There have been quite a number of books with the title ‘Marxism and …’, and many of these have investigated the crossing points of Marxism and cultural forms, from Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form to Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism, Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature, John Frow’s Marxism and Literary History and Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg’s Marxism and The Interpretation of Culture. These titles are now all quite old. Many of them were published in the 1970s and 1980s, years when the embers of 1968 and its events continued to glow, if weakly. Through the 1990s Marxism got bashed; it was especially easily mocked once its ‘actually existing’ socialist version was toppled with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Postmodernism made Marxism a dirty word and class struggle a dirty thought and an even dirtier deed. But those days that consigned Marxism to history themselves seem historical now. Signs of a regeneration of Marx and Marxism crop up periodically – how could it be otherwise as analysts seek explanatory modes in a world that, through 15 years of perma-war and the New World Disorder, is deeply riven by strife and struggle? Anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation conceive the world as a totality that needs to be explained and criticised. Marxism, however critically its inheritance is viewed, cannot be overlooked by those who make efforts to provide an analysis and a consequent practice.
Our series ‘Marxism and Culture’ optimistically faces a pessimistic world scenario, confident that the resources of Marxism have much yet to yield, and not least in the cultural field. Our titles investigate Marxism as a method for understanding culture, a mode of probing and explaining. Equally our titles self-reflexively consider Marxism as a historical formation, with differing modulations and resonances across time, that is to say, as something itself to be probed and explained.
The first two books in the series address popular or mass culture. Mike Wayne’s Marxism and Media Studies outlines the resources of Marxist theory for understanding the contemporary mediascape, while also proposing how the academic discipline of Media Studies might be submitted to Marxist analysis. John Roberts’s Philosophizing the Everyday uncovers the revolutionary origins of the philosophical concept of the everyday, recapturing it from a synonymity with banality and ordinariness propounded by theorists in Cultural Studies.
The present volume shifts the attention to ‘high culture’. Taking into its broad scope the insights of a number of key figures in Marxist aesthetics, the volume draws a balance sheet. Marxism’s directedness towards transformation might make it sit uneasily in a discipline which has characteristically been about the analysis of objects that are property, objects that are in many ways related to conservation, tradition, preservation and value in its monetary guise. However, this volume reveals the pertinence of Marxist theory to manifold aspects of the art world: the materiality of art; the art market and the vagaries of value; the art object as locus of ideology; artists, art historians and art critics as classed beings; art and economy; art as commodity; the analogism of form and historical developments. The book’s final chapters weight the analysis towards the moment just prior to ours, with the ascendance of the New Left in Visual Culture Studies. We hope that the research here stimulates further study of the contemporary relevance of Marxism in the field of culture, addressing further themes such as the role of funding and the role of the gallery, questions of recuperation, the demands of technology. We await proposals on these and other themes!