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. 

Duchamp nominating a urinal

 to the status of art object is not a gesture of "inclusion." It is a gesture that superficially challenges the distinction between art and nonart only to make it an explicitly institutional distinction. The seemingly arbitrary inclusion of select ordinary objects into the pantheon of art formalizes the authority of the nominator and, even more so, the institutional authority that ratifies these nominations. There is no dismantling of boundaries, no levelling of “high” and “low.” Rather, the readymade proves the obduracy of that distinction. The readymade demonstrates the authority of elite coteries and institutions to define art. It is the most brazen demonstration of the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie.

Through its seemingly miraculous ability to author vacancy, the readymade gilds everything it absorbs into itself with an “infrathin” aura that permits the banal to be consumed as the ironic. The readymade is a fetish. It intervenes as the last barrier before the void, which it hides in plain view. For the readymade is at a certain level the void itself, the banal object. But it is also, at the same time the means to avoid encountering the void, a voiding of the void. In lieu of a passive surrender to banality, the readymade delivers the obscene spectacle of banality’s active insertion into art. The readymade is the phallicization of the banal.

Considered as an affirmative device, the readymade argues for the recognition that the most complex and engaging forms in the modern world are consumer products. The negative corollary of this is that art is redundant, the capabilities of even the most protean individual artist paling in comparison to what capitalism’s armies of scientists, engineers, designers, and marketeers bring forth at an ever-accelerating pace.

But why the need to frame consumer items as art? Why not simply dispense with the notion of art altogether? 

The problem is that the the very profusion of the dazzling forms with which capitalism gluts the world renders them invisible. This is what Benjamin was getting at with his notion of aura and its loss through reproducibility. Standardization and mass production rob the object of its quiddity, turn it into something that passes through our hands too quickly, too unobtrusively. The readymade enables a slower mode of consumption. It permits an appreciation of the substantiality of the disposable object.

Viewed this way, the readymade is not an attack on art. It is not antiart. It is rather the last artistic means that modernity can muster to avoid its complete disenchantment.