
required to produce a meaning, so they demand not interpretation
but a sociological analysis that relates the work in question to the
a crítica market niche to which its consumers belong. In Brown’s words, “So-
só ciological questions have answers without necessarily involving
é pertinente
a obras intentions; interpretive questions, if they have answers, require
que intentions” (A, 10). For this reason, Brown claims that art commod-
suspendem
seu status ities are not available to interpretation, which is a critical activity re-
de served for those works that immanently suspend their commodity
mercadoria
status.
Brown’s conception of autonomy is well grounded in a subtle
reading of the exchange process as developed by Marx in chapter
2 of Capital, volume 1. In the concluding section of chapter 1,
Marx provided his famous account of the fetishism of the commodity,
wherein he described how the objective characteristics of human labor
appear as the socionatural properties of the commodity-form. As a
result of this fetishistic illusion, capitalist phenomenology takes on
a “mysterious character,” and commodities seem to be endowed with
a supernatural agency that allows ordinary objects like tables to
“evolve out of their wooden brains grotesque ideas, far more won-
derful than if they were to begin dancing of their own free will” (C,
163–64).32 Yet, as Marx notes at the beginning of chapter 2, despite
what appears to be the commodity’s transcendent self-agency, com-
modity objects “cannot go themselves to market and perform ex-
changes in their own right” (C, 174). In chapter 2 Marx therefore
considers the role of the commodity owner for the first time in Cap-
ital, an investigation that requires moving onto a different level of
abstraction.33 Reflecting on the function of the individual commodity
owner, Marx notes that to be exchangeable, a commodity must have
some useful quality for others. However, since the commodity is not
useful for its owner—if it were, he wouldn’t sell it—he must anticipate
its use-value through more or less informed guesses about market
demand. As Marx states categorically, “All commodities are nonuse-

values for their owners, and use-values for their nonowners” (C,
179). There is a contradiction here, however, for while the labor ex-
pended by the commodity owner is realized as socially useful only
after the commodity has been exchanged, the commodity can be ex-
changed in the first place only if it possesses some use-value for oth-
ers. As Brown puts it, “We thus find ourselves in a chicken-and-egg
loop—exchange value precedes use value precedes exchange value
precedes use value” (A, 3).
The exchange process occupies such a prominent place in Brown’s
presentation of autonomy for the same reason that Beech dedicates
such a large part of Art and Value to the concepts of formal and real
subsumption: to highlight the distinction between artistic labor and
commodity-producing labor as such. Yet the two critics approach
the distinction from opposite directions. Where Beech engages with
key Marxian concepts like subsumption, wage labor, and value to
delimit art’s economic exceptionalism with respect to the circuit of
productive capital, Brown takes art’s integration into the sphere of
commodity production for granted so as to make the political case
for artistic autonomy as the internal overcoming of the commodity-
form. The tenor of Beech’s work on artistic labor is largely refuta-
tional: it is developed from within the Marxian problematic of
productive/unproductive labor with the aim of highlighting art’s
incompatibility with the categories of the critique of political econ-
omy. The artistic sphere is hereby defined otherwise, yet, as was
argued above, for all his meticulousness in demonstrating what is
discordant in the economics of artistic production, Beech is less
forthcoming on what those qualities are that positively constitute
art in its economic uniqueness: he focuses on what art is not rather
than on what art is. The differences between the theories of auton-
omy put forward by Beech and by Brown reside in this copula, for
if art is in Beech’s work negatively ontological, Brown’s book has
the more affirmative purpose of establishing what its subtitle de-
scribes as “the social ontology of art under capitalism.”
Because the peculiarly “noneconomic” aspects of art cannot be
accounted for with the categories of the critique of political econ-
omy, and since these aspects are at one and the same time the source
of artistic autonomy, Brown must deploy a different conceptual
grammar to the one that Marx had forged in the three volumes of

Capital. This search for an adequate critical vocabulary through
which to posit art’s aesthetic autonomy leads Brown to the philos-
ophy of German idealism as developed by Immanuel Kant, Johann
Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel through-
out the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a tradition
that is by no means foreign to Marxism. As Brown points out, this
was the period in which “the concept of the artwork that renders
our contemporary practice coherent” took on its most sophisti-
cated form, first in Kant’s third Critique (1790), then in Hegel’s lec-
tures on aesthetics and fine art (1818, 1823) (A, 28). As a result of
Brown’s twin ambition to ground his conception of art in a mate-
rialist theory of the commodity-form and an idealist theory of the
artwork, the language of Autonomy has the contradictory ability
to strike the reader as at once an ambitious new attempt to theorize
the relationship between art and capitalism, and as a prelapsarian
return to a version of Hegelian philosophy before Marx had found
it “standing on its head.”34 Indeed, Brown shares something of the
idealists’ predilection for philosophical system building as he de-
scribes his readings of contemporary cultural productions as “a rough
sketch of what a system of the arts would look like if it were oriented
toward the problem that the anonymous market, both as the real and
projected horizon of interpretation, poses for meaning” (A, 27). Such
an attempt to define the artistic production of meaning against the
heteronomous logic of the capitalist marketplace shares with Beech
the ambition to circumscribe art’s social uniqueness, but Brown
has a theory of what is positively autonomous about art,35 one that
he builds with concepts recuperated in part from the German ideal-
ists: “the self-legislating artwork,” “immanent purposiveness,” “freely
assumed form,” and, importantly, “artistic intention.”
Artistic intention squares the circle of the process of commodity
exchange as described by Marx in chapter 2 of Capital. It is to be
understood alongside the Hegelian distinction between Entäußerung
or “externalization,” and Entfremdung or “alienation.” The latter of
these terms is exemplified in Hegel’s characterization of the unhappy
consciousness as “agonizingly self-divided” between an “unchange-
able” objective aspect and a “changeable” subjective aspect.36 As a
result of this separation, the unhappy consciousness “does not relate

