Elk Diorama at the Springfield Science Museum, Massachusetts; (Book I: The Process of the Production of Capital: Part One: Commodities and Money: Chapter 1: The Commodity); Capital Diorama (2009), GCGCA(i)
Capital Diorama
American Museum of Natural History, Manhattan
21 Jun - 22 Sep 2009
'The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.'
Diorama: the word diorama can either refer to a 19th-century mobile theatre device, or, in modern usage, a three-dimensional full-size or miniature model, sometimes enclosed in a glass showcase for a museum. The passage of time has somewhat antiquated them; they appear now as time capsules, their hand-made nature bordering upon installation art. But what shines through their ongoing obsolescence is their capacity to help us understand situations and processes that are otherwise unusual or abstract. In the process of miniaturisation, the visual presentation of information increases in richness and self-evidence.
Perhaps we need new kinds of diorama today, ones that might directly engage us with the effects of climate change upon our planet - global or planetary dioramas? But the idea of Capital Diorama is contradictory. It is a visual contradiction. For it contradicts Fredric Jameson’s problematic of cognitive mapping. Capital is not a question of representation - of cognitively mapping the totality of processes that form its structure. So there is no significant or critical relationship of artistic representation to capitalism at a thematic level.
Academy of Natural Sciences African Dioramas, Drexel University, Philadelphia; Capital Diorama (2009); (Part Two: The Transformation of Money into Capital: Chapter 5: Contradictions in the General Formula); Capital Diorama (2009), GCGCA(i)
It marks the incompatibility of ‘realism’ in art (as an attempt to represent subject matter truthfully) with politics, which is artistically self-destructive as a result of the sacrifice of its own criterion of autonomy (becoming mere signage or decoration for a cause - ’Social realism’), and theoretically limited in its avoidance of the actual or real abstraction (the value form) that is fundamental to capital.
Moose Diorama (2012), Alois Kronschlaeger - part of the installation ‘Habitat'; (Book III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole: Part Five: The Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise: Chapter 24: Interest-Bearing Capital as the Superficial Form of the Capital Relation); Capital Diorama (2009), GCGCA(i)
Symptomatic of Jameson’s avoidance of abstraction in Marx’s Capital is his decision to begin his introduction to Capital - entitled Representing Capital - by skipping to its sixth chapter, on labour. He thereby avoids the account of the value form and social abstraction articulated in the first five chapters of Capital (from ‘The Commodity’ to ‘Contradictions in the General Formula’), the logic of the argument of which breaks off at the chapter on labour, and which is only continued thousands of pages later in the twenty-fourth chapter of the third volume of Capital (’Interest-bearing Capital as the Superficial Form of the Capital Relation’), continuing through to chapter twenty-seven (‘The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production’). The logic of the argument from the commodity to money to interest bearing capital to credit (from chapters 1-5 of volume one to chapters 24-27 of volume 3). After this one can then read chapter six.
Hall of North American Mammals – American Museum of Natural History; (Book III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole: Part Five: The Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise: Chapter 27: The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production); Capital Diorama (2009), GCGCA(i)
Jameson proposed the idea of ‘cognitive mapping’ in ‘Totality as Conspiracy’, a chapter of The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. It is no doubt in part a result of the emphasis upon ‘aesthetic’ as opposed to ‘art’ (reducing art to aesthetic) that is the basis for his emphasis upon cognition (recoding artistic experience into knowledge acquisition).
The ideal object of a ‘geopolitical aesthetic’ (and its political possibilities) follows in the tradition of one of the founders of Western Marxism, Georg Lukács, the author of History and Class Consciousness who famously argued for the revolutionary character of 19th century bourgeoise realist novels that depicted contemporary social life not as a static drama of fixed, universal types, but rather as a moment of history, constantly changing, and open to the potential of revolutionary transformation. The hope is to have found a new artistic form that will accelerate people's underdeveloped consciousness of history, and lead to revolutionary historical change.
