Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism

Mark Steven, Mark Steven

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501351129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A concentrated study of the relationships between modernism and transformative left utopianism, this volume provides an introduction to Marx and Marxism for modernists, and an introduction to modernism for Marxists. Its guiding hypothesis is that Marx's writing absorbed the lessons of artistic and cultural modernity as much as his legacy concretely shaped modernism across multiple media.

Part One

Conceptualizing Marx

1

Greek Ideology and Modern Politics in Marx’s First Works

Giacomo Bianchino

Philosophy, like the owl of Minerva, takes flight at the end of the day. There is a pathos for anyone who recognizes the significance of this statement. It takes from each individual thinker the right to the “last word.” Pronouncing the absolute truth of a statement like this means embracing the irony of one’s own finitude. To be Hegelian is to commit absolutely to the reality of a dialectic by which all historical declarations of the absolute eventually become relativized. No less, one would imagine, for the “Master” himself. Ultimately, Hegel would have had to understand that this fate awaited his own “universal” project of thought. His attempts to bring the dialectic to bear on old metaphysical notions revolved around the ways thought can situate itself in the present. Those who adopted the owl as their sigil, then, would do so in permanent reference to the problem of their “modernity.” Only thought that recognized “the philosophy of Hegel . . . has pronounced sentence upon itself” could overcome metaphysical abstraction and make philosophy the act of a historical subject.¹ The pursuit of modernity, insofar as it was taken up by thinkers in the Hegelian aftermath, was the means by which an atmospheric “negativity” was transformed into an active and determinate “negation.”²

Perhaps the most ruthless attempt at situating thought in history came from the youthful works of Karl Marx. As early as 1837, Marx told his father of a felt need to “acquire modernity and the standpoint of the contemporary scientific view.”³ His modernity was an attempt to go beyond metaphysics and to locate himself in the determinate problems of the day. This project was to “discover” its protagonist in the model of the proletariat Marx developed in the years between 1842 and 1845.⁴ The proletarian view, unencumbered by the class interests that constrained bourgeois thought, was Marx’s answer to the problem of modernity. It would take him beyond mere “interpretation” and toward the effort of building a subject capable of “changing” the finite reality in which all subjectivity found itself. It was in the process of elaborating a proletarian view of reality that Marx developed the critical method he would leave to posterity: historical materialism. The realization that economic struggle and not philosophical speculation would liberate humanity drove the young thinker, after 1845, to examine the material conditions of the world. This meant negating the Hegelian edifice to develop a totally situated project: the attempt to determine the forces of production “with the precision of a natural science” and to study the material world “without any foreign admixture.”⁵

It would produce some interesting monsters, then, if we are to ask the literary question of Marx’s primitive modernism. Modernity was, in Marx’s youthful imagination, an entire register of analysis. In fact, the first struggle in Marx’s career was against the “spiritual situation at that time,” whose lyrical mood transformed everything real into “a remote beyond.”⁶ On leaving home, his first “idealistic” attitude produced works of verse and drama. The verse, compiled and sent to Jenny in several volumes, was characterized “by attacks on the present times, by broad and formless feelings thrown together.”⁷ His appetite for modernity, however, prompted the realization that the “complete opposition of what is and what should be” was rhetorical rather than philosophical. This led him to the unforgiving idea that philosophy must be supreme, and “poetry may only and should only be an accompaniment.”⁸

As the “discovery” of Hegel pushed him to “bring genuine pearls into the light of day,” Marx began a short-lived attempt to use literature as a vehicle for philosophical explication.⁹ In his student years, he wrote a long and “forced” comedy on a range of philosophical themes called Scorpio and Felix, and an “unsuccessful . . . fantastic drama” on political romanticism called Oulanem. The last work that can be called properly literary in Marx’s canon is 1837’s Cleanthes, or the Starting Point and Necessary Continuation of Philosophy. Moving beyond the “moonshine” of his early poetry, this defense of the dialectical model of philosophy was cashed out in the form of Greek dialogue, with the stoic Cleanthes as its protagonist. Even as early as this “philosophical dialectical account of divinity and how it manifests itself conceptually, as religion, as nature, and as history,” however, Marx clearly had no scruples sacrificing literary unity to philosophical ambition.¹⁰ His interest in acquiring the “modern scientific view” drove him further from self-conscious poetics to the use of literary flair as pure “accompaniment.”