itself as a thinking consciousness to its object” but can only out-
wardly comprehend this object as “something alien” (P, 131). This
mode of alienation is superseded in externalization, which Hegel de-
scribes as the movement whereby self-consciousness “passes over into
the actual world, and the latter back into actual self-consciousness”
(P, 295). This dialectical process of reappropriating an alienated con-
tent embodied in the object is developed most famously in the section
on lordship and bondage, in which the bondsman rediscovers through
labor his own “being-for-self.” Initially subordinated to the discipline
of the master, the bondsman qua worker “realizes that it is precisely
in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence
that he acquires a mind of his own” (P, 119). Thus the “alien neg-
ative moment” of laboring for the lord is overcome by the bonds-
man insofar as he finds in this very externality his own purpose and
truth (P, 118).37
For Brown, the overcoming of alienation through externalization
offers a model with which to theorize the kind of cultural labor in-
volved in aesthetic autonomy. “Under conditions of Hegelian exter-
nalization,” he writes, “meaning is equated with intention,” and so
the object demands interpretation. Under market conditions, how-
ever, “‘meaning’ is simply what can be said about the appropriation
of commodities,” and so a sociological analysis is more fitting (A,
10). Whereas, in the production of art commodities, cultural labor
is subordinated to the fremde or “alien” demands of exchangeabil-
ity, aesthetically autonomous works of art result from a mode of
labor in which the intention of the artist is normatively inscribed in
the object itself, thereby producing a meaning that is (in theory) uni-
versally accessible. When Brown speaks of the suspension of the com-
modity status of the work of art, he is referring to this process by
which the determination of artistic labor by market demand is super-
seded, overcome, or “driven back into self” through the inscription
of the purpose of the artist into the art object, just as the bondsman
had rediscovered his being-for-self in the alien object produced for his
master. In this way, the “chicken-and-egg loop” of the exchange pro-
cess, wherein the sole use of the art commodity was that it should pro-
duce some meaningless, private experience effect in its consumer, is
squared by the preponderation of aesthetic form and the universal-

ization of artistic intention. Meaning here becomes allgemein or a
matter of public discussion. If the mode of judgment involved in
commodity production is private and segregated, that of autonomous
art is universal and normative. This is Brown’s rephrasing of Michael
Fried’s famous distinction between “art and objecthood,” in which
the literalist or minimalist artwork is geared toward the production
of a “theatrical” experience in the mind of the beholder, and is as a
result something “hollow,” while the artwork proper is characterized
by its rejection of such a subordination to consumption.38
A fact that Brown would do better to emphasize is that the con-
cept of externalization is itself a historical one. In The Young Hegel,
Lukács noted that, from one perspective, there is nothing new about
Hegel’s use of Entäußerung: it is simply one way of translating the
English word alienation and can be found in both contemporary polit-
ical economic texts to describe the sale of a commodity, and in con-
temporary works of natural law to describe the originary loss of free-
dom attendant on the institution of the social contract.39 With Hegel,
however, the concept is used at a level of generality that surpasses
its previous uses, as it comes to denote the dialectical subject-object
relation involved in the development of history (YH, 539). Lukács
commends Hegel on two accounts. First, Hegel advances beyond
the old materialists, “who had been unable to reconcile the impor-
tance of subjective human praxis with the objectivity of what were
largely thought of as ‘natural’ laws of society.” Second, he takes one
step further than idealists like Kant and Fichte, “in whose writings
necessity and objectivity constitute a world in themselves utterly alien
to and different from freedom and praxis” (YH, 539–40). Yet, to state
the obvious, Hegel was not working with Marx’s understanding of the
system of commodity fetishism and so could not adequately grasp the
capitalist version of externalization, in which the product of labor is
expressed in the form of value and the commodity object becomes a
cipher for its exchangeability (YH, 541). Indeed, Marx moves beyond
Hegel’s model of the labor process by grasping how, under capitalism,
the “alien negative moment” of commodity labor—the divorce of the
proletarian from both the means of production and the product of her
labor—becomes the very form through which society is reproduced
on an ever-expanding scale.40 But while this separation may capture

