Zero Identity

April 18, 2026April 27, 2026 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

1.

If identity, as the Dictionary of Logic says, means “the equality of an object or appearance with itself,” then there is no such thing as identity: at least, there is no absolute identity. Not even a crab, as we know, can get into the same river twice, because neither the crab nor the river can remain absolutely identical to itself. Changes in everything and everyone are inevitable, as are losses of identity; and even that is an oblique expression, for eternal self-sameness can hardly be called a good thing. Bertolt Brecht’s Herr K. “turned pale” when it was said that he had not changed. On the other hand, of course, identity changes do not have to be positive. The transformation of curly-haired, dreamy Botticelli youths into bald, vicious insurance salesmen, for example, cannot be called either aesthetic or moral progress. And when former social critics become zealous statesmen and patriots, it is hard to call this change of identity a turn for the better. Nevertheless, we should not give up hope for improvement, because, according to all probability calculations, the general law of change and transformation cannot always lead us astray.

In any case, it is quite clear that, in the logical and philosophical sense, a fixed identity is not possible in the real world. Certainly, there is such a thing as personal continuity, represented by what we call memory; however, the unreliability of memory has been proven even in ordinary matters (a fact that, apart from Marcel Proust, every detective knows all too well). In this respect, one cannot even speak of a real “identity” on the level of the “person.” The question of what the relative identitarian moment actually is at the various levels of manifestation of nature and human experience of the world is indeed an interesting and, in some respects, speculative problem, but one that should have no significance for practical life, and certainly not for political life. This makes it all the more urgent to explain the fact that the “question” of identity keeps cropping up in contexts where it does not belong. And since no concept has ever become the object of ideological and socio-political skirmishes, battles and wars beyond the rather narrow circles of logicians and specialist philosophers for logical or specialist philosophical reasons, the so-called question of identity must above all arouse suspicion. Not even identity itself, as such, is identical with itself; for having fallen into the hands of ideologues and interest fighters, it must, in all probability, fall victim to the worst possible changes of meaning.

2.

Since the fleeting journey on earth is not possible for man as an individual being, but only as the famous Zoon Politikon, something like a (just as uncertain) collective or cultural continuity is superimposed on the uncertain personal continuity. But living together with other people, loving or hating them, being in a larger historical context, etc., has as little to do with “identity” in the logical sense as the personal memory tape. When someone says of himself, “I am German,” this is true only in a relative, non-identitarian sense, in the sense of a copula, as one of an almost infinite number of relative, ephemeral qualities. To have grown up speaking a certain (e.g. German) language, which in turn has a history, i.e. is ephemeral, or even to possess a certain passport, even if one is not a passport enthusiast: who would deny this?

On the other hand, if someone says: “I am German” in an absolute, identitary sense, in the existential or essential sense of “being,” then it can only be a kind of mad cow disease. He could just as well claim that he “is” Napoleon or a hippopotamus. But where does this bovine madness of essential national, regional, cultural or other political “identity” come from? Perhaps there is some confusion here too, perhaps it is originally a matter of some other desire, such as for security. Even in order to be able to argue terribly as a Zoon Politicon, one needs a frame of reference, a presupposed common ground, because in complete institutional emptiness and relativization, it would no longer be possible to argue at all.

The fact that this historical, cultural, institutional commonality, which “contains” the human individual, at the same time influences relationships of a completely different and more immediate nature, extending, for example, into the bedroom, keeping an eagle eye on even the most personal desires (or, as Deleuze/Guattari say, suppressing the “desire machines” of the unconscious), already points to the fundamental inadequacy of all hitherto known varieties of historical-cultural commonality. If this connection is redefined as a false essential “identity,” then its coercive character is fully revealed. Whoever has (or thinks he has) a fixed political or cultural “identity” is poor. He carries around with him an identity prison that makes any open perception of the world impossible.

Now it must be said in favor of all pre-modern forms of society, however horrible they may sometimes have been in detail, that at least they did not give rise to the “question” of (political, cultural, national, etc.) “identity.” Their traditions, customs and behaviors were simply too natural to them. If, in the process of modernization, the problems of social coherence have been glossed over with the false label of “identity,” then this can only be the overcompensation of a new and additional deficiency. The change in the form of historical-cultural commonality meant that it began to lose its “salvaging” function, without losing its coercive character; and for this very reason, out of anxiety over this change, it had to be immediately absolutized into “identity.” The so-called question of identity is thus linked to the loss of the self-evident, even within the (unabated) coercive nature of society.

3.

No sooner has modern man begun to settle into some semblance of a home than everything is swept away again by a new whirlwind of “modernization” – one that isn’t even called “Anna” or “Angelica,” but has such strange names such as “war of liberation,” “construction,” “automation,” “creative destruction,” “location competition,” “market correction,” and so on. This life of endless impositions and disruptions, which, to make matters worse, does not take place within a reliable frame of reference to which one could become accustomed, seems to produce the strange desire for a fixed “identity.” There is, after all, a difference between engaging in reasoning about such a speculative question calmly over a cup of tea or a glass of wine on a long summer evening, and those reasoning – poor, naked, and on the run, habitually in the process of drowning – who are clutching at straws.

Modernization, that is, the total marketization of everything tangible and intangible, thinkable and unthinkable, born and unborn, is in a new potency inhuman precisely because of its accelerated dynamic character. While all previous institutional abominations were at least characterized by stasis, the modernized world, which continues to modernize in a mad tour de force, is, on the contrary, characterized by the institutionalization of change. This change, however, is not one that originates from within, springing from the direct human-nature process, constituted by independent experience – which might even make the shift in identity pleasurable – but rather an imposed, unmediated for the individual, blind and frenzied change that follows the fetish laws of capital. This is precisely what gives rise to the strange reciprocity of institutionalized change and permanent identity rupture on the one hand, and an “identity” ideology as a search for stability in the endlessly unleashed process of the crazy social fetish on the other.

But modernization also means emptying, namely an increasing loss of meaning. The structure that is unleashed and becomes a permanent whirlwind is, to make matters worse, contentless, the complete void; precisely the nirvana of money, but not as finally coming to rest, but as senselessly and restlessly plowing the world. Money not only has no meaning or purpose except the end in itself of its self-valorization as capital; it is also the paradox of a form without content. Emptied of even the last sensuous remnant of precious metals, which was itself already a decaying content, capitalized money becomes a tangible nothingness, a hard appearance, an eerily dynamic zero. Everything becomes attainable, an infinite world of things and possibilities becomes accessible, in contrast to the silly limitations of pre-modernity with its dress codes and elaborate special rights; but these infinite possibilities of things and relations can, in modernity, only be attained as commodities, in the form of total commodity production, i.e. stamped by the zero and thus provided with the sign of meaninglessness. In this form, however, their content decays, they become endless arbitrariness, in which no meaning whatsoever can be retained.

