Connor MacDonald
The aesthetic of the new apathy is a way of describing the aesthetic of modern globalised society. It is a complete privatisation of experience facilitated by the twin apparatuses of multinational capitalism and a postmodernist value system. It is a mass commodification of expression, which produces at a rate that exhausts the meaning of all messages. It requires the destruction of meaning to facilitate the acceptance of contradiction, and so those who live within the aesthetic rely on apathy, irony, cynicism and parody to anchor themselves in a reality they do not fully understand. The aesthetic is amorphous and irresistible as everything created within it is subject to the same exhaustion of meaning. This short essay will examine some of the facets of our modern apathetic aesthetic and attempt to illustrate how it privatises experience, promotes contradiction, and destroys meaning in relation to social theories by writers like Karl Marx, Frederic Jameson, and Eduardo De La Fuente.
The aesthetic owes its existence to a ‘totalising structure’ (Jameson, 1991: 272), which sets out the framework from which all works derive value. At the heart of this structure lies the symbiotic relationship between aestheticism, postmodernism and multinational capitalism. For Murphy & Fuente (2009: 3) the cultural conditions of capitalism are inherently paradoxical; however where Marx (1867: 493) imagined these contradictions to be the eventual death of capitalism the opposite has come to pass. What Marx could not have foreseen was the scale and rapidity at which these contradictions would be broadcast. Our global media apparatus, simply by virtue of its size and proliferation, has become the driving force of apathy in the modern world. The result of this apathy is seen in the privatisation of experience that creates a system where reality becomes a series of aesthetic choices.
This is one of the reasons the aesthetic of the new apathy has no definable, ‘style’, as it is used here to describe the cultural phenomenon of personal and privatised experience. However it is possible to point to individual examples as symptoms of the larger culture. Parisian fashion brand Vetements took to the catwalk in 2015 with a DHL logo shirt that they sold for £185 (when you could buy a nearly identical shirt from DHL direct for a little over £6.50). In the fashion world this was lauded as a bold statement of individualism but in a system where experience is privatised, all things possess the veneer of individualism as everything is experienced in a social vacuum (Cochrane, 2015: 1). Castoriadis (2003: 184) argued that as long as we remain within this state of apathy and privatisation we can only experience a pseudo-individualism taken here to be an individualistic consumerism that offers no real resistance to the system from which it comes and instead exists simply as a method of entrenching ourselves further in our private realities. The view of Dupuy is that this is a natural and a self-organising principle of the economy. As with the large religious powers that ruled our society before modern capitalism, the economy is not able to generate rules and principles to restrict its validity (Dupuy, 2012: 116-117). Therefore any possible resistance to the aesthetic is dependent on developing large scale ideological mechanisms to shape our beliefs, but the absence of definable truth or meaning within the aesthetic reduces every organising principle to the level of a thought-exercise as all experiences are private and so all arguments equally valid.
The continued proliferation of the aesthetic can be attributed to the rise of postmodernism as a replacement for modernism, which was criticised for its implication in the rise of totalitarianism (Shorten, 2012: 26). However postmodernism has enabled a kind of tribalism where there are so many competing agendas at play that it becomes impossible to separate truth from lie. This is one of the reasons for the rise of cynicism, apathy and parody as a social crutch. The cultural cache given to apathy in the aesthetic is partly the result of an attempt to come to terms with our inability to understand reality.
That is not to say ideology is not still a powerful force, but rather we have reached a point where the only true ideology that can flourish within the aesthetic is consumerism and a firm belief in the market as the sole arbiter of what is valuable. If true, then all art, whether intended to be sold or otherwise, exists as a commodity. To illustrate this, you need look no further than last year’s sale of a section of wall from the town of Glastonbury for an undisclosed sum because it supposedly featured a Bansky mural hidden under several layers of white paint. The intention of street art, presumably, is to engage with a wide public audience, but the market deemed the piece of wall valuable enough to become part of somebody’s private experience. This helps to illustrate postmodernism’s role in reinforcing the aesthetic as the market can imbue value in resistance and turn it into a commodity to furnish the consumer with a supposedly, ‘real’, and ‘authentic’ experience. The aesthetic provides the ultimate form of commodity fetishism that incorporates all forms of resistance as product. As Lev Kreft explains in his essay on Capitalism and Marxist Aesthetics:
The attack on art as bourgeois institution, at first recognized as something radically anti-capitalist, found its place inside institution of art. Anti-art developed into mainstream art, anti-artwork is now museum artifact, and anti-aesthetics is new academism: de Stijl is now Art Deco. What is wrong with avant-garde anti-art? To simplify a little: Peter Bürger’s answer is that proletarian revolution failed, so avant-garde cannot but fail too.