the historical form of labor that in Hegel’s account was falsely equated
with objectification as such, externalization nevertheless lives on with-
in capitalism as what Brown terms “the other or negative horizon of
commodity exchange” (A, 5).41 The reason for this is that externaliza-
tion, in which the purpose of the producer is legible in the product,
bears an affinity with the simple formula of commodity exchange
C-M-C, which is oriented toward use-value. With the capitalist inver-
sion of this formula, M-C-M, use-value becomes a vanishing moment,
but the C-M-C circuit continues to live on as that realm of concrete-
ness and utility of which the process of valorization would like to di-
vest itself, but to which it is inextricably tied by virtue of its need for a
material bearer or Träger.
Another issue that remains to be clarified is the question of the
institutional or material conditions that either do or do not need to
be present for the assertion of aesthetic autonomy to take place. As
was suggested above, neither Adorno’s nor Bourdieu’s conception of
autonomy as identical with a modernist restricted field is tenable in
the age of late capitalism, in which such market niches are no longer
available. Nevertheless, Brown argues that autonomy is still possible,
and that this fact has to do with some quality immanent to the art-
work itself, without, however, dismissing the changes to the culture
industry that have taken place in the interval. Brown’s autonomy is
then not modernist autonomy, which is still predicated on the exter-
nal condition of uncommodified zones rather than the immanent pur-
posiveness of the work itself. Because the modernists were not facing
the kind of market dominance we see today, Brown argues that the
modernist opposition to the heteronomy of the commodity-form
becomes truly political only after modernism has passed away. This
is a periodizing claim that rests on the Jamesonian narrative of total
subsumption. In Brown’s words, “The real subsumption of aesthetic
labor under capital”—which, for him, characterizes the current era
of cultural production in a historically new way—
is the real tendency of which contemporary aesthetic ideology is
the dogmatic representation: . . . once the means of distribution
are fully subsumed, whatever is genuinely unassimilable in artistic
labor will cease to make any difference; . . . the artist, when not
directly a cultural worker, must conceive of herself as an entrepre-

neur of herself; . . . any remaining pockets of autonomy have effec-
tively ceased to exist by lacking access to distribution and, once
granted access, will cease to function as meaningfully autono-
mous. (A, 17)
For Brown, then, it is precisely the elimination of the conditions for

modernist aesthetic autonomy by the real subsumption of all aspects
of social life under capital that gives autonomy a renewed political
valency. This political defense of autonomy—the artistic resistance
to the market through the immanent suspension of the artwork’s
commodity status—gains force in direct proportion to the extent
to which it appears implausible. The way Brown conceives of auton-
omy is neither as a return to the modernist restricted field nor as a
kind of metaphysical independence from the external conditional-
ity of works of art. Rather, it is precisely the opposite: a relationship
between the artwork and its external conditions so close that the work
in question takes up these external conditions in such a way as to
immanently suspend its own status as a commodity. Here is a pos-
sible solution to the problem of the neglect of the aesthetically unique
features of the artwork that arose in Beech’s more restricted focus on
the economic exceptionality of artistic labor. Which is to say, Brown’s
idealist theory of immanent purposiveness gives sophisticated expres-
sion to what Brouillette termed the “stably unusual” relation be-
tween art and the economy. Although all art is irremediably condi-
tioned by the materiality of its production, Brown shows the extent
to which the specificity of aesthetic experience depends on a dialec-
tical return of these external conditions back into the artwork in
such a way as to produce a moment of autonomy from the other-
wise all-encompassing domination of the capitalist market.
Yet, in light of Beech’s warning as to the overapplication of Marx’s
categories of subsumption, there is room to push back against the
argument that aesthetic autonomy can take place only against the
backdrop of art’s complete integration into the sphere of commod-
ity production. Note that, in the passage quoted above, it is the pres-
sures exerted on artworks by their large-scale distribution that are
supposedly responsible for the subsumption of artistic labor under
capital, with the result that all art is said to be art made under the

sign of its inevitable market integration. However, an important
point of Beech’s is that the standard passage from production to dis-
tribution does not hold in the case of artistic labor. Under normal
conditions, a productive capitalist hires wage labor to produce com-
modities that are then distributed on the market and sold to con-
sumers, “but with art, the first phase of productive capital is absent”
(AV, 268). For this reason, the distribution of art by gallerists or oth-
er purveyors in fact marks the first encounter between capital and
the work in question. Brown’s claim that “once the means of distri-
bution are fully subsumed, whatever is genuinely unassimilable in
artistic labor will cease to make any difference” is thus, in a certain
sense, a non sequitur: one cannot infer the total subsumption of
artistic labor from the degree of access to the means of distribution
because the artist is in the first place not a productive laborer.42 In
the case of regular commodity production, the separation of the
wage-laborer from the circulation of the product is indeed one
expression of the kind of “taking hold” of the labor process that
occurs in real subsumption. The fact that artists are deprived of
the ability to self-distribute their work, on the other hand, has no
bearing on the degree of the subsumption of their labor, since there
is no original productive moment on which capital could exert its
drive to technologically self-innovate.
A more salient issue arises when Brown turns his attention to the
formal/real subsumption couplet itself. For Brown, the transition from
the modernist era, in which autonomy was derived from the vanishing
existence of a restricted field of cultural producers, to the contempo-
rary moment, in which “the art commodity is supposed to have no
other” (A, 15), is cast in terms of the historical passage from formal
to real subsumption. Under conditions of formal subsumption, use
takes precedence over exchange, and externalization still ensures that
the purpose of the producer is legible in the product. With real sub-
sumption, by contrast, “the whole production process is oriented to-
wards exchange” (A, 15), and so, instead of bearing the inscription of
the intention of the producer, the commodity object becomes an in-
dex for its exchangeability. Brown finds in this distinction a theoret-
ical framework to buttress his account of the periodizing shift from
modernist to what, for want of a better term, we can call postmodern

