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{"id":17075,"date":"2015-03-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1900"},"modified":"2015-03-04T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-03-04T00:00:00","slug":"fragmentation-and-aestheticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/03\/fragmentation-and-aestheticism\/","title":{"rendered":"Fragmentation and Aestheticism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

In several dense paragraphs in\u00a0The Fragmented World of the Social<\/a>, Axel Honneth describes the Gyorgy Lukacs\u2019s analysis of the fragmentation caused by capitalist society and the romantic reaction.<\/p>\n

There is, for starters, the fragmentation of the human being himself, induced by the capitalist separation of the worker from his work. The relation of the person to his own self becomes a relationship of \u201crent\u201d because the worker can no longer express himself in the products of his labor: The auto worker on the assembly line puts nothing of himself into the cog that he puts on the machine. In Marx and in English theorists like Ruskin and Morris, the ideal is one of \u201caesthetic production\u00a0in which artistic work is taken to be the model for the organization of all forms of activity. . . . A work process which is self-enclosed and overseeable by the independent worker himself is in this case made into the elementary unit of a social organization constructed according to the model of a craftperson\u2019s workshop\u201d (52). This becomes a utopian ideal that has little relation to the actual conditions of capitalist society.<\/p>\n

At a second level there is fragmentation in \u201cthe pluralization of action-guiding values. . . . Human social relations are fragmented because the necessary bonds are now merely cognitively generated and no longer emotionally experienced. Rather than being supported by active participation and affective consent, social institutions meet with nothing but indifference\u201d (52). To heal this fragmentation, romanticism posits a unity based not on rationality but \u201cemotionally laden and collectively reproduced conventions.\u201d Art that \u201cpermeates society\u201d is taken as the \u201cmedium of such collective reproduction of common values.\u201d But this agenda itself becomes fragmented, subject to \u201ca fundamental tension between the ideas of restoring cultic pre-urban communities and of a democratic public integrated through the medium of art\u201d (52-3).<\/p>\n

Finally, there is a fragmented, separated relationship between human beings and nature \u201cbecause external nature is given just as little as bodily impulses the scope that is necessary for an undistorted reproduction within the natural environment.\u201d Thus modernity throws up various forms of nature mysticism, \u201cthe image of a society in which natural life processes are freed from the compulsion of a totalizing drive toward instrumental control and in which nature thus becomes a dialogical counterpart for humans\u201d (53).<\/p>\n

One doesn\u2019t have to agree with the mono-causal assumption that capitalism is the cause of these forms of fragmentation to be impressed by the power of this analysis. It goes some good ways to explaining modernity\u2019s oscillation between the cage of bureaucratic rationality and softer, woolier, breezier social and intellectual forms.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"