Mors Immortalis, Or, The Dead Shark and the Immorality of Capitalism
October 14, 2008
Mark Featherstone
Two totally unrelated pieces in the current London Review of Books caught my eye: the famous art critic Hal Foster’s piece on the art market and an advertisement for the John Templeton Foundation containing excerpts of a debate on moral character and the market contained on the organisation’s website. In the former piece, Foster focuses on the expansion of the art market and the irresistible rise of Damien Hirst who has continued to sell work and make enormous profits despite the onset of the global credit crunch. The latter piece excerpts essays from some of the world’s most famous writers and theorists, including Bernard-Henri Levy, John Gray, and Michael Walzer, organised around the question ‘Does the free market corrode moral character?’ Although I read the two pieces independently, I could not help but think that Foster’s piece could shed some light on the Templeton debate and provide an interesting angle on the various positions taken by Levy, Gray, Walzer, and the other essayists.
Foster begins by suggesting that Hirst is the market artist par excellence who makes Andy Warhol’s original attempts to fuse pop culture and art look amateurish. As his article develops towards its conclusion, Foster notes that there is some kind of connection between Hirst’s embrace of the market and his preferred subject matter, death. From his famous formaldehyde tiger shark ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ through ‘Adam and Eve under the Table’ to his diamond encrusted skull, ‘For the Love of God’ the idea of death dominates Hirst’s work. However, Foster suggests that the type of mortality that Hirst’s work symbolises is less natural death than the kind of deadness that occurs when living objects are subjected to what sociologists call commodification. In other words, it is less that the shark or skull represent the horror of natural mortality, but rather that they embody the deadness of the commodity, and the ways in which it undermines all forms of qualitative human meaning in favour of quantitative monetary value, simply by virtue of their position on the market (‘The Physical Impossibility…’ sold for $12 million and the diamond skull is priced at £50 million) where they have no value or meaning beyond their exchange value.
This is a familiar thesis. In the 19th century one of the founders of sociology, Karl Marx explained that the transformation of the objects of human production into commodities to be traded on the market mortifies both the worker, who produces the object in the first place, and the commodity, which no longer embodies the living labour of humanity but becomes instead a kind of zombie, a thing that seems to possess a will of its own simply by virtue of its estrangement or alienation from its creator who no longer understands his own creation. In many ways, then, Hirst’s most famous contribution to the culture of death, ‘The Physical Impossibility…’, is the perfect embodiment of Marx’s commodity because it is a creature that throws our own status as living beings into doubt. The shark confronts us with our own mortality, precisely because it stands before us, less the product of humanistic artistic production, and more a kind of quasi-natural commodity, which saps our life force and grows more powerful as we shrink before it. But, of course, there is room for confusion here. Is it that Hirst’s shark is commodity that deadens people or a work of art that represents the natural condition of human mortality? The artist intended the latter, but various art critics have argued for the former view on the basis that Hirst never made the work himself, but rather paid a fisherman to catch the shark and then oversaw the production of the piece in much the same way that any capitalist oversees the production of commodities.
In light of this view, let me repeat Foster’s key point: the reason Hirst’s tiger shark has a deadening effect on viewers is less the result of its embodiment of some Schopenhauerian ultimate reality, the primal life-death drive that eventually swallows everybody and everything in order to simply reproduce itself, and more because of the way it represents the effect of the market on the things that humans make, the process of commodification that transforms the fruits of our labour into monstrous things that feed off our life energy, killing us in the process. This is exactly how Marx understood capitalism. He famously declared mors immortalis and told us that capitalism is a culture of death ‘…that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’. But what is the difference between Schopenhauer’s terrible reality and Marx’s vampire-like system? The precise difference between Schopenhauer’s vision and Marx’s system is that the former was a theory of natural or even cosmic reality, whereas the latter was a sociological theory of the human-built world. This is an extremely important distinction because it changes the way we (humans) must think about our moral responsibility for other people.
Given the difference between these two visions of the world, it is clear that there is less pressure on humans caught in Schopenhauer’s terrible reality to be moral, simply because morality cannot exist in nature, whereas people existing in human-built capitalist society really should know better than to treat each other like worthless objects. Unfortunately, as Marx showed through his various works, this is not how capitalism works precisely because people are keen to unload their responsibility for other people onto a naturalised vision of the capitalist world that they can do nothing about. In other words, the human-built capitalist reality becomes Schopenhauer’s cosmic reality, Hirst’s shark is transformed from a commodified symbol of avoidable premature death by human neglect to an artistic symbol of the kind of natural death that will eventually visit every one of us, and people are excused from worrying about the morality or immorality of their behaviour towards others.
It was this thesis that I took to my reading of the Templeton debate on the relationship between moral character and the market. Against the famous idea of being-towards-death, which the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger developed in order to suggest that the knowledge of death makes life worth living, and contemporary free market ideology, which rejects social security for the notion of the totally autonomous individual who does not care about other people, my view is that the problem with the culture of death and the free market is the way that the latter creates and fuels the former by mortifying the products of human living labour, endlessly replacing quality with quantity, and prohibiting the possibility of morality, which is an emotive category beyond mere calculation. In other words, I think that the market and money, which sociologists from Marx to Simmel have seen as dehumanising developments, cannot produce a moral system, beyond the kind of degraded neo-conservatism of those who attack the poor for their human failings in the face of monstrous, dead, vampire-like system Marx taught us about. Following this conclusion, it struck me that Hirst’s tiger shark was the perfect complement to the Templeton piece. What better way to answer the question of the relationship between moral character and the market, and assert the immorality of economism, than through reference to the $12 million corpse of a killer shark?
