Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory

by Jaleh Mansoor

In Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, Jaleh Mansoor provides a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction and a reexamination of Marxist aesthetics. Mansoor draws on Marx’s concept of prostitution—a conceptual device through which Marx allegorized modern labor—to think about the confluences of generalized and gendered labor in modern art. Analyzing works ranging from Édouard Manet’s Olympia and Georges Seurat’s The Models to contemporary work by Hito Steyerl and Hannah Black, she shows how avant-garde artists can detect changing modes of production and capitalist and biopolitical processes of abstraction that assign identities to subjects in the interest of value’s impersonal circulation. She demonstrates that art and abstraction resist modes of production and subjugation at the level of process and form rather than through referential representation. By studying gendered and generalized labor, abstraction, automation, and the worker, Mansoor shifts focus away from ideology, superstructure, and culture toward the ways art indexes crisis and transformation in the political economic base. Ultimately, she traces the outlines of a counterpraxis to capital while demonstrating how artworks give us a way to see through the abstractions of everyday life.

256 pages, Paperback

Published May 23, 2025

Reviews

[Stevphen Shukaitis · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory, Jaleh Mansoor offers a daring reconfiguration of art history, not as a chronology of movements and styles, but as a vital archive of transformations in the capitalist social order. With impressive theoretical range, Mansoor mobilizes Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic insights to track how modernist aesthetics function less as representations and more as indexes of real abstraction: the historically specific processes through which labor, subjectivity, and value become estranged and reconstituted under capitalism. Far from treating modernist works as autonomous or hermetic, Mansoor reads them as sensitive seismographs of shifting demands placed on labor across capitalist mutations. Her nuanced interpretations reveal how formal experimentation emerged not in aesthetic isolation but from a cultural unconscious shaped by commodification, mechanization, and the reconfiguration of life as labor-time.

Mansoor’s central provocation, that modernist abstraction does not evade political and economic determination but instead metabolizes and reflects it, pushes beyond traditional art-historical frameworks. This is not a history of art per se, but an excavation of how art bears witness to the becoming-technical of the human, the abstraction of labor, and the birth of new social ontologies. In doing so, Universal Prostitution brilliantly maps the aesthetic forms through which capitalism inscribes itself on the very conditions of perception, embodiment, and subjectivity. Mansoor’s work compels us to see art not merely as a response to social conditions, but as a means of theorizing them.