It is therefore not merely the institutionalization of external, blind, imposed change per se, but something far worse: an incessant change that historically increasingly unleashes contentlessness, meaninglessness, pointlessness, and absolute arbitrariness to the same extent that it forces all things and relationships into the commodity form and thus hands them over to the absurd self-valorization process of money. In the form of capitalized money, a voracious black hole opens up, swallowing up matter, sensation, the world and reality with increasing speed. The world is de-sensualized and de-aestheticized (a glance out of the window is enough), nature is destroyed. In modernization as a self-unfolding crisis, people squirm under the double assault of alienated change and growing lack of content; and with it, the identity problem produced by this structure itself intensifies.

For even an imposed change of identity might still be bearable if it were meaningful in content; but the progress towards total lack of content is unbearable. This state of meaninglessness – which is constantly emerging anew and intensified from the process –becomes, as the process continues, the inner state of the individuals and subjects themselves: their adaptation to this dynamic structure establishes them as total money-subjects. In other words, their identity now consists in having none. They find themselves in the form of an emptied, contentless subject: ready and able, even compelled, to absorb anything and everything, but only ever in this form of their own arbitrariness, as an appropriation to their own zero position of “hard nothingness”: eternally separated from sensual content and its enjoyment (Midas).

Thus, in a manner as perverse as it is paradoxical, absolute identity is ultimately achieved; the logical impossibility has truly come to pass – albeit at the price of an absolute zero-identity. The unbearable nature of this subject form gives rise all the more strongly to a desire for a substantive, significant, and meaningful identity that is simultaneously meant to escape the mad and ceaseless form of change or remain independent of it; but since one’s own zero-identity as a money-subject must nevertheless remain unquestioned, from now on it can only ever be a matter of synthetic pseudo-identities – in themselves and a priori untrue, laboriously propped up, and then evaporated once again by the restless nirvana of money, by the actual zero-identity.

4.

Yet, in contrast to the infiniteness of the commodity world, the synthetic plastic identities of modernization neither simply dissolve into total arbitrariness nor are they merely desperate acts of self-defense by subjects who have become meaningless. On the one hand, it is a matter of a historical process of assertion of dynamic nothingness against the static, pre-modern structures of the social imposition of generality. In this history of assertion, the black hole of money, of the “automatic subject” (Marx), was at first small and its process slow; only gradually did it enlarge and increase its process speed, eating and digesting faster and faster. t is only today that the black hole has, in a certain sense, become all-encompassing, and we find ourselves in it, skin and hair, i.e., our own interior has itself become a black hole, in which the dynamic nothingness again and again senselessly plows up sensual matter, eats it, digests it, and excretes it again.

In this history of the assertion of the insane end in itself, various synthetic transitional identities were formed that suggested ideological solidity reaching down into the unconscious, without really possessing it. Foremost among these is the nation, organized in the form of the modern nation-state. The ideologists, the historical sciences and the humanities have worked hard to ontologize this equally young and (in the historical process of the “automatic subject”) short-lived phenomenon, to give it a false beard, to endow it with a false ancestral passport, and so on. In fact, the nation, too, was only a kind of loincloth or foot rag of the “hard nothing” that kept working its way through the meager “identitarian” disguises of its history.

The nation was not arbitrary or random; that is why it seemed to possess significance. Yet it possessed this significance only as a function within the process of its own emerging total insignificance, a process in which it was bound to decay once more, so as to allow the naked, empty money subjectivity to emerge as the final stage. This transformation ultimately even led to the nation – though nothing more than a historical function of capitalism’s self-assertion, that is, a synthetic identity in this and no other sense – being ideologically mobilized as an identity against capitalism itself, which was growing out of it. In general, it seems to be a peculiarity of this structure that the respective past transit identities are invoked as synthetic “content,” because the “hard nothing” that becomes visible as the actual zero-content of the entire process of modernization plunges the subjects, who nevertheless “are” this meaninglessness themselves, into horror and despair.

On the other hand, a synthetic identity had to be formed vis-à-vis the non-European or non-Western structures, cultures, etc., that were not, or not yet, in the mill of money. Just as the identity construct of the nation mediated the competition between the emerging money subjects for a certain transitional period, so the construct of the “West” served to represent the common demarcation of the money subjects from the non-money subjects. And just as with regard to the nation, so with regard to the “West,” all the humanities, social sciences, and history worked as a collective forgery workshop to give this identity construct a semblance of plausibility and a false “uniqueness,” identitarian solidity, and self-importance. Begun in the 18th century, the 19th century saw the completion of a historical image that was racist and anti-Semitic in its foundations, spun out with ever greater subtlety and sophistication, still “valid” today, and dragged through the textbooks. For example, the black African origins of Greek antiquity were systematically erased (Martin Bemal, Black Athena), in order to cover the overall identity of the “hard nothing” with a false white skin of “noble simplicity, quiet grandeur” (Winckelmann), whitewashed like the once garishly painted Greek statues.

Falsified as identitary content and as cultural coherence from A to Z, the synthetic construct of the “West” became capitalistically functional in three ways. First, it served to dress up the European absolute zero-identity, the terrible shame of the West, in a grandiose theatrical costume. Second, Western European self-hatred, all too justified by self-submission to the fetish of the dynamic “hard nothing,” could be projected outward in the form of a false identitarian self-aggrandizement: as the construction of “races,” of “Blacks,” “savages,” “primitives,” etc., of allegedly foreign “identities,” in other words, whereby the shame of one’s own zero-identity became presentable as the inferiority of other people and cultures not yet participating in this zero-identity. Thirdly, the global campaign of destruction and annihilation resulting from the fetishistic worship of the zero-god of money-valorization could be given a missionary appearance: the senseless misery of capitalism, marketization, and “valorization” as a Promethean bringing of light (indeed: Lucifer).

Today, another century later, total, naked money subjectivity as a global system has become so entrenched that even its own identity constructs can no longer be taken seriously. The costumes, fake beards, and fake teeth have become so ridiculously obvious that no one really “believes” in them anymore. Just as capitalism has outgrown itself in its powerful nothingness, just as it has stepped out of its industrial form and out of itself as “modernity,” so it has also destroyed the nation and the “West” and, in general, every conceivable synthetic identity. What remains, however, is the impossibility of sublating (or overcoming) the unresolved absolute zero-identity, which today is more obvious than ever. And what also remains is the competition of the money monads in the ongoing process of the “hard nothing”; in its globalized form, more total and inexorable than ever.

So the completely worn-out, decrepit costumes of false identity are brought out again and again; and the hopelessly worn-out, thousand-fold resurrected, ghostly money subjectivity strives to continue “pretending” (simulation) in an endless loop. If there is talk of a “post-industrial society” and of “post-modernity,” then the fake, synthetic, shriveled identity that is always brought up with a wry grin should now be called “post-identity.” And this is perhaps the worst of all, because the increasingly infantile Indian Game of identities becomes the bloody seriousness of the “molecular civil war” (Enzensberger) at the historical end of the absolute zero-identity.