Marx’s tilt into Hegelianism gave a new set of structures to his developing interest in history. His pursuit of philosophical modernity and his attempt to situate thought in history prompted him to develop an acute and often brutal sense of his own place in history. He found himself in the “iron times” that come after a “great philosophy” has animated the world. In this light, he saw himself chiefly as a “carrier” of the Hegelian sequence, whose role was to make the system “worldly.”¹¹ This project was ultimately informed by precedents he discovered in the proponents of what he called “Greek Enlightenment.”¹² In the late 1830s, Marx began to weave a modern view from the frayed threads of the Greek Fleece he found in the work of the Alexandrian schools of the fourth and third centuries BC. It was in his dissertation, On the Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophies of Nature, that he developed his own model of philosophical history. By focusing on the Hellenistic inheritors of Aristotle, Marx developed original theories about the German interpretation of Hegel. His understanding of the Greek antiquity was thus recoded by the modern parameters of the struggle developing in Germany between the “Left” and “Right” Hegelians. In this way, the ancient world shed light on the current situation, with Marx seeking to provide the conditions under which both were comparable. Epicurus, the “greatest representative” of Greek Enlightenment, had worth for Marx so long as he illuminated the universal conditions of the worldly reception of philosophy.¹³

Marx’s philosophical theory of influence and reception, then, demanded he become a certain kind of reader. As with Epicurus’ critical ingestion of Aristotle, Marx set himself the task of reading reality as if it were an established, Hegelian text. His approach to this text was at times quodlibetarian and at times critical. On the one hand, Marx sought to protect the authorial integrity of the “giant thinker” from the moral reproaches of his critics and followers.¹⁴ Living in the wake of this “master” meant searching for traces of absolute Spirit in history. The irony that Marx recognized better than any other, however, was that this intellectual machinery would eventually claim Hegel as collateral. Moving beyond the German Right’s enthusiasm for “mediocrity” as the “normal manifestation” of absolute Spirit also meant putting everything, including Hegel, in its place.¹⁵

This appetite for the dialectical method of relativizing old absolutes infused Marx’s style of reading with an attitude that can only be called satirical. He himself was aware of the historical necessity of this parodic impulse. In the dissertation, Marx identified both the young Hegelians and the receivers of Aristotle as revellers in a “carnival of philosophy” (Fastnachzeit der Philosophie) that develops after a world-system makes itself “total” and self-sufficient in its own abstraction. In this carnival, philosophy “throws itself on the breast of the world” and seeks to resolve its theoretical issues practically. Having “expanded to be the whole world,” thought now “turns against the world of appearances” to find truth.¹⁶ The Fastnachzeit, literally the Mardi Gras before Lent, allows and requires the total overturning of convention and orthodoxy. It means inverting philosophy’s own preconceptions and evaluating against the reality from which it emerged. It is in the iron time that philosophy itself becomes ironized, transforming its own ambient negativity into an active and subjective process of negation.

The young Marx drew his own critical “modernity” from the “carnival” philosophy of Epicurus. In this conjunction, “objective universality” is transformed into “subjective forms of individual consciousness.”¹⁷ These subjective forms evaluate the majesty of the formal system by their own discrete and concrete needs as individuals. His “ruthless” negative position made Marx a powerful critical reader. But he soon realized that the Epicurean subjectivism was only able to tie itself in contradictions. Marx came to recognize “real and true science” as something that had to constitute itself in a struggle against the view of any individual subject.¹⁸ The attempt to elaborate the philosophical sequence “subjectively” ultimately meant asserting his project’s own finitude and pronouncing sentence on itself. For Marx, acquiring modernity meant moving beyond “philosophy as philosophy” and seeking a model that could be “determined with the precision of natural science.”¹⁹ This pivot toward materialism meant reprising philosophy as just one “ideological form in which men become conscious” of class conflict “and fight it out.”²⁰ The so-called mature Marx is thus born in the assertion of philosophy’s contingency as just one site of the class struggle.

Taking the complexity of the young thinker’s carnivalesque criticism as the starting point, what remains of this chapter traces the explicit movement of the Greek influence in his bildung. The first two sections examine Marx’s development through the analysis of Greek thought in the dissertation. The major problem that emerges from this is the role that the individual subject plays in elaborating the “objective universality” of scientifically-deduced truths. The third section examines Marx’s application of the Epicurean subjectivism to his own time. The inadequacies that he discovered in his attempt at this historical generalization are taken up in the fourth and final section. Here, a new narrative of ideological d...