Marxist Aesthetics (Routledge Revivals)

The foundations within everyday life for an emancipated consciousness

Pauline Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415609098
• eBook ISBN: 9781136838187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1984, this study deals with a number of influential figures in the European tradition of Marxist theories of aesthetics, ranging from Lukacs to Benjamin, through the Frankfurt School, to Brecht and the Althusserians. Pauline Johnson shows that, despite the great diversity in these theories about art, they all formulate a common problem, and she argues that an adequate response to this problem must be based on account of the practical foundations within the recipient's own experience for a changed consciousness.

Part one

Lukács: reification and its overcoming

1 History and Class Consciousness

1 The foundations for a revolutionary consciousness

This work on Marxist aesthetic theories starts out with a brief review of History and Class Consciousness for two reasons. Firstly, a discussion of History and Class Consciousness is a useful introduction to Lukács’s own later writings on aesthetics and to a number of other aesthetic theories which take their bearing from this text. Benjamin and Adorno are both particularly indebted to Lukács’s work. Secondly, it was History and Class Consciousness which first articulated the problem so central to the tradition of Marxist aesthetic theories: Lukács is specifically concerned to discover how an enlightened, defetishised consciousness can be produced out of the dynamics of an alienated, fetishistic present.

History and Class Consciousness (1919-22) is not Lukács’s first major work. In a number of influential writings, of which perhaps The Theory of the Novel (1917) and Soul and Form (1910) are the better known, Lukács explored the aesthetical/ethical dilemmas which had emerged with the consolidation of bourgeois society in the pre-First World War period. The early writings specifically examined the phenomena of cultural crisis in this society; they focused on the growing alienation of the individual and the loss of meaning in modern life. At this stage, Lukács drew on traditions in German sociology and philosophy which had formulated these questions with the, now, well-known concepts of rationalisation and the dichotomy of Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft.¹ In this period, Lukács vacillated between a profound despair about the possibility of authentic life in bourgeois society and a vague presentiment that the future offered some hopes for an ethical regeneration. Lukács’s despair intensified with the outbreak of the First World War and it was only the October Revolution which revived his hopes and drew him towards a Marxian standpoint.² With this radical shift in perspective, Lukács attempted to recast his earlier preoccupations within a social theory which, seemingly, offered a real hope for the radical overcoming of an alienated existence and the re-establishment of authentic human life.

Lukács describes the general aim of the various essays which make up History and Class Consciousness as an attempt ‘to clarify the theoretical problems of the revolutionary movement’.³ In particular, he endeavours to establish the inadequate theoretical foundations of the 2nd Internationalists’ reformist politics. Far from attempting to locate the revolutionary dynamic within an analysis of the character of the proletariat’s social existence, the theorists of the 2nd International simply derived a conception of the inevitable transition to socialism from an account of the essential laws at work in the economy. According to Lukács: ‘Vulgar marxist economism bases itself on the “natural laws” of economic development which are to bring about this transition by their own impetus.’⁴

Lukács argues that proletarian revolution must be conscious transformation of the existing social order. Unlike the bourgeois revolutions, socialist revolutions cannot be achieved simply through the pursuit of immediate economic interests. Because there is a dialectical separation between its immediate objectives and its ultimate revolutionary goal, the proletariat ‘has been entrusted with the task of transforming society consciously’.⁵ Lukács is specifically interested in discovering the mediations within the proletariat’s immediate class situation for a revolutionary class consciousness.

He suggests that Marx’s totalising methodology establishes a perspective from which empirical consciousness and class position can be drawn into a unity to yield an account of appropriate or imputed consciousness. Lukács describes the notion of imputed class consciousness as follows:

By relating consciousness to the whole of society it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and feelings which men would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess both it and the interests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and the whole structure of society. That is to say, it would be possible to infer the thoughts and feelings appropriate to their objective situation.⁶

In pre-capitalist epochs the question of imputed class consciousness cannot even arise. Since in these earlier societies class interests do not achieve a full economic articulation but are inextricably bound up with political and religious factors, status consciousness prevents the emergence of a class consciousness. In contrast to this, capitalist society abolishes the estates system and organises society along class lines.⁷ For the first time in human history the objective possibility for the emergence of a class consciousness has arisen.

