when confronted with a critique of civilization, people, including leftists, will always ask one singular question: “what about _____?” sometimes it’s technology, sometimes it’s medicine. one friend of mine one day asked, “but what about art? even though it was produced in injust conditions, it’s still beautiful.”
and i don’t deny that it’s beautiful, at least from an ‘objective’ viewpoint, which means that we’re looking solely at the artwork itself. yes, the pyramids are quite something, and so are all the trinkets down at the louvre. i myself like art and i even think that my politics are informed by certain aesthetic aspirations, which i found through art.
walter benjamin once wrote that there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time also a document of barbarism, and i think he got it very well. he meant to say that everything handed down to us by civilization is dripping with blood and shit. this is a critique that you can even find in marxism: there’s that famous poem by brecht where a worker asks: who built the pyramids, or who built thebes? the anti-civ critique starts off from that question but it goes deeper, because (unlike the marxists who think the glories of civilization can be reedeemed if capitalism, its last form, is destroyed) it rejects the idea of ‘socialist civilization’ entirely. ‘communist art’ in this sense, is a mauling of the term ‘.communism’. and it’s not because free human communities don’t make beautiful things, they do. it’s because for us, art, like religion, is a pale reminder of freedom.
when it comes to art, anti-civ anarchists don’t just ask: “well, what where the means of production behind a velázquez painting?” – a question that inevitably leads to “well, even though it was produced for the sake of empire, it’s still beautiful”. they ask: “does that beauty speak of free lives or not? furthermore, is it worth it?” is it possible to find anything beautiful when it speaks the language of leviathan? the mere fact that life is separated into ‘art’ and ‘things that are not art’ already speaks to unbelievable violence and a spiritual misery so great that it’s no wonder that this division is a cornerstone of western thought, and one so praised by one of the founders of marxist aesthetics, theodor adorno. for him, it is capitalism’s little ability to turn everything into commodities that makes art into an autonomous realm, where it is free to finally separate itself entirely from the capricious wishes of rulers, kings, the bourgeois themselves, and most importantly at all, from the decay and tear of life. art is a hobbled ontology of sad human beings. this is probably a reason for why artists suffer so much: they have access to Being, but they are forced to condense into Art. in fact, this is why most of us suffer so much: life has to be reduced to whatever stupid corpse we particularly specialize in, whether it be sex, religion, art or engineering.
“Art”, “Architecture”, “Technology” are all cadavers that follow Leviathan’s march. sure, they make our lives a little less terrible. but by giving us that small respite, all they serve to do is to remind us that there was once something outside civilization, and i myself reckon that it was much grander, because the second you think it aloud, the cadavers start peeping through: “how could you want to live without art, without beauty?”
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