autonomy. To do this, he must argue that “there are sectors of the

culture industry where the logic Marx develops in the Resultate frag-
ment is directly operative” (A, 15). He believes to have found a jus-
tification for this argument in Marx’s own example of the singer who
is unproductive when singing like a bird, and productive when en-
gaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing for money (C, 1044). In
the latter case, the singer’s labor has been formally subsumed; that is,
it has undergone “the subsumption by capital of a mode of labour
developed before the emergence of capitalist relations” (C, 1021).
Yet at the same time, as Brown concedes, it is difficult to envision
the transformation of the singer’s labor by such laborsaving tech-
nologies as automation and deskilling, and so, while Brown main-
tains that the formal subsumption of artistic labor is readily imagin-
able, the question of real subsumption poses a problem for cultural
production (A, 16).
Nevertheless, in apparent equivocation from this concession,
Brown in the next breath proceeds to take “the real subsumption
of cultural labor under capital” as the periodizing event after which
the progressive working out of media-specific formal concerns that
had characterized modernist autonomy vanishes as a possibility (A,
18).43 What emerges in its stead, in Brown’s account, is postmodern
pastiche, wherein “a tremendous liberation of formal energies” re-
sults from the dissolution of those autonomous pockets that, under
modernism, had confined the proliferation of aesthetic strategies,
styles, and techniques to their respective nonmarket niches (A,
19). In this new moment, the restricted field is collapsed into culture
at large and the artist is granted the hitherto limited ability to select
and choose from the great gallery of dead forms with the express
aim of eliciting a reaction from the spectator in the manner of Frie-
dian objecthood. What is lost in this transition, claims Brown, is
precisely the kind of protection fostered by conditions of formal
subsumption—“professional guilds, research-based tenure, Ador-
no’s well-funded state institutions, . . . something like Bourdieu’s
concept of a field of restricted production”—as well as a collective
sense of historicity (A, 15). What is gained is attendant on the real
subsumption of aesthetic labor, which subordinates the artwork to
the imperatives of market exchange in a way that gives rise to what

Jameson describes as the “prodigious expansion of culture through-

out the social realm.”44 However, far from a revanchist clarion call to
return to the modernist era, whose autonomy for Brown is still too
reliant on external conditionality and whose political valence becomes
clear only in light of the kind of market domination that emerges in
modernism’s wake (A, 33), Brown’s autonomy takes place through
the internal staging of the materiality of the artwork as an immanent
moment of its form. The two strategies that Brown proposes as the
privileged means for achieving this immanent suspension are: (1)
“positive historicism,” whereby the artwork selects a formal or the-
matic problem and rewrites the history of the medium as the history
of that problem; and (2) “the aestheticization of genre,” in which it
is the formulaic nature of genre production that allows the com-
modity status of the work of art to be addressed as an aspect of
its material support (A, 25). But if this Hegelian theory of immanent
form and externalization represents an advance on the restricted
autonomy of the modernists, Brown’s political vision still shares
much in common with the social democratic programs of the early
twentieth century, which also were grouped around such demands
as universal education and state subsidies for the arts (A, 32). In-
deed, something that could be clearer in Brown’s book is whether
the claim that the assertion of aesthetic autonomy constitutes the
minimal condition for any politics whatsoever entails a rejection
of certain forms of politics over others, and what relevance if any
it might have for tactical disputes between Marxism and liberal so-
cial democracy.
Cycles of Struggle
I want to conclude by arguing that the two approaches to artistic
autonomy considered in this article mirror in important ways con-
temporary debates over the history of subsumption among commu-
nization theorists. The term communization emerged out of French
ultraleft currents in the 1960s and 1970s and is typically associated
with the names of midcentury Marxists like Jacques Camatte and
Gilles Dauvé as well as with more recent work by Endnotes, Théorie
Communiste (TC), and the journal Tiqqun. The gerundial shift from

communism to communizing is intended as a rebuke to the tradi-
tional Marxist conception of the revolution as an event necessitating
a period of transition after the initial seizure of power by the work-
ers, as in the Leninist model of the proletarian party-state.45 For
communizers, by contrast, the revolution is something immedi-
ately achievable, “something that we must do now, here, for our-
selves,” and thus requires an entirely different set of tactics and
strategies than those that defined much Marxist politics of the
twentieth century, and which are in fact closer to the tradition of insur-
rectionary anarchism.46 Such an emphasis on immediacy, however,
should not be taken to endorse an individualist program unyoked
from either serious analysis of the immanent contradictions of his-
torical capitalism or careful engagement with the Marxist critique
of political economy. Rather, as Endnotes write, “the revolution
as a communizing movement would destroy—by ceasing to consti-
tute and reproduce them—all capitalist categories: exchange, money,
commodities, the existence of separate enterprises, the state and—
most fundamentally—wage labor and the working class.”47 None-
theless, for the group behind the journal Tiqqun and the affiliated
collective The Invisible Committee, communization is taken as a
proclivity for abstract self-affirmation inadequately grounded in
the abolition of the proletariat as a class. Despite the diatribe against
“mass personalization” and consumerist individualism in The Com-
ing Insurrection, for example, the collective “we” that is supposed to
form the basis for revolutionary action—“creatures among creatures,
singularities among singulars, living flesh weaving the flesh of the
world”—falls back on a voluntarist conception of the insurrection-
ary subject that problematically posits, as Endnotes put it, “another,
truer self beyond the first.”48
Against Tiqqun, TC and Endnotes develop a strain of communi-
zation founded on a rejection of prefigurative politics and appeals to
an allegedly authentic class identity. As TC note, since the mid-1990s
the proletariat has found itself in a contradictory situation in which
“the very fact of acting as a class appears as an exterior constraint,
a limit to be overcome.”49 If the proletariat can no longer assert
itself politically on the basis of an autonomous workers’ identity,
this failure has less to do with changes in the terrain of workers’
self-identification than it does with the restructuring of the condi-

