ABSTRACT
The commodification on which the global economy depends supplies not only designer sportswear but things that make life better; or, rather, like sportswear, it will supply anything people believe might make life better, including literary works of art that deal with the most profound aspects of human wants. The work of art is to remains the conceptual property of aesthetics rightly, so the art will retain the political potential derived from its autonomy. Art and the market are seen as two autonomous systems that are nevertheless coupled. Although the Dialectic was concerned with resisting commodification rather than investigating its precise mechanisms, they, as well as Niklas Luhmann, would have found specifics of its mechanisms among book historic details, changing between titles and editions over time. Turn of the century technological advances in production, to printing and typecasting, and further reductions in paper costs meant that the relative importance of production costs fell while the relative importance of operational costs rose.