Lukács argues that there is a dialectical relation between the bourgeoisie’s class interests and a class consciousness. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie is faced with the task of organising the whole of society in accordance with its economic interests. Yet, since an understanding of society as a whole would involve a consciousness of the transitory nature of its existence as a class, bourgeois class interest and class consciousness are incompatible. He writes:

On the one hand, capitalism is the first system of production able to achieve a total economic penetration of society, and this implies that in theory the bourgeoisie should be able to progress from this central point to the possession of an (imputed) class consciousness of the whole system of production. On the other hand, the position held by the capitalist class and the interests which determine its actions ensure that it will be unable to control its own system of production even in theory.⁸

Lukács analyses the problem of the overcoming of reified bourgeois consciousness from three different angles. He first examines the character of reified thinking and its foundations in capitalist commodity production. Second, the essay entitled ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ considers the implications of the treatment in German classical philosophy of the subject-object antinomy which characterises reified thinking. Finally he turns to an analysis of the standpoint of the proletariat to establish the practical social conditions under which the proletariat is able to develop a totalising perspective on its empirical false consciousness and its objective class position and to arrive at an imputed revolutionary consciousness.

Lukács’s analysis of reified thinking takes its bearing from Marx’s account of commodity fetishism developed in volume I of Capital. His discussion of reification examines the fetishistic transformation of social relations between people into a system of exchange relations between things which occurs at the level of appearances in capitalist society. Objectively, reification means that the world constructed by humans takes on the appearance of a second nature. From the subjective viewpoint it means that the activity of the producer is turned into something independent from him/her. Lukács describes the fetishistic character of appearance in capitalism thus:

in capitalist society man’s environment, and especially the categories of economics appear to him immediately and necessarily in forms of objectivity which conceal the fact that they are the categories of the relations of men with each other. Instead they appear as things and the relations of things with each other.⁹

In capitalist society social relations assume the false appearance of a second nature. Social relations appear as a natural order regulated according to its own laws. Reified consciousness is, therefore, structured by an antinomial subject-order or freedom-necessity relation. Consciousness assumes the character of a free subjectivity which occupies a contemplative position in relation to the social ‘object’.

While economic crisis cannot itself bring about the collapse of the economic system, it is a situation which causes a practical disruption to the reified subject-object antinomy of bourgeois thought. The economic crisis generates a crisis in the reified notion of a second nature. In times of economic crisis: ‘the pretense that society is regulated by “external iron” laws which branch off into the different special laws applying to particular areas is finally revealed for what it is: a pretense’.¹⁰

For the capitalist, economic crisis is experienced as a period of chaos. The crisis situation forces the dialectical contradiction between the bourgeoisie’s class interests and a class consciousness to a breaking point. In periods of economic crisis the bourgeoisie’s immediate interests demand the suspension of the reified conception of a second nature in order to bring about a conscious regulation of the economic system as a whole. Yet the attainment of a consciousness of its class position would mean the ‘jettisoning of its last theoretical line of defense’.¹¹

The proletariat experiences the ideological dimensions of the economic crisis quite differently. Lukács suggests that a disruption to the reified conception of a second nature appears to the proletariat as ‘the gathering of strength and the springboard to victory’.¹² The disruption to the reified conception of the social order as a natural object is not, however, sufficient to produce a revolutionary situation. The economic crisis only provides the proletariat with a situation of advantage relative to the periods of capitalism’s ‘normal’ functioning. The ability of the working class to assume conscious control over the course of history depends on the specific state of its ‘ideological maturity’.¹³