tions for capitalist accumulation. TC account for this historical
development with the categories of formal and real subsumption
in tripartite periodization that one also finds in the work of post-
autonomist Italian Marxists like Antonio Negri.50 TC use formal
subsumption to date the birth of large-scale industry and the ori-
gins of the workers’ movement, where the proletariat begins to rec-
ognize itself as a class. Because, under formal subsumption “capital,
in its relation to labor, poses itself as an external force,” the proletar-
iat can still affirm itself in terms of a precapitalist identity and an
essentially moralistic politics.51 TC label this initial stage “program-
matism” and periodize its dissolution around the time of the Second
World War, at which point a first phase of real subsumption begins.
Now, the workers’ movement undergoes a qualitative transformation
as the reproduction of the proletariat is integrated into the reproduc-
tion of capital through institutional forms like trade unions and the
welfare state. As a result of this integration, “the autonomous affir-
mation of the class enters into contradiction with its empowerment
within capitalism, in that this is more and more the self-movement of
capital itself.”52 This first phase of real subsumption witnesses “the
decomposition of programmatism” and is not so much an exhaustion
of the prior phase of formal subsumption as it is “a new structure and
a new cycle of struggle” in itself.53 It culminates in the late 1960s and
1970s in a spectacular set of defeats: “of workers’ identity, of commu-
nist parties of unionism; of self-management, self-organization and
autonomy.”54 With this definitive eclipse of proletarian programmatic
self-affirmation, a second phase of real subsumption begins. This cur-
rent cycle of struggle is the problem to which communization posits
itself as a political solution with its call for the self-negation of the
proletariat and the abolition of capital.
Endnotes take issue with TC’s historical interpretation of the cat-
egories of subsumption but share the communizing thrust of their
theory of insurrection. Offering a more nuanced understanding of
subsumption that pays closer attention to the text of Marx’s Resul-
tate fragment, Endnotes write:
Since formal subsumption is a logical prerequisite of real sub-
sumption as well as a historical one, it characterizes not just one
historical epoch but the entirety of capitalist history. Further-

more, according to Marx, though formal subsumption must
precede real subsumption, real subsumption in one branch can
also be the basis for further formal subsumption in other areas.
If the categories of subsumption are applicable to history at all,
this can therefore only be in a “nonlinear” fashion: they cannot
apply simplistically or unidirectionally to the historical develop-
ment of the class relation.55
Thus, for Endnotes, formal and real subsumption exist alongside

each other throughout the development of capitalism and cannot
be taken separately as denoting sequential historical phases. For
this reason, the collective also takes issue with “total subsumption”
narratives that conceptualize cultural changes in society at large as
effects of the triumphal march of real subsumption.56 Indeed, the
“abject” existence of unsubsumed domestic labor routinely per-
formed by women, for example, goes to show that “there is always
this remainder that has to remain outside of market-relations.”57
Existing attempts to think through the implications of communi-
zation theory for art and aesthetics have turned to the concept of
“autonomy” as a way of championing art’s ability to resist the pres-
sures of the commodity-form. As Brouillette has persuasively argued,
however, celebrations of creative labor and defenses of the ideal of
the autonomous artwork not infrequently function as a smoke screen
for the neoliberal belief “that insecure employment in temporary net-
works is the key to groundbreaking innovation.”58 For this reason,
corporate capital is wont to sponsor the aesthetic ideology of indi-
vidual genius through joint ventures between art and industry that
more or less implicitly lionize the entrepreneurial self-reliance of the
artist as an example of the capitalist work ethic. Reconsidering the his-
tory of art in light of the communization tactics deployed in the late
2000s Occupy Movement, Jaleh Mansoor, Daniel Marcus, and Daniel
Spaulding argue that the horizon of communization provides a way to
“positio[n] anew the notion of autonomy” in opposition to this kind
of corporate ideology.59 In a broad sense, the problematic of auton-
omy arises in communization movements in the guise of issues like
economic self-management and free associations like unions and
collectives, yet it is also present as an aesthetic paradigm that Man-

soor, Marcus, and Spaulding, like Brouillette, deem highly prob-
lematic. “The aestheticizers of autonomy,” they write, “vaunt
autonomy within capitalist relations, presuming—in our view,
wrongly—that these relations cannot be altered by any means”
(R, 49). The authors’ critique is thus directed precisely at the neo-
liberal ideology of artistic independence, but it can also be read
against the kind of residual voluntarism that undergirds Tiqqun’s
call for immediate insurrection.
In keeping with the communization theorists’ rejection of prefig-
urative politics, Mansoor, Marcus, and Spaulding propose to think
autonomy instead “as process, not as a stable state,” and caution
against conceiving the usefulness of art in revolutionary times ei-
ther in terms of anticipating the coming order or even negating the
present one (R, 49). Rather, art is thought here as a means of aesthet-
ically registering the fleetingness of time, the elusiveness of certainty,
the fact that “things are not what their commodity-form would have
us believe”:
Paradoxically, art tends towards autonomy by fixing on what re-
cedes from visibility, what withdraws from evaluation. Tends to-
wards it, but never arrives: from the perspective of communization,
autonomy is a horizon, not an end-state or totalizing system. At
best, art beckons from beneath the present state of things, showing
us—sometimes brilliantly, sometimes naively—the world composed
of objects and bodies alone, putting to us the question: “Why isn’t
this good enough? Why does there have to be Value, too?” (R, 50)
Benjamin Noys contributes to this discussion around the aesthetics

