Gesamtkunstwerk 2.0

The "work of art" was a hypothesis that was finally disproven around the time of Benjamin. The Gesamtkunstwerk offers something different, however, than an addition of the forces of individual works of art. As Engels would point out, it separates itself qualitatively by the fact of its unique level of accumulation. Nietzsche was right to cut down Wagner's resuscitation of a political metaphysic via the Gesamtkunstwerk, but the idea anticipates the form that aesthetic productivity must take in the next generation of capitalism (ie, the world we were born into). What we are close to realizing is the all encompassing advertisement, in which every object is actively being pitched by an investor (and hence behind every object there stands a capital flow underwriting the venture) and every presentation of objects take the form of an engaging narrative.

These kinds of ads were previously considered "high concept" but they are becoming the norm; or if the skill of narrative carries too high a price, they can at least attain the anxious ambivalence of insecure and sarcastic youth. On the other front, NBC's 30 Rock has done the best work to ironically incorporate, as in a vacuole, the pleasures and perils of the discourse of advertising. But that model and its opposition are bound to collapse, leaving us with a life that has both the curious twists of a fate of an unrevealed novel and the opportunities for buying back tokens of our life in every atomic aggregation.