This has created a system where social statements sprayed on pieces of wall and ‘working class’ signifiers like DHL are repackaged and marked up for sale to those who feel the need for some sort of meaning in their life, while simultaneously feeding this need for meaning by devaluing all messages through commodification. This is just one of the central paradoxes of the aesthetic of the new apathy. Where modernism used authority used to control and coerce with a series of simple value judgements, postmodernism uses ‘authenticity’ to appeal to the consumer. Authenticity has many definitions but appears to serve two functions within the aesthetic. Firstly, it is used as a sales tool, it too now a commodity, a contradiction to itself. Secondly, modern authenticity might best be described as an admission of artifice and a laying bare of process. In the age of apathy, the most authentic form of expression may well be an honest admission of the manipulation of truth, as it too has no inherent value other than as a commodity. As Junk (2010: 1) writes in his short essay on postmodernism and the commodification of authenticity, ‘authenticity has supplanted authority as the guiding principle of fiction’. This idea of ‘authenticity’ as it relates to the aesthetic can also be applied to the individual-as-a-commodity in their own right, and in turn adds perceived value to what they create simply by virtue of their association with it. In 2013 Kanye West released a limited-run plain white t-shirt that cost $120. The shirt was in no way materially different from many other plain white cotton shirts, but the perceived authenticity and limited availability of this shirt as it related to Kanye West as an ‘authentic’ figure and author of the work imbued it with an additional value. It follows then that the final cornerstone of the aesthetic would seem to be scarcity. In a society driven by mass production scarcity is the single most valuable commodity.
One of the reasons the aesthetic of the new apathy is so difficult to define in its totality is that it is almost all encompassing, and so the only way to examine its function is through the mechanisms that enable it. If you can draw any concrete conclusion from these examinations, the aesthetic of the new apathy is not an aesthetic in the traditional sense but a way of describing the cultural reaction to art produced under a specific set of socio-political conditions. It has a set of guiding principles, primarily a belief in the market’s power to determine value, but this alone is not enough to define it. It is the privatisation of experience that drives the contradictory nature of the aesthetic which in turn feeds the apathy of the general populous. The hyper-commodification we have attained through this process is the basis for the aesthetic but it is the postmodernist mode of thought which sustains it. Therefore, taken simply, the aesthetic can be defined as a series of automated and unconscious processes which govern the individual’s reaction to art. Though I have attempted to understand these processes, it is my belief that this essay cannot in any meaningful way fully describe them as I too am a product of the aesthetic, and so is anything of my own creation. As a secondary consideration it could be argued that it is not possible to logically understand the aesthetic as previously stated, ‘the cultural condition of capitalism is paradoxical’ (Murphy & Fuente 2009: 3), and the aesthetic exists outwith the bounds of logic.
Bibliography
Castoriadis, C. (2003). The rising tide of insignificancy, the big sleep. [online] Notbored.org Available at: http://www.notbored.org/RTI.pdf
[Accessed 12 Dec. 2017]
Cochrane, L (2016). Scam or subversion? How a DHL T-shirt became this year’s must-have. [online] theguardian.com. Available at:
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2016/apr/19/dhl-t-shirt-vetements-fashion-paris-catwalk [Accessed 12 Dec. 2017]
Dupuy, J. (2012). L’avenir de l’économie (Translated). Paris, France, p.116-117.
Jameson, F. (2012). Postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. New Delhi: Rawat, p.272.
Junk, D. (2010). Postmodernism and the Commodification of Authenticity. [online] Readingsubtly.blogspot.co.uk. Available at: https://readingsubtly.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/postmodernism-and-commodification-of.html [Accessed 10 Dec. 2017].
Kreft, L. (2013). Capitalism and Marxist Aesthetics, Ljublijana, Slovenia. p.5.
Murphy, Peter, & de la Fuente, Eduardo (2009) Aestheticism: the new spirit of capitalism. Copenhagen, Denmark, p.3.
Marx, K. (1867). Capital: Critique of Political Economy. Hamburg, Germany, p.493.
Shorten, R. (2012). Modernism and Totalitarianism. Birmingham, UK, p.26.