After Capitalism?

Abstract

Events seen from a distance can reveal information not visible when the same events are seen in close-up. This is certainly true of art history. Western art history is traditionally written from a close-up perspective, which favours the closed, compact, complex images of Western Old Master painting and sculpture, physically extended in ‘timeless’ three-dimensional aesthetic space. From the broad perspective of 30,000 years of art history, on the other hand, Western-style space-based art with its closed aesthetic images is a relatively minor player on the scene. The leading cultural role in those 30,000 years has been taken by an art of open, environmentally scaled images, physically extended in four-dimensional ritualistic space–time: the cave art of the Hunter–Gatherers, the temple art of the Agrarians, early Christian church and cathedral art even—a genre of communication still throwing a long shadow over modern mass media. Much the same can be said about economics. Seen in close-up—framed by the all-conquering Western Capitalism of the past five centuries—human economic behaviour is a Darwinian struggle for survival, driven by the constant expectation of plentiful resources. In a longer view of human economic history, on the other hand, it may be argued that the ‘economics of plenty’ play a relatively transient role—uniquely associated with the emergence of new forms of human ecology—and that the principal driver throughout most of human history has been the more sustainable ‘economics of scarcity’, principally associated with the two long periods of ecological settlement, Hunting–Gathering and Agrarianism, already mentioned. The following paper merges these two long views—of art and of economics, respectively—to suggest that scarcity rather than plenty may yet have the last word in our newly globalised machine ecology and that the arts may yet turn out much more central to human survival than they currently seem.

Acknowledgements

This paper was originally presented at the ‘Future Matters: Futures Known, Created and Minded’ conference, Cardiff University, 2006.

Notes

1. The threat of a potential ‘hard landing’ for the human species was implicit throughout the Cardiff Conference.

2. The terms ‘cave art’ and ‘temple art’ are used here as abbreviations for the much wider range of, respectively, found and constructed art environments which each genre of art embraced in its day.

3. The homology of art and sex provided (and still provides) for ‘passing off’ in both directions: for art appreciated as pornography and for pornography appreciated as art.

4. Informally, ‘The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease.’

5. Gombrich's (1950) eponymous best seller has now sold more than 7 million copies.

6. There are many potential parallels between the Mesolithic and the Modern age yet to be explored: both being ‘construction sites’ for a new ecological settlement.

7. From a modern Neo-Darwinist viewpoint, it is arguable that Darwin derived his original idea of natural selection by survival of the fittest from his observation of 19th-century capitalist behaviour.

8. The Book of Genesis with its tale of the Fall from Paradisal food-gathering to sweaty digging and delving is one such record.

9. ‘Scarcity’ in this context should not be confused with poverty—the actual absence of resources.

10. Modern ‘hedge funds’ derive their profits from the secondary function of derivatives markets, which is to offer high-risk-to-reward ratios in exchange for small initial ‘margins’ of liquid capital.

11. Adam and Groves's (2007) work being an exception.

12. The basis of socialism/syndicalism, with its appeal to a reformatted and confrontational version of the ‘economics of scarcity’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicholas Tresilian

*Calle Antonio Machado-1, Las Pinedas, 14111 Cordoba, Spain. Email: [email protected]