5.

The question of identity also has another aspect that pertains to the “how” of the systemic, procedural nature of the system. The false identity – which is, in truth, the absolute zero-identity of money – also implies a certain way of perceiving the world, one that is a moment of permanent capitalist “world-transformation” and its dynamic meaninglessness. As Sohn-Rethel and others have shown, along with money came theoretical, “conceptual” thought, which, unlike mythological, poetic thought, no longer has anything flowery about it. This double-edged progress brought advances in knowledge, but at the price of submission to the secularized meta-myth, to money’s “metaphysics of reality.” Only with its totalization since the 17th century has society been transformed into a machine of valorization, which is at the same time a conceptual “identification machine.”

The money-born “concept,” the scientific consciousness, which, after a long incubation period, only began its flight of fancy with the onset of the modernization process, does not give the world its proper names, in whatever fantastic form, but “identifies” it according to a grid that does not reproduce the world’s manifold peculiarities, but subjects it to an alien and external abstraction. Kant has shown that this abstract space-time grid, which makes natural science possible in the first place, is not something inherent in things, but the perceptual form of cognizant human consciousness. If this insight is not ontologized, as in Kant, but historicized, then it becomes clear that the abstract space-time continuum and the concepts emanating from it originate from the dynamic social form of money, the “hard nothing,” and thus did not become an object of reflection by chance, but only together with the unleashing of the capitalist mode of production. It is not a matter of Kant’s discovery of the “finally revealed” truth about human cognition per se, as he himself assumed in good Enlightenment fashion, but rather of the involuntary early revelation of the connection between the totalized commodity form and modernity’s thought-form.

Modern science, specifically natural science, contains at its most basic level the empty, contentless law of money. Its false objectivity corresponds to the false objectivity of money, which has become an apparent fact of nature. What is at stake in the simultaneity of the emergence of the total money economy (capital) and (natural) science is not a mere external parallel, but the common zero-identity that also belongs to the subjects of money and natural science. The restless impetus, according to the abstract spatio-temporal pattern, “to measure everything that is measurable and to make measurable everything that is not measurable” (Galileo) corresponds to money’s equally restless and abstract compulsion to valorize. The de-sensualization and de-aestheticization of the world occurs equally through money and natural science: they are two sides of the same coin. Scientific and commodity-based thinking “identifies” objects and phenomena according to its own zero-identity, stamps them with its abstraction, and leaves nothing in them that does not merge into that identity. Perhaps we are also dealing with two successive levels of “real abstraction” (Sohn-Rethel), which, according to Hegel, is “world-destroying”: scientific abstraction precedes the transformation of things into commodities, prepares them, as it were, for their entry into the infinite arbitrariness of the commodity world.

The only concession of the dynamic “hard nothing” to the sensual character of the world is the socio-historical construction of “femininity,” which has been made “responsible” for everything that falls outside the logic of abstraction of money/science; admittedly, only insofar as this dissociated, incomprehensible “rest” of the world is unfortunately functionally necessary for the process of valorization itself and cannot be substituted or adjusted in a scientific commodity-like manner. The construct of “femininity” is thus itself a system function, albeit in paradoxical entanglement; a flanking measure for the process of commodified-scientific “identification,” from which things are stretched onto the Procrustean bed of the “hard nothing.”

In this process, “femininity” is “identified” in its compensatory function as an object, just as, by the way, the “Black person” is, while, conversely, the dependent, itself fetish-constituted actor of the process identifies itself as a “subject” (and thus, correspondingly, destroys itself). The “identifying” thinking in the empty money-science form does not identify the “to-be” of identities, but it is “identical” with the construction of these identities; this thinking and the action corresponding to it represent a reality grid in which things and relations compulsively first appear as (synthetic, set out of the absolute zero-identity of the grid) identities without having been so before.

Here, the synthetic “identities” show themselves in their functional garb, preparing themselves and “the others” as juicy roasts for the ravenous black hole of the litigating, subjectless money. This applies equally to subject and object identity, to gender identity, national identity, and all the other synthetic identities of modernization: “identifying” thought establishes an alignment with the logic of zero, with the absolute zero-identity, always anew and at an ever higher level of development, by relegating the various functional, subject, and object identities (which at the same time feign content or something similar to content) to their places: the “woman,” the “Black person,” the “worker,” the “scientist,” and so on. Just as natural science “identifies” and presents the world as a kind of uniform white powder with different modes of reaction, so social science “identifies” human beings as carriers, subjects and objects of the commodity-producing system, uniform in money subjectivity but functionally and ideologically different. In both cases, there always a “residue” left behind that must be treated as waste.

Adorno and Horkheimer criticized this “identifying” thinking – and thus Hegel’s philosophy of identity – because they saw that in this process the world spirit of the concept by no means comes to itself through mere comprehension, but rather that this identifying comprehension must be understood quite literally: as a brutal shaping of the world according to the real-abstract essence of the concept, i.e., according to the totalitarian zero-identity of dynamic money. It is this actual context that makes conceptual thinking, as money-born and belonging to the process of money, the rape of things and relations; for this thinking can never remain mere thinking, its abstraction is immodest and murderous. Conceptual thinking, the only form of reflection achieved to date, should not, according to Adorno, simply be discarded (for instance, in an unreal, itself synthetic return to myth), but rather transformed together with its socio-historical foundation.

But how? Critical theory no longer saw an open possibility here, but only the self-contained system of “doom.” Frozen in the absolute zero-identity and then set in endless motion by it as mechanical pseudo-identities like wound-up dolls, people would remain trapped in the mental derangement of their identity mania, driving the capitalist process on ad infinitum. In his desperation, Adorno suggested fishing in the garbage (of the artistic, for example, paying attention to the “residue” of the unusable, and seeking out the hidden little territories of the last no-man’s land, where the prison of identity has not yet been completely closed. Today, however, it is becoming clear that the identitarian process of the “hard nothing” can also negatively cancel itself out, i.e. that it does not at all continue to move endlessly, but rather burns out catastrophically. Since the black hole of total money valorization is not physical but rather social in nature, it must, with the destruction of society and its bio-physical basis, also destroy itself. The other concern is whether the resulting pressure of suffering creates a possibility of escape from the prison of identity, even if its walls are not broken through from the inside in a well-considered way, but burst like in an earthquake.

6.

