James Kim
PL 314
Professor Gordon
Marxist Philosophy: Un-Natural Write-Up
With technology on a perpetual growth in the 21st century, the technological advancement of several industries frightened the replacement of manual labors which were previously performed by human workers. The productions of goods in factories and other manual labors have gradually been replaced by the ominously efficient machines. One anthropological production, however, was perceived to be persisting through the change: the arts. The prediction of having the process of producing art alienated to the artist seemed like an exaggerated fear in the midst of all the technological development. After reviewing the relationship of the culture industry to art, however, we can observe how capitalism has further alienated the labor of artists and media production from ourselves.
The development of the culture industry, according to Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, the two authors discuss the detrimental consequences of the culture industry blurring the lines of form and content in which form has taken over the content of the art. In the modern day, the artist must conform with the expectations from the culture industry to censor and adjust their production of art. Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction explains this phenomenon by stating:
“With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature…In the same way today, by the emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental.” (Benjamin, Section V)
With the transformation of our artistic consciousness due to the culture industry and the mass production of art, I wanted to explore the alienation of an artist’s labor through my final project. I’ve decided to create an integration of creative writing and film to accomplish my goal.
For the creative writing section of my final project, I’ve written an original spoken word which was heavily influenced by the themes and points raised in Marx’s original selected writings. In Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx explains the debilitation of the worker’s “means of life” (Marx, 60) from his premise:
“The more the worker exerts himself, the more powerful becomes the alien objective world which he fashions against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, the less there is that belongs to him.” (Marx, 60)
In my poetry, I explore the limitations of this confined, inner world through the placement of time as a form restriction which supplements to the alienation of our own labors. The first part of my poem illustrates the ominous presence of the “ticking clock” that enforces efficiency and submission. In the second part of my poem, I focus entirely on the rising consciousness of such alienation that has been put into my labor. Marx also write in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts:
“Political economy conceals the alienation in the nature of labor by ignoring the direct relationship between the worker (labor) and production.” (Marx, 61)
I attempt to unveil the concealment through a reflective stanza on recognizing the alienation of my labor from the haunting gaze from time.
Finally, in my third part of my poem, I explore Marx’s imaginative term of our “natural species being” (Marx, 70-79). My stanza alludes to Marx’s assumption of our natural species relationship to be solely dependent between a human being and another human being (Marx, 70). My stanza alludes to the overcoming of human self-alienation and a reconstruction of society through communal satisfaction (Marx, 71-72). My stanza alludes to the eradication of private property (Marx, 74). My stanza yearns for the lost essence in humanity and imagines the possible outcome of returning to our natural state of existence.
I combine the deep interpretations of Marxists texts and the analysis by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin to finalize by project with a cinematic presentation of all the authors. The first half the film is consisted of different videos of machines and factories present in our lives. The videos are played over with a voice-over of my own voice reading over the poem. The second half of the video, however, is a combination of videos that show myself; and the same poem is read aloud by a mechanized voice through the “speech” function on the computer. I’ve deliberately juxtaposed these two parts of the film together to depict the alienation of my own words through a mechanized voice, reclaiming the authenticity of my personal voice. My goal of projecting the issues of alienation and the evolution of how art is produced through the culture industries was covered through this performative project in hopes of leaving the audience with a sense of fear and self-evaluation.