9
Arnold Hauser, Adorno, Lukács and the Ideal Spectator
There are three major philosophical and political figures who thread their presence through the life and work of Arnold Hauser: Marx, Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno. If the first naturally entails the other two, the second clearly stands in conflict with the third; yet as admired friends (for certain periods of Hauser’s life) and intellectual sounding boards, both Lukács and Adorno play significant roles as critical models and supporters. As is well known, Hauser knew Lukács from the time they spent together in the Sunday Circle discussion group in Budapest in 1915–16. Committed to the spiritual regeneration of Hungarian intellectual life, the membership of the group reads like a roll-call of those Hungarian socialists and liberals who were to have such a widespread impact on European culture from the 1920s onwards: Frederick Antal, Karl Mannheim, Ervin Šinko, Emma Ritóok and Béla Bartók amongst others. Lukács was 30 and had already published widely; Hauser was 23 and was only just beginning to think of himself as an art historian. The authority that Lukács had amongst the group was enormous, provoking descriptions of him as the ‘aesthetic Pope’, ‘Saint Lukács’ and even ‘Socrates’ (by Hauser himself).1 After the dissolution of the group, Hauser lectured, along with Lukács, Antal and others at the Free School of Humanities as part of a series organised by the writer Béla Balázs, who was intent on extending the group’s public profile. Whatever hopes the contributors had, though, as regards a new culture of idealism for Hungary were swept away by the impact of the Russian Revolution and the politicisation of Lukács himself, vividly affected in his role as Cultural Commissar during the Hungarian revolution in 1919. As Lukács transformed himself into a figure of action during the 133-day Republic, many of the other Sunday Circle contributors were won to the Revolution and socialist politics.
Hauser was one of these, retaining a view of himself as a critical Marxist throughout his life. As with Lukács, who escaped to Vienna after the counter-revolution, Hauser became an exile. In 1919 he left for Italy and in 1922 moved to Berlin and then in 1925 to Vienna himself, where he remained until 1938. On the eve of the war he left for England, where he established his permanent base and where the majority of his writing on aesthetics and art were published, and where he found part-time employment as a lecturer at Leeds University. In fact, by the time The Social History of Art (1951)2 was published he was approaching 60, revealing a very different career pattern to that of his more famous peers. Indeed, it was a few years after the publication of The Social History of Art that Hauser appears to have been at his most desperate, turning to Adorno, whom he had recently befriended, for help in finding a university job that he believed was commensurate with his abilities and achievements.
Hauser had met Adorno in Frankfurt in January 1954 and from then until the end of the 1950s conducted an extensive (if formal) correspondence, until they fell out.3 However, during this period the two men appeared to be intellectually very close. In fact Adorno and Max Horkheimer praised The Social History of Art highly and invited Hauser to lecture at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. But if academic success had eluded Hauser so far, it was to continue to do so. The early correspondence with Adorno is very poignant in this respect. In January 1954 Adorno recommends Hauser for the vacant chair in sociology at Heidelberg. Nothing materialises. In July Adorno writes to the Free University in Berlin recommending Hauser for the position of professor in philosophy. Nothing materialises. Although obviously disappointed, Hauser’s search for financial security is subtly underlined in the letters by a desire on his part to join Adorno in Frankfurt. This proves impossible in the end but Hauser clearly feels this is where his intellectual home is, or might be at least. In this respect what dominates the early correspondence is a striking mutual flattery in which Hauser unveils his increasing sympathy for Adorno and Adorno praises Hauser without reservation, as if Hauser was desperate to show himself intellectually willing and Adorno was intent on protecting with kindliness what he obviously saw as a very bruised man. In a letter of July 1954 Adorno talks about Hauser’s The Social History of Art as ‘epoch-making’ and one of the most important texts published in ‘our time’ on the science of culture.4 Similarly, in a letter of 13 July he says he is ‘completely engrossed’ in The Social History of Art, and wants to make it his own, ‘eigen ich es mir ganz und gar zu’.5 In a reply on 16 July Hauser refers hopefully, almost gratefully, to ‘the flattering affinity of our thinking’.6
Little of intellectual substance is actually said in this early correspondence, but nevertheless it is clear that despite Adorno’s tone of patrician largesse they shared many points of interest and concern at a time when the Cold War made it difficult to construct any kind of anti-positivist cultural debate on the left. Clearly what attracted Adorno to The Social History of Art was its reinvigoration of a socialised aesthetics in which questions of art’s autonomy could be discussed as a practical problem of social and cultural division rather than merely as a symptom of cultural decline. In this, Hauser’s critical disengagement of the social history of art from a conservative Hegelianised art history (in particular Wöfflin) and a conservative Hegelian Marxism and orthodox Marxism chimed with Adorno’s own concern with an aesthetic theory that was sensitive in non-formalist ways to the particularities of the art object.7 Both Adorno and Hauser pursue a radicalised nominalism grounded in artistic subjectivity rather than a generalised and historicist account of form and style. In short, the study of the modern artwork, of modernism, was shaken free from the amorphousness and abstractedness of academic Hegelianism, orthodox Marxist economism and neo-Kantian formalism.
