PREFAB: dissident art-making against the capitalist common sense

Abstract

PREFAB is a political modernist project whose threefold purpose, through development of a theory-in-praxis framework, is to counter the naïve assertions of the realist aesthetic (the dominance of which serves to reproduce capitalist common sense), as well as the conformism of the ‘art for art’s sake’ avant-garde. In the third place, PREFAB wishes to repudiate the hagiographic emphasis of liberal art history & theory in the evaluation of the arts. Contrariwise, in the world of work, no less than in the academy and culture, women and men ‘make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’ (Marx, 1968, p.96). On this model of structured agency, focusing on real social and economic determinants, PREFAB instead features an ‘author as producer’ frame of analysis, where the object of study is the materialised memories of the life and times, or lived experience (through the decades, circa 1930–95), of a working–class Edinburgh family. Namely my own.
The intellectual formation of PREFAB’s integrative synthesis of making and writing was informed, signally, by Marx’s profound insight that social being determines thought, by Antonio Gramsci’s counter–hegemonic inventory of traces – a knowing oneself as a product of the historical process to date – and by the dialectical distanciation techniques, or ‘the separation of the elements’, of Bertolt Brecht’s anti–illusionist ‘epic’ theatre (and by affiliated political modernists in the interwar era and since). The project’s primary sources also include the demythologising semiology of Roland Barthes, the cultural materialist formulations of Raymond Williams, Janet Wolff’s Marxist sociology of art, Avery Gordon’s exploration of the hauntological imagination, and Lukacs’s critique of the ideological reproduction of the capitalist commodity–scape.
Determined therefore (in paraphrase of Godard’s slogan) not to make political art but to make art politically, (Godard : MacCabe, 1980, p.19) the PREFAB how–is–what case studies address the Scottish nativism grounded in invented traditions of neo-tartanry, the ideological distortions of the ‘thing-world’ of finance–capitalism, with especial interest in the fetish forms of reification evocative of the proletarian popular culture of my grandfather’s prefab–worldview. Reproduced from indexical signs of post-war capitalist consumer culture, the PREFAB ready-mades accompanying the written thesis, comprise a family history of redux commodities, parodic fetishes of nation–state, and Marxist signage: a laboratory of didactic experiments in what may also be called critical realist method (in complex unity with critical realist theory) against the dominant conventions of bourgeois ways of seeing, knowing, and telling.

Date of Award	9 Mar 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Cumbria Lancaster University
Supervisor	Mark Wilson (Supervisor)