The term “agitprop” has a negative connotation among American thinkers in the Western liberal tradition, a residue of the high-culture/mass culture debates of the Cold War era. In his DC post on the Belarus Free Theater, for example, Jeff Goldfarb writes:

“They [the actors] create a free space in a repressive society. They do so not just to make a political point, but a cultural one, creating art, not agitprop.”

Part of the anxiety rests in the hermeneutics of suspicion, the perception that ideology, which agitprop is at the service of, ultimately deals in false consciousness, that it’s a veneer that serves vested interests and thus occludes “true” knowledge. Critical theory awards a privileged position to “art” as resistant to ideology due to its ostensible autonomy. And yet even Theodor W. Adorno, arguably the most mandarin of the Frankfurt School meisters, acknowledges a dual nature for art, characterizing it in Aesthetic Theory as both autonomous object and embedded social fact. (Early on in that famously gnarly tome he writes: “Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived.”)

Clifford Geertz offers a solution to the problem in “Ideology As a Cultural System.” For Geertz, ideology isn’t necessarily deceptive (in the service of what he calls “interest”) or symptomatic (a manifestation of what he calls “strain”) but instead is a semiotic system that uses metaphor to “grasp, formulate, and communicate social realities that elude the tempered language of science” (and I would add formalist aesthetics). From that perspective, what is called agitprop might be less normatively called visual culture, part of a semiotic system in which art is simply one aspect, if a culturally privileged one. I think of this with respect to the work of Dylan Miner, which was on view in Detroit last fall.

An assistant professor in the Residential College at Michigan State University, Miner is also a member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, a group of 26 artists working in the US, Canada, and Mexico who use printmaking as a form of activism. Among the materials in the exhibition was a collection of relief prints, mostly in black and red, on recycled grocery bags that featured imagery based on the Mexican Dia de los Muertos, during which people remember family and friends who have passed on, and in this case a metaphor for Karl Marx’s idea of capital as dead labor, the remains of surplus value appropriated by the bosses during the working day.

The work that best summed this up was Damos Gracias (Wal-Muerto). The image’s central skeletal figure is wearing a store clerk’s smock with an “un-smiley” face pin above the employee (oh, I’m sorry, I mean “associate”) nametag. She stands before a big-box store facade bearing the slogan “Siempre Pobre” (Always Poor), a reference to Walmart’s advertising tagline “Always Low Prices” and its direct connection to the immiseration of workers both within and outside of the company in the global economic race to the bottom driven by the enormous retailer’s ruthless cost-cutting business model. The neoliberal ideology of so-called free markets (which in fact are rigged to give advantage to the haves and even more to the have-mores) is represented in a prayer at the bottom left that translates to the effect of “Let us give thanks to the Virgin of Capitalism for delivering us from poverty,” a statement of false consciousness that the dead laborer reveals, along with the shopping cart she pushes representing commodity consumption as the reproduction of the inequality low wages initiate.

Miner’s use of humble handcrafted and recycled materials and indigenous-based imagery are an act of resistance to the alienation at the core of the modern capitalist system. Together, form and content constitute a semiotic communication, a meme (the basic unit of communication similar to the gene in biology) that can be replicated and transmitted, released into the cultural idea pool so that it might have a chance of changing our way of thinking. Call it agitprop if you want. But I for one, hope it goes viral.