Night of the living dead

This will be a post on post. It seems we are living in a post world, words with the prefix are springing up like daisies on a spring pasture. Notwithstanding the most obvious objection that adding the prefix post does not say anything substantial: we might as well say that philosophy today is post-scholastic and have it done with, say that we are living in the post-palaeolithic and that our art is post-baroque, the real problem is that the prefix does not only reveal an intellectual confusion, but that it is ideological. It's aim is to conceal a reactionary movement in all spheres of modern life. The process is the same everywhere one looks: take a name of a progressive movement (in either art, philosophy, politics or social sciences), strip it of all progressive tendencies and attach the prefix. A good example is post-modernism in art. The historical avant-garde developed means of expression that aimed at a revolutionary impact: no more and no less than a thorough social transformation by the aesthetic realm. In post-modernism these devices have survived, but have become assimilated by the institution art that the historical avant-garde rebelled against. In this process the avant-garde has been reduced to a set of ornaments, set to adorn a resurrected affirmative culture. And as Adorno noted, culture is the mechanism by which class domination is internalized. It, that can exist only by exclusion, has produced a sphere that promised pure humanity to the select few - it should be noted that just as slave labour was constitutive of philosophy in ancient Greece, so exclusion was constitutive for bourgeois culture. That today all are excluded - the manager, who must subordinate not only his body, but his mind to the dictates of economy, most of all - might fool us into thinking that contemporary culture has become inclusive. Quite the opposite is true: exclusion has becom universalized. Where can one today find a homme de lettre, or anybody cultivating aesthetic sensibility as an entry into the realm of a pure humanity? There is no "high" or "low" art any more - constitutive of "high" art of the bourgeois era was that it transcended social praxis by its promesse de bonheur - a counterfactual vision of a better, a harmonious world. This idea (one can find it in almost all aesthetic manifestos of the time, whether it be Kant's Critique of the faculty of judgement, Wordsworth's preface to his Lyrical ballads, Schiller's Aesthetic education, or Hölderlin's Hyperion) was of course ideological when it claimed that the harmony of art was realised in society, but at the same time critical, when it showed the gulf between social praxis and happiness. Bourdieu's analysis of art in Distinction implicitly treats it as equivalent to objects of taste (furniture, clothing, cuisine), which might have caused an outrage in the 19. century, but is today statement of fact: art has been reduced to a mere object of taste, critique to a statement of like or dislike on a 5 point Likert type scale - in short, art has become a mere commodity among others. Post-modern art has retained the affirmative character of bourgeois culture, but what it affirms is no longer a realm of pure humanity set into heaven, but social praxis itself - one need only look at the works of Andy Warhol. What has remained is the ideological moment of affirmation, what has been lost is the critical vision of a better world. Avant-garde techniques are used not to beat the path to a free society, but to soothe the guilty conscience of the sublime fallen from grace.