of communization by meditating not only on what art itself looks
like during the process of revolution but also on “the kind of aes-
thetic figures, tropes, and forms that communization theory uses to
construct its own problematic,” among which he singles out the fig-
ures of immediacy, acceleration, and dispersion.60 On the question
of the art of communization, Noys takes TC’s notion of the end of
programmatism as a cue to reflect back on the disappearance of aes-
thetic avant-gardes like Situationist International, while also broach-
ing the question of “the futility and necessary nullity of any affirmative
revolutionary art.” Like Mansoor, Marcus, and Spaulding, Noys pla-

ces great importance on “the absence of any affirmative practice.”61

Although it is the main sticking point in the disagreement between
TC and Endnotes, what does not figure in these approaches to art,
autonomy, and communization, however, is the question of the real
subsumption of labor under capital.62 Is it possible to pair an appre-
ciation of art’s ability to register the transitoriness of social experi-
ence, as well as its nonparticipation in prefigurative politics, with a
conviction as to whether artistic labor can be really subsumed under
capital or not? While the purpose of Beech’s and Brown’s books
on artistic autonomy is certainly not to interject into contemporary
discussions over the future of communist strategy, what underpins
their differing approaches to the concept of autonomy are neverthe-
less opposing interpretations of Marx’s categories of subsumption.
Brown’s argument, for example, can be rephrased in terms of the
following logical syllogism: if autonomy is the immanent suspension
of art’s external material conditions (universal), and these conditions
are now defined by the real subsumption of aesthetic labor under cap-
ital (particular), then autonomy must emerge as a response to this
situation of real subsumption (singular). In an analogous way, TC’s
periodization of the decline of the programmatist era is predicated
on the notion that we have entered a second phase of real subsump-
tion characterized by capital’s unprecedented taking hold of all as-
pects of social life (an argument that is stated in more direct fashion
in the work of Camatte, Negri, and Jameson).
Though not principally interested in periodization, Beech’s thor-
oughgoing analysis of the economics of art flags an issue with the
particular chain in Brown’s syllogism, insofar as the notion that aes-
thetic labor might be subsumed by capital at all rests on a faulty under-
standing of art’s relation to capitalist value production. Dispelling “to-
tal subsumption” narratives, Beech shows that art is to a large degree
“noneconomic” and thus demonstrates the limits to subsumption
rather than departing from an acceptance of its triumphant march.
Inasmuch as it attests to the continuing existence of spheres of social
life that either are left unsubsumed by capital or that intrinsically re-
sist incorporation into the vortex of value, Beech’s analysis overlaps
with Endnotes’ more nuanced take on the categories of subsumption,
in which both formal and real modalities are conceived as dialecti-

cally intertwined rather than historically sequential, and in which are-
nas like gendered reproductive labor maintain a nonintegrated, “ab-
ject” relation to capitalist valorization. To be clear, what is not being
suggested here is that Beech and Brown offer clarifications of points
of divergence among communization theorists, still less that one can
derive a theory of art’s autonomy from the history of thinking around
communization. But the fact that the two sets of disputes considered
here are fractured by disagreements over whether the categories of for-
mal and real subsumption can be historically interpreted or not high-
lights both the continuing relevance of Marx’s Resultate fragment for
discussions on the radical left as well as what role (if any) art might
play in revolutionary struggle.
......................................................
thomas waller is Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in
the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin.
His interests include world literature, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and
the environmental humanities. His research has appeared in journals
such as Modern Fiction Studies, Rethinking Marxism, and Textual
Practice. He is working on two book projects: a monograph titled
Genres of Transition: Literature and Economy in Portuguese-
Speaking Southern Africa and an edited collection titled Roberto
Schwarz and World-Literature: Critical Essays. He is associate editor
at CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture.
Acknowledgments
For reading through an earlier draft of this article, my thanks go to Sarah
Brouillette.
Notes
1. Marx, Capital, 1021 (hereafter cited as C).
2. Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado about Nothing,” 155–61.
3. Endnotes, “History of Subsumption,” 148–52.
4. Brown, Autonomy, 37 (hereafter cited as A): “A plausible claim to
autonomy . . . is the precondition for any politics at all other than the
politics of acquiescence to the status quo.”
5. See Bernes and Spaulding, “Truly Extraordinary,” 51–52; Brouillette,