Especially at the catastrophic end of modernization, the state of social criticism is admittedly a deplorable one. And this is only due to misunderstandings. Insofar as the (left or radical left) critique of society in the form of the various Marxisms, anarchisms, etc. was itself an “identity,” was perceived and presented as such, it was always also its own secret denial. If the reference to something that one wants to abolish or overcome appears as a positive identity, then this is a logical self-contradiction. This means that together with the carefully hated (or rather, love-hated) object, the equally carefully built up, cherished, and cultivated positive identity and one’s own identitarian self-confidence (as a critic, left-wing radical, know-it-all, and troublemaker) would come to an end. Of course, that cannot be allowed to happen, and that is precisely why evil capitalism must live forever, so that one can eternally criticize and fight against it with full self-confidence as a good person, revolutionary, tribune, theoretical expert, elitist cultural critic, etc. (in this respect, not entirely unlike the vampiric relationship between Christian charity and the misery of the world, as already exposed by Nietzsche).

Is this merely dialectical sophistry? Yet there is indeed an intrinsic, objective reason for this self-contradictory, identity-based characterization of social critique, one that cannot be reduced to purely psychological factors. This reason lies in the fact that the previous critique of society was not yet a transformative critique of dynamic money as such, but rather was itself a driving moment of modernization; be it in the form of the internal system development of the West, or in the form of the recuperative modernization of the East and the South. Involuntarily, then, as long as permanent modernization had not yet exhausted itself, social critique was itself part of the whirlwind whose respective destructive force it deplored. Thus, it ultimately belonged to the systemic process of the “hard nothing.” It was involved (under the names of enlightenment, democracy, etc.) in the shaping of the absolute zero-identity, in the totalization of money-subjectivity; and in this respect, at the end of the overall process, its identity also turns out to be a real plastic identity, a synthetic illusory content under the sign of zero and its dynamic meaninglessness. In this sense, the attribution of an “identity” to leftist consciousness is quite fundamentally correct.

And in this respect, the transformation of the plastic identities of the left within the absolute zero-identity in the last ten or fifteen years also becomes understandable, because it points to the end of modernization. The transformation of the old left identity into a trembling post-identity was almost inevitable in this process. To the same extent that the process of modernization began to exhaust itself without the underlying social form being questioned in the slightest, it follows that leftist consciousness also became extinct. Since “creative destruction” has finally lost the attribute assigned to it by Joseph Schumpeter and is now only linearly destructive, there is no longer a “left wing” to occupy within this process in terms of social and development policy. In the great structural crisis at the end of modernity, the left is merely staging a ghostly farewell ball.

The dissolution of leftist consciousness as an identitarian critique of society began with a change of identity in parts of the alternative and ecological movements. Some of its protagonists began to wrap the decaying leftist identity in a bearskin and to want to save the forest only because it was “German.” Far from giving the critique of society a different (reactionary) justification, the critique as such was thus completely withdrawn. Not even a consistent anti-modernism can be attributed to this embarrassing construct. For the “identifying” thinking of modernity even appears particularly transparent in the neo-German identity maniacs as a kind of travesty of the Hegelian concept: it has never occurred to the forest itself to be “German,” any more than it has to dogs and cats; only in the identifying grid of the identity mania is it given such an attribute. For the forest, this does not mean salvation, but rather a death sentence; for its transformation into a component of a synthetic, plastic identity can only mean that the factual-sensual problem of preserving trees, ecological systems, etc. is not at stake at all. The fact that the forest is once again being sung about as “German” at the end of the 20th century is its funeral song from the mouths of maddening money subjects of the absolute zero-identity, who are always already destroying the ecosystem by “making money.”

Parallel to this deep-rooted regression, an initially seemingly contrary dissolution of leftist consciousness into affirmative theorems and attitudes of “postmodernism” developed. Outwardly, the foolish postmodern hustle and bustle was fun, and it continues to this day. With the onset of the secular crisis, many formerly identitarian leftists discovered that not everything was to be taken so seriously, and that capitalism was not so bad after all, but rather fashionable, urban, and fun. Identity was criticized, but in the guise of an identity of social criticism, that is, in an affirmative way. Thus, the postmodern left criticized identitarian thought only in the context of becoming largely uncritical. The pseudo-content of plastic identities was not overcome either, but merely relativized and dumbed down. Identity turned out not to be a skin at all, but merely a costume; and this was not a cause for horror and reflection, but for hooting jokes. Today a little dialectical materialism, tomorrow a little rain dance; today a family man, tomorrow a little gay; today exercises in sensuality, tomorrow a craving for theory again; today a cashmere scarf, tomorrow a traditional jacket and a chamois tuft on the hat: damn, how identity-less we are.

But the more clearly the Medusa head of the absolute zero-identity, i.e. of the mature and aged money subject, appeared in the mirror, the faster and more loudly the permanent costume change had to be carried out. “Masquerade ball” is what this is called in military drill: lining up every five minutes in a different outfit – tracksuit, work suit, evening suit; and most recently, by the way, combat suit. The old ‘68er demand for “strong ego identity,” at that time still meant as a condition for the liberation struggle, but even then rather unreflective in its implications, mutated via “politics in the first person” into the narcissism of the competitive subjects in the party fun of the casino capitalism of the 80s and 90s.

In the 1990s, however, the crisis of the commodity-producing system also reached global proportions. The salon lions of the postmodern costume parties in the Western metropolises must now gradually fear for their own material existence and life in the unresolved fetish form. The fun is over, even if it is still being simulated. Under the impression of crisis and secret existential fear, the identity costume has to be hallucinated again as a veritable skin, as an essential being, even if the functionalism of crude competitive interests peeps out of every buttonhole. From leftist identity to postmodern costume identity to infernal neo-patriotic post-identity: the delirious fetish-consciousness trapped in the nothingness of money finishes its St. Vitus dance. It is as if adults were taking a grim Rütli oath to believe in the Easter Bunny again from now on. And since there are no new plastic identities, pseudo-meanings, and illusory contents to be found, we have to reach for the old ones.

It was certainly suspicious that at the costume party of casino capitalism, the majority of men dressed up as men and the women as women (or even continued to play out the same “identities” within the same gender); under the false impression that these were “just” costumes. Underneath the carnival mask lay the old accrued gender mask. To lift this would have meant to show the bloody facelessness of the money subject; something like how in the movie “Planet of the Apes” the last humans take off their human face masks and show their eerily deformed, eyeless “selves” as they worship the atomic bomb. The unresolved gender masks, as a shell of the absolute zero-identity – which were once again post-identitarily painted over in the revival of the eroticism of the “strong man” and “beautiful woman” (e.g., “Carmen”) – already pointed, however, to the return of the old national uniforms, which were meant to complete the renewed identity mania.

Nevertheless, the errant post-identities do not merge with the old plastic identities. The prefix indicates that once again a historical level of self-evidence and apparent naturalness has broken away; that more subtle and downright ludicrous derivations become necessary in order to be able to play the game once again as mutual deception and self-deception. The empty abstractions of the “difference” discourse are meant to point to identitarian contents that, as plastic identities of past modernization, exist only in faint outlines – like the echo of life in the realm of the dead. But the mad compulsion toward competition and self-assertion in the crumbling civilization of money compels identitarian occupation even in a postmortem sense.

