ABSTRACT
Fredric Jameson has argued that modernism might best be understood as ‘a mode in which [the] transitional economic structure of incomplete capitalism can be registered and identified as such’, implying that our current period is progressively converging as ‘completed’ capitalism. Challenging this perspective, this essay explores how the spatial and temporal complexities of modern capitalism – grasped in terms of its contradictions, combinations and unevennesses – are manifested aesthetically as cultural form. Drawing on recent Marxist debates, the chapter considers Allan Sekula’s work. From the 1990s, until his untimely death in 2013, Sekula attained prominence for a series of artworks – exhibitions, books, video and films – that took as their subject the sea; or, more precisely, the question of the labour process in the maritime economy. He photographed or filmed shipbuilding and repair, the arduous work of seafarers and of dock labourers, fishing industries and fish markets, employees dealing with a chemical leakage and volunteers clearing a major oil spill. It is not just Sekula’s thematic content that is important for this account; he applied his critical intelligence equally to the problem of form. The hypothesis is that Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘chronotope’ offers a useful way to understand this socio-aesthetic relationship.