“On Art and ‘Real Subsumption,’” 171–72; and Brouillette and Clover,

“On Artistic Autonomy as Bourgeois Fetish,” 203.
6. Camatte, Capital and Community, 45; Negri, “Twenty Theses on
Marx,” 159; Jameson, Postmodernism, 48–49.
7. Strictly speaking, as Patrick Murray has emphasized, Marx had not
two categories of subsumption but four: formal, real, ideal, and what
he called the “Zwitterform,” or hybrid form of subsumption. Fur-
thermore, as Stephen Shapiro notes, the term subsumption itself is by
no means an unproblematic one in the context of Marx’s critique of
political economy. There is evidence, for example, that Marx moved to
erase the term (in German, Subsumtion) from several foreign-language
editions of Capital toward the end of his life or else replace it with
related terms like subordination. It was only after Marx’s death that
Friedrich Engels elected to restore it to the third and fourth German
editions, from which it then entered into the various English-language
translations. See Murray, “Social and Material Transformation of
Production by Capital,” 250; and Shapiro, “Woke Weird,” 59.
8. For an account of these narratives of “total subsumption,” see Clover,
“Subsumption and Crisis,” 1572; and Endnotes, “History of Sub-
sumption,” 142–43. It should be noted that neither Clover nor End-
notes subscribe to this type of argument.
9. See, e.g., Lye and Nealon, After Marx.
10. “But as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to
artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized.
Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice:
politics” (Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 106).
11. As the art historian Caroline A. Jones argues in her book on the
“industrial aesthetics” of postwar American art, the auratic image of
the Romantic artist has been “recuperated endlessly by the market and
mass culture, where the construction of authorship is crucial to com-
modity exchange.” To this extent, Jones speaks of a “regime of auratic
authorship” that refers to the persistence of the traditional concept of
the artist as exceptional genius in a cultural economy that is supposed
to have done away with such outdated Romanticisms (Machine in the
Studio, 2, 12–13).
12. Wong, Van Gogh on Demand, 14–16.
13. This confusion is mirrored in the contradictory way in which the Dafen
artists are perceived by those in China and those outside it. As Wong
writes: “Among Chinese elites, Dafen painters are seen as uncultured

workers trapped in the Western and neoliberal capitalism that the mer-
cantile south has rampantly embraced. Among Western elites, Dafen
painters are seen as victims of a totalitarian communist Chinese state that
condemns them to sweatshop imitation and that prevents the expression
of their individual and creative selves” (Van Gogh on Demand, 15). This
difference of opinion is closely tied to the ambiguity around whether the
Dafen paintings are art or not.
14. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1.
15. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 3; Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 430.
16. Interestingly, while Adorno’s writings on the culture industry and the
commodification of art are a key reference point for Brown’s account of
the “real subsumption” of artistic labor, Adorno’s work on aesthetics is
almost never mentioned by him.
17. “An ‘it shall be different’ is hidden in even the most sublimated work of
art” (Adorno, “Commitment,” 362).
18. Beech, Art and Value, 28 (hereafter cited as AV).
19. As Benjamin writes in “Work of Art,” 103: “In even the most perfect
reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of
art—its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence—
and nothing else—that bears the mark of the history to which the work
has been subject.”
20. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 100.
21. Adorno and Horkheimer, “Culture Industry,” 133.
22. Bourdieu, “Market of Symbolic Goods,” 116.
23. Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion,” 211.
24. Jameson, Postmodernism, 4. See also 48–49, where Jameson writes
that “the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up
penetrating and colonizing those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature
and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean
footholds for critical effectivity.”
25. Endnotes, “History of Subsumption,” 138–39.
26. Mau, Mute Compulsion, 235.
27. Mau, Mute Compulsion, 243–49.
28. Spaulding, “Clarification on Art and Value.”
29. Bernes and Spaulding, “Truly Extraordinary,” 51.
30. Brouillette, “On Art and ‘Real Subsumption,’” 170–71.
31. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 426.
32. I have changed the register of the quote from the third-person singular
to the third-person plural to facilitate the reading.
33. This shift is reflected in the title of chapter 2, which is “The Process of
Exchange” and not “the exchange relation,” the latter of which had

been dealt with in chapter 1. Whereas the exchange relation signifies
the reduction of commodities to abstract human labor that is carried
out in the exchange act, the process of exchange introduces the owners
of the commodities into the equation. As Michael Heinrich explains
in his commentary on Capital, volume 1: “The exchange process con-
sists in the following: Commodity-owner U exchanges his commodity
xA with the commodity yB of commodity-owner V. By contrast, we
obtain the exchange-relation of the commodities by abstracting from
commodity-owners U and V, leaving only: x commodity A = y com-
modity B, or x commodity A is worth y commodity B” (How to Read
Marx’s “Capital,” 187). As a shorthand, one can therefore say that,
while the exchange relation equals xA + yB, the exchange process
equals UxA + VyB.
34. “The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no
means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms
of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is
standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the
rational kernel within the mystical shell” (C, 103).
35. The catch is that this more affirmative theory of artistic autonomy
equates the concept with what, in Hegel’s idiolect, is called “negativity”
(A, 30).
36. Hegel, Phenomenology, 131 (hereafter cited as P).
37. In his 1922 essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Prole-
tariat,” Georg Lukács used the model of Entäußerung developed by
Hegel in the Phenomenology to grasp the role of the laborer within the
system of commodity fetishism described by Marx in Capital. Just as the
bondsman recognizes his own freedom in the alien object he has pro-
duced, so “the worker can only become conscious of his existence in
society when he becomes aware of himself as a commodity” (History
and Class Consciousness, 168)—that is, he realizes his existence insofar
as he grasps himself as an externalized object, labor-power.
38. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 151, 153.
39. Lukács, Young Hegel, 537 (hereafter cited as YH).
40. In this sense, Jameson suggests a correspondence between external-
ization and the Marxian trope of separation: “Where Hegelian En-
täußerung externalized the product only to enrich itself by way of its
reappropriation (and return into self), the Marxian system posits an
increasing separation which necessitates its own enlargement” (Rep-