In the discourse of “difference,” postmodern reflection unites with the earthy stammering of inane bearskin patriots. Adorno’s critical theory is turned into its opposite. It is not what is “different” about things and people themselves from what the “identifying thinking” of the money-born concept stamps them as that becomes the topic, but exactly the opposite: the reciprocal “difference” between their false plastic identities, which “identifying thinking” stamps on them, is once again invoked. Not only in the cultural racism of the New Right, even the identity constructs of the oppressed and offended, which were created in self-defense, are instrumentalized for the prevailing identity mania. The “Black person” is to uphold his false identity “as a Black person,” the gay man his false identity “as a gay man” (possibly even genetically fixed by the new biologism), the “Russian” his false identity “as a Russian,” the woman her false identity “as a feminine being,” and so on. They uphold these pseudo-emancipatory constructs for no other purpose than to allow the “White” and Westerner, the forced heterosexual, the “German,” and the man to once again lead his most false of all false identities onto the battlefield of total competition in a post-identitarian manner.

Post-identities are needed so that people can attack one another. Of course, the “post-metaphysical age,” which has emerged from post-structuralist drivel, no longer permits any substantive or pseudo-substantive objectives of devout self-evidence. Now it’s time to grit one’s teeth and, in all seriousness, march into the “molecular civil war” for the constructivist-revived Easter Bunny. “There is no alternative!” scream the ex-leftists, the identity-obsessed, post-postmodern, defensive late democrats, who in truth no longer want to hear anything about an alternative. But excuse me, who is going to take the global civil war of absolute zero-identity so seriously; after all, it’s all just nothing, even if it is pretty hard.

Originally published in EXIT! no. 15 in 2012.

The Aesthetics of Modernization

March 4, 2026March 20, 2026 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

From Detachment to the Negative Integration of Art

Robert Kurz

The separation of life and art is an old theme of modernity. All artists who want to express a truth and who consume themselves existentially in their creations have always suffered from this separation. Whether art shows well-proportioned beauty or, conversely, the aesthetics of ugliness in its various representations, whether it criticizes society or seeks to rediscover the wealth of forms in nature, whether it is realistically or fantastically oriented: it always remains separated from everyday life and thus from social reality as if by a glass but impenetrable wall. Artistic creations are either ignored or they are world-famous as museum objects, dead before they are even born. The artist thus resembles a figure from the tragedies of antiquity: just as water and fruit forever recede before the thirsty Tantalus, so life recedes before him; just as King Midas had to starve to death because all objects turned to gold under his touch, so the artist as a social being must starve to death because all objects turn into pure exhibits under his touch; and like Sisyphus, he always rolls his stone in vain – his work remains disconnected from the world.

All attempts by art to break out of its glass ghetto have failed. Sculptures set up in factories and paintings on the walls of offices remained foreign bodies; literary readings in churches or schools never got beyond the character of compulsory events. When the Dadaists resorted to provocation out of desperation and dragged toilet bowls or rusty iron pipes into the sacred halls of art to mock the bourgeoisie, this offer was accepted with animal seriousness as an art object and cataloged like Michelangelo’s sculptures or Picasso’s paintings. The tautological definition is: art is everything that society perceives a priori in a separate space, in a reservation called “art,” and which, therefore, in its impregnated artistic objecthood, can be collected independently of any content, like stamps or insects. It doesn’t matter what the art wants and how it presents this, its effects are always defused and trivialized. For the capitalist elites, the artist is not even a court jester, but at best a special supplier like the wine merchant or the confectioner. You wouldn’t buy a used car from him, and you wouldn’t want him to be your son-in-law. At least that is his status in classical modernity.

Modern society has always seen its own mode of existence and its categories as supra-historical and universally human. If there is something rotten and actually unbearable about this system, then it is never supposed to be a historical problem that can be overcome through critique, but always an irrevocable condition of existence per se, which humanity unfortunately has to live with. Modernism also perceives the dilemma of the separateness of art and life through this lens of false ontologization. People pretend that in ancient Greece the artist was just as much a seller of his possibilities as he is today and that even the ancient Egyptians exhibited their images of the gods in galleries and museums or put price tags on them at auctions.

But in ancient civilizations there was no separate social department called “art” or “culture” in the sense that we understand them today. The modern structure of separate and mutually independent spheres, which also determines our language and our thinking, was completely alien to all earlier societies. Whatever human deficits, problems and social power relations they had, they did not divide their existence into separate functional areas. Such a division of social life only developed when the so-called economy was detached from the rest of life in the modern era; an elementary change that cannot be emphasized enough. Recent systems theory regards this as “progress” and the previous state of humanity as a lack of “differentiation,” axiomatically assuming a measure of primitiveness: The more integrated a society is through an overarching cultural context, the more primitive it is from this perspective; and conversely, the more “differentiated” a society is, the more it has split into separate spheres (based on the independence of the capitalist economy), the more “developed” it appears and the more “opportunities” it supposedly offers. This way of thinking has become so self-evident that it no longer seems absurd to see the highest achievement of social evolution in the fact that the functionally reduced human being only represents an intersection of systemic structures.

In reality, however, pre-modern civilizations were not primitive, but highly differentiated; only this kind of differentiation does not correspond to the concept of it accepted today. The old, predominantly agrarian societies did not have a culture, in the way that one “has” an external and random object, but they were a culture. This is even expressed in our scientific language, albeit most of the time unconsciously: we readily speak of the “culture” of ancient Egypt, antiquity, the Middle Ages, etc. and, as a rule, we indicate in this way both the special artifacts and artistic representations of sculpture, painting or literature and, on the other hand, the respective civilization, accompanied by its social structure and its relationship to the world in general. On the other hand, when we talk about “modern culture,” we only mean that particular aspect of artistic forms of expression that have been relegated to a separate sphere and never the social context as a whole. So we unconsciously “know” that culture used to be the whole and not a functionally separate sphere for the edification of the money-earning individual on his Sunday trips to the museum.

In fact, the Latin word “cultus,” from which our concept of culture derives, means both “planting” and “agriculture” as well as “worship,” “way of life,” “sociality,” “education” and even “clothing” (for certain occasions). This multi-layered terminology points to the culturally integrated character of ancient agrarian civilizations. The differentiated contents and forms of both their “metabolism with nature” (Marx) and their social relations and aesthetics did not fall apart as “subsystems,” each with its “own logic,” but were always only different aspects of a single and coherent cultural mode of existence. In modern terms, the description of this culturally integrated existence must sound confusing: production was aesthetic, aesthetics was religious, religion was political, politics was cultural and culture was social. In other words, the social aspects that are distinct for us were intertwined, and each area of life was to a certain extent contained in every other.

