Fragmentation and Aestheticism

In several dense paragraphs in The Fragmented World of the Social, Axel Honneth describes the Gyorgy Lukacs’s analysis of the fragmentation caused by capitalist society and the romantic reaction.

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 “rent” 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 “aesthetic production in 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’s workshop” (52). This becomes a utopian ideal that has little relation to the actual conditions of capitalist society.

At a second level there is fragmentation in “the 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” (52). To heal this fragmentation, romanticism posits a unity based not on rationality but “emotionally laden and collectively reproduced conventions.” Art that “permeates society” is taken as the “medium of such collective reproduction of common values.” But this agenda itself becomes fragmented, subject to “a fundamental tension between the ideas of restoring cultic pre-urban communities and of a democratic public integrated through the medium of art” (52-3).

Finally, there is a fragmented, separated relationship between human beings and nature “because external nature is given just as little as bodily impulses the scope that is necessary for an undistorted reproduction within the natural environment.” Thus modernity throws up various forms of nature mysticism, “the 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” (53).

One doesn’t 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’s oscillation between the cage of bureaucratic rationality and softer, woolier, breezier social and intellectual forms.