Lukács argues that an analysis of the dynamics specific to the proletariat’s class situation uncovers the basis within the historical process for the practical overcoming of the reified subject-object antinomy of bourgeois thought. He maintains that, while immediate consciousness is ‘the same’ for both bourgeoisie and proletariat, the different positions which the two classes occupy in the social totality means that reified immediacy is raised to the level of consciousness through ‘specific categories of mediation.’¹⁴ Immediacy for both capitalist and worker is governed by a reified antinomy between the social as a ‘natural’ object and the individual as apparent subject. This reified immediacy is, by virtue of his/her position in the production process, subjectively confirmed for the capitalist. The capitalist’s attempts to calculate and rationalise the state of the market and his/her capacity to exercise choice as a consumer of luxury goods allows him/her to adopt the attitude of a free subject.

The antinomial subject-object relation of reified immediacy is experientially negated by the worker’s position in the production process. There is a definite dialectical contradiction in the class situation of the proletariat between a reified consciousness which affirms the subjectivity of the individual and an actual experience which denies it. For the worker, the freedom of the individual is an objective reality in the sense that he/she is ‘free’ to sell his/her commodity: labour power. Yet in his/her actual life situation, both in the workplace and as a consumer, the worker’s activities are completely externally determined. ‘In every aspect of daily life in which the individual worker imagines himself to be the subject of his own life he finds this to be an illusion that is destroyed by the immediacy of his existence.’¹⁵ Through the act of selling his/her labour-power, the worker integrates him/herself: ‘into a specialized process that has been rationalized and mechanized, a process that he discovers already existing, complete and able to function without him and in which he is no more than a cipher reduced to an abstract and rationalized tool.’¹⁶ Lukács maintains that it is specifically the struggle over the length of the working day which undermines the worker’s sense of the subjectivity of the particular individual. The struggle over the rate of exploitation creates a situation in which the workers can become conscious of the object character of their labour-power. The consciousness of itself as the object of calculation undermines for the proletariat the reified conception of the social as a natural object governed by its own internal laws. Lukács describes the objective change which occurs in the object of knowledge as follows:

The special nature of labour as a commodity which in the absence of this consciousness acts as an unacknowledged driving wheel in the economic process now objectifies itself by means of this consciousness. The specific nature of this kind of commodity has consisted in the fact that beneath the cloak of the thing lay a relation between men, that beneath the quantifying crust there was a qualitative, living core. Now that this core is revealed it becomes possible to recognise the fetish character of every commodity based on the commodity character of labour power: in every case we find its core, the relation between men, entering into the evolution of society.¹⁷

Because proletarian class consciousness involves the transcendence of a reified antinomy between consciousness and its object, it is necessarily a practical consciousness, ‘since consciousness here is not the knowledge of an opposed object but is the self-consciousness of the object the act of consciousness overthrows the objective form of its object’.¹⁸ The dynamics internal to the proletariat’s class situation generate only the objective possibility for a revolutionary consciousness. The proletariat’s conscious assumption of control over the course of human history is not inevitable, ‘the objective evolution could only give the proletariat the opportunity and the necessity to change society. Any transformation can only come about as the product of the-free-action of the proletariat itself.’¹⁹

The problem of the party

There is, as Markus has pointed out, a serious contradiction within Lukács’s account of the mediations within the proletariat’s immediate life situation.²⁰ As we saw above, Lukács maintains that, for the proletariat, reified immediacy, according to which the individual is the social subject, is experientially negated by the worker’s position in the production process. It is, Lukács argues, particularly the situation of economic class struggle which undermines the worker’s reified sense of his/her subjectivity as a particular individual. Here he/she comes to recognise that he/she represents only an object of the capitalist’s calculations. There is, however, a very definite counter-tendency in this situation which serves to shore up the worker’s reified conception of his/her subjectivity. It is precisely the power of luxury co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Lukács: reification and its overcoming
• Part II The role of art in modern capitalism
• Part III Althusserian Marxism and the Problem of Ideological Struggle
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index