One might perhaps be tempted to speak of these agrarian cultures as religiously constituted, because religion was apparently the strongest integrative element of such a “society as culture.” It is well known that not only all kinds of artistic crafts, but also the theater and sporting competitions emerged from cultic acts; more precisely: they were cultic acts of a special kind. But even the quite ordinary activities of everyday life had a fundamentally cultic character; even humor and irony were cultically integrated. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to single out “religion” as the systemically defining moment of such societies, because in doing so we are already thinking of our functional concept of separate spheres. But religion was not a religion in the modern sense either, not a mere “belief,” not a limited opportunity for transcendental thoughts, and certainly not a “private matter.”

We must therefore not simply imagine the religious character of ancient cultures as a restrictive, irrationally coercive relation. The religious was at the same time the public, the so-called politics, the form of debate. It is not for nothing that the Latin word “privatus” has a rather negative, derogatory meaning, which becomes even clearer for us when we look at the corresponding ancient Greek term: there, the “privatus,” who does not participate in public life on a daily basis and as a matter of course, is the idiot. The fact that the religious aspect is both the form of public life and encompasses the whole of everyday life is not, however, an index of the limitations of this society, as the ideology of modern self-legitimization claims. Conversely, it could just as well be said that such a civilization had much more publicity and debate than the modern system, in which most of society’s affairs are settled automatically and without debate through the mechanics of the “detached” economy. Whichever way we look at it, our modern self-image does not allow us to come to terms with the existence of a culturally integrated society. We have no concepts for it.

This modern blindness to the character of pre-modern conditions has created yet another major misunderstanding. At the center of what we call “religion” is basically, in all cultures, the problem of human mortality and death as a process, event and “goal of life.” Along with religion, modernity has also relegated death to a special functional sphere, thus separating it from life just like it has done to art. In this way, the modern secularization of society did not lead to a different and possibly more reflective approach to death, but rather to its being repressed and ignored. What religion had meant in the old societies was not overcome and positively abolished, but merely functionally reduced to an irrational remnant for the private sensibilities of the abstract individual. With regard to bodily mortality, modernity went even further: just as old people who have become “useless” for capitalist reproduction appear even to their own children as mere “waste” and are locked away in institutions separated from normal life, the dead are also “disposed of” like garbage and industrial scrap.

Once modernity had repressed death, it could only understand the earlier integration of life and death as a frightening “fixation on death.” The fact that the ancient Egyptians attached so much importance to their tombs and to embalming the dead is usually interpreted as a sinister death cult, as if they had been preoccupied with nothing else. Modern man is even more disgusted by the widespread Neolithic custom of burying the bones of the dead in the middle of the house under the fireplace. In reality, all these people must have been extremely fun-loving, as ancient studies can now prove in many respects. The natural integration of death into everyday life only seems strange to us because the problem of our own mortality has been “outsourced” to a place that is invisible in ordinary life. Various cultural critics have repeatedly made this separation of life and death, as well as the separation of art and life, an agonizing topic in the history of modernization, without, however, ever radically criticizing the underlying social structure.

In a “society as culture,” which was even capable of integrating death, “art” was necessarily always part of everyday life and was therefore completely unthinkable as an exhibit of a sterilized and dead sphere “behind glass.” But that is precisely why it was not art as art, but a specific moment in an integrated social context. The “artist” could therefore only be an artist and be recognized in the sense of a technical ability, but not as a social representative of “the” art. The problem of functional divisions, which so preoccupies modernity, arose with it in the first place and could not even have been formulated before. The question therefore arises as to where this systemic “differentiation” actually comes from.

The process of modernization has by no means divided up society evenly and equally. Rather, a certain aspect of human reproduction, namely the so-called economy, was split off from all other aspects and from life in general. It is therefore no more possible to speak of an economy in our sense of the word for the ancient agrarian civilizations than it is to speak of an art or religion, even though the term originates from antiquity. However, while in ancient Greece, as in all pre-modern civilizations, “oikonomia” was a household economy in an integrated cultural context, a factual prerequisite and a means for cultic and thus social or aesthetic purposes, in the modern age it developed into an absurd end in itself and the central content of society. Money, as capital, was coupled back onto itself and thus became a blind “automatic subject” (Karl Marx) that is eerily presupposed for all human and cultural purposes.

As this “valorization of value” (Karl Marx) or abstract economic profit maximization split off from life as a dynamic end in itself, a separate, independent “functional sphere” emerged for the first time, like a foreign body in society, which began to rise to dominance and become the center. And it was only the existence of this detached and simultaneously dominant sector that made all other aspects of social reproduction left over from the capitalist economy appear as separate “subsystems,” that are, however, without exception of merely secondary importance and subordinate to the assumed economic end in itself.

Under the dictates of the independent economy, productive activity has mutated into abstract “labor” in an alienated functional space separate from life, which is only regulated secondarily and under the compulsion of its own uncontrollable “system legality” by the equally separate special sphere of politics. Such a “politics” split off from the culturally integrated society must therefore have been just as unknown to pre-modern civilizations as the “disembedded economy” (Karl Polanyi) of the capitalist self-purpose and the corresponding positive concept of abstract “labor” outside an integrated context of life. Modern politics and the associated institutions of the state and law cannot be equated with the apparently corresponding pre-modern institutions, which, just like “religion,” did not have the character of separate functional sectors. Only in the process of modern social disintegration through the “disembedded economy” did politics, the state and law emerge as complementary “subsystems” of the second order and thus as the first servants (ministers!) of the mute a priori of the capitalist economy.

When the central content and purpose of society has become a split off end in itself, then life must necessarily sink to a mere remnant. Expressions of life beyond the systemic divisions and complementary functional spheres of market and state, economy and politics, competition and law have been degraded to the residual waste of “leisure”; and somewhere in relation to this diffuse remnant, not only religion but also art and culture are located in a special sphere. All things that were once crucially important to people, all existential questions, all associated aesthetic purposes and forms of expression have become this meaningless “remnant” and their representatives have to scramble for the crumbs that fall from the table of monstrous self-purpose.

The situation of art and aesthetics in general is particularly absurd. Although every manifestation of life in itself always has an aesthetic moment for humans, capitalism has negated this elementary fact and separated aesthetics into a separate space, just like all other moments. “Work” is not aesthetic, the economy is not aesthetic, politics is not aesthetic; only aesthetics is aesthetic. It is as if the aesthetics of things lead an abstracted, ghostly existence of their own alongside things; just as the social nature of products leads an abstracted, separate existence alongside the products in the abstract form of money, which has become an end in itself, and abstract formal logic, as the “money of the mind” (Marx), becomes independent and stands alongside the concrete logic of real relationships.

The modern artist’s glass prison consists precisely in this structural separation of the aesthetic. Art flounders helplessly back and forth in this prison; it is no longer the artistic form of a social content, but a dissociated “formality” – either form without content or content as mere form. Art must therefore ape the end in itself of capital, which, as an abstract form (money) that feeds back on itself, would prefer to emancipate itself from any material content, without ever being able to realize this absurdity. “Art for art’s sake” is only the culmination of art as an involuntary caricature of capital, without being able to solve the dilemma at the heart of the capitalist system.