resenting Capital, 134–35).
41. See also A, 9: “The point here is not that artistic production, any more
than Hegelian externalization, is somehow precapitalist. . . . The art-
work is not an archaic holdover but the internal, unemphatic other to
capitalist society.”
42. On this point, see Brouillette, “On Art and ‘Real Subsumption,’” 172:
“Brown claims that the pressure for a work to be extensively distributed
has fundamentally restructured the production process itself, such that
the culture available to us is culture made in the light of the reality of its
inevitable incorporation. In contrast, Beech’s point is that an artist’s
willingness to suit consumers is not relevant to the question of whether
his or her art has been subsumed. The creation of saleable singular art
objects differs fundamentally from the production of commodities via
labor that is formally or really subsumed to varying degrees and whose
ultimate purpose is the accumulation of surplus value.”
43. Brown’s understanding of the modernists’ tendency “to gravitate toward
formal concerns, toward the progressive working-out of problems
specific to individual media” is grounded in Bourdieu’s theory of the
restricted field as a specialist public-unto-themselves of producers,
connoisseurs, and critics. For a different approach to this theme, see
Spaulding’s essay “Value-Form and Avant-Garde,” in which Spaulding
uses a theory of programmatist politics to account for the leap-frogging
process by which, under modernism, each solution to an aesthetic
problem is reformulated as a new problem whose own solution be-
comes another problem in turn. Spaulding’s essay can be read as a ref-
utation of Brown’s claim that modernist autonomy was not necessarily
political because the modernists were not facing the kind of market
dominance we see today. For Spaulding, by contrast, modernism is
constituted by its ambivalent relation to the value-form and its active
role within the early twentieth-century workers’ movements—facts
that explain both the conceptual and aesthetic limits of modernist art
and its frequently utopian orientation.
44. Jameson, Postmodernism, 48; A, 17.
45. Endnotes, “Communization and Value-Form Theory,” 75.
46. Endnotes, “What Are We to Do?,” 24.
47. Endnotes, “Communization and Value-Form Theory,” 75.
48. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 29–34; Endnotes,
“What Are We to Do?,” 32–33.
49. Théorie Communiste, “Glass Floor,” 175.

Negri, “Twenty Theses on Marx,” 159.

50.
51. Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado about Nothing,” 155.
52. Théorie Communiste, “Introduction to TC,” 9; Endnotes, “History of
Subsumption,” 147; Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado about Noth-
ing,” 156–57.
53. Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado about Nothing,” 159–60.
54. Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado about Nothing,” 161.
55. Endnotes, “History of Subsumption,” 150.
56. Endnotes, “History of Subsumption,” 149: “Though massively sig-
nificant changes to society as a whole—and to the relation between
capitalist and worker—may result from the real subsumption of the
labor process under capital, it does not follow that these changes can
themselves be theorised in terms of the concepts of subsumption.”
57. Endnotes, “Logic of Gender,” 86.
58. Brouillette, “Academic Labor.”
59. Mansoor, Marcus, and Spaulding, “Response to Occupy,” 49 (here-
after cited as R).
60. Noys, “Aesthetics of Communization,” 1.
61. Noys, “Communization and the End(s) of Art,” 64, 67.
62. For an example of an account that weaves together work on aesthetic
autonomy, debates over the “real subsumption” of aesthetic labor, and
communization theory, see Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Pro-
duction, esp. chap. 3. To a certain extent, Vishmidt shares the conviction
of Mansoor, Marcus, and Spaulding that the role of art in communiza-
tion can at best be a negative, anti-prefigurative one. In Vishmidt’s words,
“Art is likewise a product of a determinate social relation which can
only negatively hint at and not embody a post-capitalist emancipation
of human activity” (24).
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In what was originally planned as part 7 of Capital, volume 1, but

qui parle Vol. 32, No. 2, December 2023

the extent to which art’s productive process could be technologically

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the overlap or divergence between materialist studies of culture and

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it was missed,” so art “seeks refuge in its own negation, hoping to

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Roughly speaking, Marxist scholars have approached the problem

359).19 The progressive rationalization of production that marks

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of the culture industry).22 After the historical disappearance of these

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in its own image.”25 In the case of formal subsumption, capital’s

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real subsumption are to be understood alongside the categories

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actually sell for has little to no relation to their production time to

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domination of capital and the mute compulsions of the value-form—

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The salutary emphasis on art’s “stably unusual” character is a dia-

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demand. As Marx states categorically, “All commodities are nonuse-

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result of this separation, the unhappy consciousness “does not relate

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squared by the preponderation of aesthetic form and the universal-

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on an ever-expanding scale.40 But while this separation may capture

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directly a cultural worker, must conceive of herself as an entrepre-

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For Brown, then, it is precisely the elimination of the conditions for

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modernist to what, for want of a better term, we can call postmodern

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the imperatives of market exchange in a way that gives rise to what

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self-identiﬁcation than it does with the restructuring of the condi-

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historical epoch but the entirety of capitalist history. Further-

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Thus, for Endnotes, formal and real subsumption exist alongside

collectives, yet it is also present as an aesthetic paradigm that Man-

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Benjamin Noys contributes to this discussion around the aesthetics

revolutionary art.” Like Mansoor, Marcus, and Spaulding, Noys pla-

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in which both formal and real modalities are conceived as dialecti-

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5. See Bernes and Spaulding, “Truly Extraordinary,” 51–52; Brouillette,

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writes: “Among Chinese elites, Dafen painters are seen as uncultured

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increasing separation which necessitates its own enlargement” (Rep-

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49. Théorie Communiste, “Glass Floor,” 175.

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