RasTheDestroyer
24th July 2010, 02:19
Burgis begins with the premise, which permits one to historicize in a Marxist way, of "a connection between the development of [an] object and the possibility of cognition."...The first sage [of the avant-garde critique of bourgeois art] occurs by the end of the eighteenth century when the autonomy of art is proclaimed as an Ideal, in Enlightenment aesthetics. The second state occurs by the end of the nineteenth century when this autonomy is made over into the very subject of art, that is, in art that aspires not only to abstract form but to an aestheticist withdrawal from the world. And the third stage occurs at the beginning of this century when this aestheticist withdrawal comes under attack by the historical avant-garde, for example, in the explicit productivist demand that art regain a use value, or the implicit dadaist demand that it acknowledge its ueslessness value - that its withdrawal from the cultural order may be an affirmation of this order as well...[Marx advances the following in Grundrisse]:
[I]Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization
of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its
structure. thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production
of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up,
whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human
anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher develop-
ment among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after
the higher development is known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the
ancient, etc.
[I]Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization
of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its
structure. thereby also allows insights into the structure and the relations of production
of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up,
whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human
anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher develop-
ment among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after
the higher development is known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the
ancient, etc.