But if, through its own distress, it has become a delusional, self-obsessed end in itself, art, in its unreconciled separateness, can give rise to social hubris: Instead of understanding itself as the product of a system of divisions and mobilizing the radical critique of this destructive self-serving structure, art begins to “aestheticize” the division itself and its functionalist manifestations. Not only its own dilemma becomes an aesthetic subject, but also the glaring capitalist schizophrenia as a whole. However, if the capitalist structure is not criticized but aestheticized, then bodies torn apart by grenades, raped women, starving children and the obscenity of power can also appear as merely aesthetic objects. The detached aesthetic does not return to the social content, but only illuminates it in cynical reflection. An “aestheticization of politics” within the unresolved capitalist system thus leads not to emancipation, but directly to barbarism. Aesthetically staged politics was the secret of fascism’s success and Hitler was the prototype of the artist as politician, who did not reintegrate the separate spheres but stylized their disintegration into a bloody Gesamtkunstwerk.

The precarious situation of art in the capitalist structure of divisions also has a gendered aspect. In order for the “disembedded economy” of capitalist self-purpose to establish itself at all and produce the modern separation of spheres, an elementary precondition was necessary: Everything that was not absorbed into this system of divisions had to be primarily dissociated in its turn. And these were those aspects of life that were once culturally integrated but were then shifted onto modern women: family, “housework,” childcare, caregiving, “love,” etc., along with their associated characteristics. This also included a supposed special receptivity to aesthetics: women, as “natural beauties,” adorn themselves and the homes of their loved ones. This social space, which could not be completely absorbed by capitalist structures but nevertheless remained necessary for human reproduction, emerged as a separate kind of privacy in contrast to the entire social structure of capital and the internal divisions it contained. A paradoxical “separation from the overall system of divisions” (Roswitha Scholz) thus emerged, which forms its “dark reverse side” and is connoted as “female,” while, conversely, the official system as a whole is occupied and dominated by “masculine” elements.

This realization of the elementary and primary gendered dissociation, which emerged from feminist critique, points to a peculiar gendered relationship between the private and public spheres, which also affects the detached aesthetic sphere of art and culture. In the culturally integrated pre-modern societies, there were indeed strong patriarchal moments, but not in the “differentiated” and exaggerated modern form. The culturally integrated differentiation, for which we no longer have terms, did not separate “privacy” and “publicity” in the way we understand them today. In modern terms, much of what is considered private today was public, and vice versa; insofar as the public sphere was “male,” it remained limited, or there were “male” and “female” public spheres simultaneously and in parallel in the cultural context.

The paradoxical forms of disintegration based on the “disembedded economy,” however, have gendered the public and private spheres in a twofold way. On the one hand, there is the intimate space of privacy, in which “the woman” is the so-called fairer sex and at the same time responsible for the warmth of the nest, the comfort of the master, loving care, etc. – and for this very reason is considered inferior and “weak of spirit.” In contrast to this inferior private sphere, the entire system of capitalism with the “disembedded economy” at the top appears as the “masculine” sphere of bourgeois public life and as society proper. On the other hand, there is also a second internal split between the private and public spheres within this official “male” structure: absurdly, the activity for the subjectless end in itself of the system appears here as the “male” private sphere of the capitalist subject with specific interests, the “homo economicus” and money earner, while the complementary sphere of politics, which is also “male,” is defined as the public sphere. And the dissociated sphere of aesthetics or art and culture is merely an extension of this internal public sphere within the “male” capitalist pseudo-universe.

Therefore, “the artist” is in principle a male being within the capitalist public sphere, albeit in a particularly precarious place. There are also female artists, just as there are female politicians, entrepreneurs, scientists, etc. – but firstly, they are merely exceptions that prove the sociological rule; and secondly, they always have to adapt to the “male” rules of the game, which only proves that these are not biological conditions, but socio-historical attributions. The structurally “male” artist in his glass cage of dissociated aesthetics becomes a particularly schizophrenic being: On the one hand, he is a thoroughly capitalist “man” and moneymaker who rests on bourgeois privacy of the first order and needs “the woman” as an inferior caregiver in the background like any ordinary car salesman. On the other hand, within the “male” bourgeois public sphere, he represents a dissociated “female” element in the form of aesthetics itself, which is not absorbed into the functionalist system but is nevertheless part of the capitalist public sphere.

Only in the form of detached, sterile, museum-like art objecthoods can the “feminine” appear within the male pseudo-universe. The artist is thus the capitalist man who is the only one allowed to show his female side and even be homosexual if necessary – but only as the social aberration of the narcissistically self-centered aesthetic, who also robs “the woman” of her ascribed attributes and is thus the superman precisely because he even incorporates the “feminine” in a masculine way and degrades “the woman” as a model, object, or muse to a mere object of beauty. At the same time, however, bourgeois society chalks up his representation of the feminine in the masculine as a shortcoming and the “feminine inferiority” rubs off on him, so that he is regarded by his fellow car salesmen as a social exotic and is not really taken seriously.

However, this structure of divisions, which is the essence of modernity, is already perceived as a historical past. The capitalist dynamic has blown up its own social form and yet continues to proceed unabated. Mass culture and new media seem to level out the systemic “differentiation”: What critics denounced half a century ago as the “culture industry” (Adorno) is now celebrated by postmodernists as the reintegration of art and life. Mediatization is seen per se as emancipation from the constraints of capitalist reality; the world is declared to be a digital game. Everywhere is teeming with “opportunities” that can be seized in the spirit of media “democratization.” And in the amusing habitual masquerade of the sexes, the brave new postmodern world believes it has also overcome gender inequality. The transvestite is almost being proclaimed the new revolutionary subject.

The rhetoric of opportunity in postmodern cultural professional optimism, even if it sometimes presents itself as radical left-wing, is suspiciously reminiscent of the Orwellian language of neoliberal economists. In fact, it is not art that is returning to society as “democratic mass culture” but, conversely, the market is overstepping its boundaries and renewing its claim to totality harder than ever. Once the capitalist economy had detached from the cultural context of life and transformed its remnants into separate subsystems, its dynamics could not remain in this state of disintegration. While the sectors of art and culture, sport, religion, “leisure” etc. initially seemed to be able to assert a certain logic of their own against the dominant system of the “disembedded economy,” they are now being successively “economized” themselves.

These areas were dependent and secondary from the outset: if the structuring social context of society is determined by the end in itself of money, then priests, athletes, and artists must also “earn money,” whether directly as sellers in the market or indirectly through the state’s siphoning of money from market processes. But for a long time, this dependence was only external. As long as art was not subject to the economic laws of the market in its own production, it could not yet be a completely capitalist commodity, but only became so retrospectively in circulation. But the capitalist end in itself is as voracious as it is insatiable, and so it ultimately had to devour the already mutilated remnants of life: the detached art and culture as well as the meager “leisure time” and limited family intimacy.

