It is difficult to comprehend

what was lost when our experience of the world was subjugated to scientific method. The mere possibility of revelation is banished. All traffic between the world of the senses and the eternal world comes to a halt. Nullifying thousands of years of mystical experience, Kant declares the thing-in-itself radically unknowable, and in so doing imposes the limit of rational inquiry as the limit of all knowledge. This is the moment the modern world is born.

A fundamental flaw in Marxist thinking

is the assumption that oppression disposes to insurrection. But the habitus of the working class tends to fatalism, not self-assertion. The rise of the bourgeoisie and its overthrow of the nobility did not presage a similar path of development for the proletariat. There is a profound difference, an asymmetry, between the experience of the rising bourgeoisie, whose expanding economic power gave it the self-confidence to gain power, and the experience of the working class, which knows only precariousness and learns from history only the futility of revolt.

Marx' own theory of alienation ought to have helped him understand why the proletariat could never become a revolutionary class. The worker, having estranged his labor must always encounter its product as the hostile, intimidating power of capital. The working-class, despite being the productive class, is barred from gaining a sense of its own productivity because it always experiences its productivity as that of the Other, as a force of dispossession, as a curse.

Unlike the bourgeois, the worker encounters in the world only evidence of his disposability. This is why worker psychology is a psychology of adaptation, fatalism, resentment but almost never of revolutionary consciousness. It is not ideology that renders the working-class docile. Alienation has already dispossessed the working-class of agency at the site of work before ideology naturalizes impotence. Inverting Marx, we could say that it is precisely because the workers work that they cannot acquire revolutionary consciousness. Work is the killer not the instigator of revolutionary consciousness. 

The imaginary tennis match

 

staged by the roving troupe of mimes at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up is the perfect allegory of what contemporary art is about: poseurs giving poseurs the opportunity to relish their exceptional acuity. In art as in the larger economy, the separation of value from labor required the transformation of vacuity into commodity. This took something like 40 years to accomplish, essentially the interval between Duchamp's introduction of the readymade and the Pop artists' exploitation of its potential. The readymade entered art as a tiny, almost imperceptible black hole. But it eventually swallowed up everything around it because in the absence of a sanctified purpose, art has no purpose and art about nothing must become nothing posing as art.