Art only returns to life to the extent that life has already dissolved into the economy. Now art no longer has an existence of its own, not even as a sphere of a separate aesthetic, but has itself become a direct economic object and therefore its production is already taking place with a view towards how it can be marketed. In the boundless capitalism of the late 20th century, all objects in the world and in life no longer have any intrinsic qualitative value, but only the economic value conferred on them by their marketability.

What postmodernism would like to see as an emancipatory opportunity for art in capitalist mass culture is in reality its destruction. If the “cheerful positivists” (Michel Foucault) of postmodernism today want to place this prophetic insight of Adorno in the vicinity of conservative cultural pessimism, then they are only proving that they themselves have capitulated unconditionally to the economic imperative and are no less affirmative than the conservative pseudo-critics. If conservative cultural pessimism criticizes the destruction of art by the capitalist culture industry only from the point of view of its own past, when it was still a self-purposeful aesthetic in classical modernism, postmodernism twists the final push of the dissolution of art into economics into its re-appropriation by society. And while conservative cultural criticism mourns the bourgeois family and the elitist subjects of the old educated bourgeoisie, postmodernism misjudges the lonely media misery of the atomized “decentered subject” as an emancipatory spring. Some cling to the capitalist past, others to the capitalist present, both deny a new perspective for the anti-capitalist future.

Men and women, artists and car salesmen have become identical today only insofar as they have
all assumed the same empty identity of “homo economicus” and are no longer themselves as will-less agents of the “automatic subject.” The “differentiation” of sectorally split subjectivities is crushed by the market economy until everyone is a kind of car salesman, no matter what they do. The naïve belief in the cultural-industrial postmodern consumer democracy is disgraced under the dictatorship of capitalist supply. The culture industry is therefore not to be criticized because it is mass culture, but because it is absorbed in the alienated form of the “disembedded economy.” Its aesthetics are not the aesthetics of man, but the aesthetics of the commodity.

In the democracy of commodities, people as human beings no longer have anything to say. The aesthetics of commodities does not integrate the disintegrated individuals, but the commodities as ghostly pseudo-subjects. It is not the aesthetic form of a content, but the “design” of economic abstraction. This final stage of modern aesthetics can be described on several levels:

Firstly, it is an aesthetics of particularism. Contexts and connections are not taken into account. It ignores the fact that the whole is more and something qualitatively different than the sum of its parts. The design is the glittering aesthetics of the abstract single commodity for the consumption of the abstract single individual, while the whole of the landscape, the cities and the social space is transformed into a stinking garbage dump.
Secondly, this design corresponds to an aesthetic of arbitrariness. Form and content no longer have any relationship to each other, because the content itself is redefined as form. Capital is indifferent as to whether it valorizes itself through the production of pig carcasses, anti-personnel mines or laxatives. Art, which has been economized into design, must be just as indifferent to what it produces – if only it presents itself as marketable and capable of being staged in the media. This eliminates any yardstick. While conscious cultural integration must always develop standards, even if it is aware of their relativity and can change them, commodity aesthetics is a priori without standards – in keeping with the postmodern “decentered subject,” who literally “doesn’t care about anything.” A world without standards, which makes everything indifferent, can only produce one thing: endless boredom.
Thirdly, art and culture degraded to the design of the commodity world proves to be the aesthetics of simulation. The crazy postmodern idea of a media-induced de-realization of reality (Jean Baudrillard et al.) is only too eager to believe in the appearance of design because it produces it itself. Media simulation attempts to build a parallel virtual and dematerialized world in which capitalism no longer faces any natural or social barriers and the growth of the “disembedded economy” can continue indefinitely. In economic terms, the virtual illusory worlds of the media correspond to the casino capitalism of the last 15 years: the decoupled financial markets simulate an accumulation of capital that has long had no real economic ground under its feet. Capitalism continues to run on air, so to speak, after it has crossed the edge of the abyss. In this economic milieu of “fictitious capital” (Karl Marx) of stock market booms, debt, gambling, and “risk” sociology (Ulrich Beck), a zeitgeist has developed that wants to cover up the intolerability of capitalist impositions by “pretending.” In the simulative pose of media self-aestheticization, individuals act “as if” they were competent, successful, beautiful and reflective, while their real social relationships collapse.

Particularism, arbitrariness, and simulation reveal that destroyed art, through its mutation into commodity aesthetics, is only negatively integrated into a social life that is no longer life at all. The old problem of the separation of art and life has not been solved, but has become irrelevant because social man himself has become irrelevant. But even this irrelevance proves to be mere appearance, in which the “automatic subject” creates illusions about itself in people’s minds, so to speak. Capitalist reality must be de-realized because it has reached the absolute end of its development without any way out, while systemically conditioned people refuse to acknowledge this historical crisis. But behind the smooth design of commodity aesthetics, its true negative existence is relentlessly revealed. They cannot escape their real suffering, even if they try to de-realize themselves through the media.

The “disembedded economy” can only ever integrate itself tautologically into itself, but its claim to smooth totalization must fail, because although it can make real, sensual life negative it cannot incorporate it into its surreal world of independent abstractions – just as it is incapable of de-realizing death. The repressed does not return; it is always already there. Only on the surface of the design does the system of divisions appear to be dissolved into the economization of the world. Behind this appearance, however, the disintegrated real world becomes unbearable. Just as gender dissociation does not disappear in travesty, but rather the postmodern “feralization of patriarchy” (Roswitha Scholz) continues to shift the burdens of the social crisis primarily onto women even after the decomposition of the bourgeois family, the aesthetic misery of the functionalist world does not disappear in commodity-aesthetic design, but emerges all the more starkly in the desolation of economized public spaces.

When the real crisis can no longer be suppressed, media de-realization proceeds to “aestheticize” the unconquered and painfully perceived misery, even if this aestheticization of the crisis no longer takes on the political forms of the 1930s, but even appears “economized” in politics itself. But the motifs of fascism grin out of the commercial, commodity-aesthetic mediatization of poverty, violence and the degeneration of gender relations. The aesthetics of media de-realization and boundless arbitrariness is the aesthetics of civil war and barbarism, because they ultimately eliminate civilizational inhibitions.

There can be no return to classical modernism, just as there can be no return to the old agrarian forms of culturally integrated society. But continuing to live in capitalist disintegration is just as impossible. Art, too, can only positively transcend itself by consciously becoming the moment of a new social movement that goes beyond the old workers’ movement Marxism and exposes the root that has produced the system of divisions and functional separations. Cultural integration of society on a new, higher level of development will only be possible if the self-purpose of the economy is broken and the basic gender dissociation is abolished. The prerequisite for a new emancipatory debate today is self-defense against the capitalist economization of the world.

Originally published on exit-online.org on 01/11/2002