In the 1940s and 1950s this struggle for the cultural visibility of the artwork ran counter, of course, to the commonsense progressivism of the Stalinised, fellow-traveller left. Both Adorno’s Frankfurt School writings of the 1950s and Hauser’s Social History of Art are embedded in the critique of the ‘vulgar Marxist’ elision of the self-consciousness of the modern artwork with formalism. For Hauser, working in Britain in the 1950s, the continuing force of this verdict on the left is not to be underestimated. In 1950, for instance, Lawrence & Wishart published A.A. Zhdanov’s collection of speeches on culture, On Literature, Music and Philosophy, including the infamous speech he gave at the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 as an intervention into the debate on culture and art. The speeches still make chilling (and bathetic) reading, and show how impacted the cultural debate still was in the communist movement in the 1950s.
Under the slogan of ‘overthrow rotten academicism’ they called for innovation, and this innovation reached its most insane point when a girl, for instance, would be portrayed with one head and forty legs, one eye looking at you and the other end at the North Pole.8
The plays of this Jean Genet are presented with much glitter on the Parisian stage and Jean Genet is showered with invitations to visit America. Such is the ‘last word’ of bourgeois culture. We know from experience of our victory over fascism into what a blind alley idealist philosophy has led whole nations. Now it appears in its new repulsively ugly character which reflect the whole depth, baseness and loathsomeness of the bourgeoisie.9
The rhetoric may be extreme, even for many Party defenders of socialist realism and populism, but the tone of anti-bourgeois vehemence was well rehearsed on the left at the time. Modern art was seen – with the exception perhaps of Picasso’s convergence of history painting and cubism in Guernica – as the reified expression of a bourgeois culture in terminal decline.10 This apocalypticism was reinforced by a popular culture and an academic senior-common-room culture that took modern art to be an elaborate fraud. It is always easy to forget how persecuted modernist art, poetry and theatre actually were in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly in Britain. Moreover, when modernism was defended (within small intellectual circles both inside and outside the world of artistic production) the force of the dominant cultural positivism forced practitioners into highly aestheticised defences of modernist practice, as in Patrick Heron’s critique of John Berger’s social realism in the pages of the New Statesman and Nation and The Twentieth Century. In this sense there was very little space for a social history of art that took aesthetic and extra-aesthetic forms of attention equally seriously. This is why Hauser’s The Social History of Art was so misconstrued by its detractors. On the right, as with Ernst Gombrich for example, it was viewed as an act of cognitive violence against the particularities of the aesthetic, whilst on the left it was felt to be non-committal on what constituted socialist history and cultural practice. Hauser’s critique of the available social traditions of engagement with art was made invisible.11
This lack of a critical audience for Hauser’s work has been perceived as the cost of his exile from a European philosophical tradition which could have sustained and developed his thinking. This was very much the view of Adorno, whose antipathy to Oxbridge empiricism after his brief sojourn in England is well known. But the obvious problems of exile within an antipathetic philosophical culture should not outweigh the more specific ideological entrenchments and reactions of the discipline of art history itself. Hauser was a professional art historian writing art history ‘outside’ of the profession itself. By this I mean that as a sociologist and philosopher of culture working within and against Hegelian Marxism, the connoisseurial verities of official Courtauld/St Andrews art history offered few points of reception. The days when art historians such as Anthony Blunt could write for the Left Review and debate the political implications of contemporary European art were long over. Art history in Britain was in deep ideological retreat: from Hegel, technology, sociology and of course Marxism. The conventional boundaries of the discipline remained firmly, piously intact. Hauser’s identity as a modern European intellectual, therefore, was foreshortened and disparaged by an academic art history that, quite simply, had no workable means of engaging with his terms of reference. For despite the even tone, and its respectful judgements of high culture and the modern literary and artistic canon, The Social History of Art ultimately is out to attack what he sees as the massive bifurcation of art from its public after 1848 and the development of the modern capitalist state. This was not something traditional art history took as having a bearing on matters of aesthetic judgement. Crucial to the concluding volume of The Social History of Art, on nineteenth-century French culture and the origins of modernism, is the fundamental post-Russian Revolution debate on technology, democracy and art. For Hauser, the rise of the modern proletariat, the development of mass means of reproduction and the demand for socialism in France after 1830 go hand in hand with a modern reading public and the possibility of a working-class popular art. From 1830 the serial novel (serialised in newspapers) ‘signifies an unprecedented democratisation of literature and an almost complete reduction of the reading public to one level’.12 As such, it is quite common at this time amongst this incipient critical public for literary judgements to be made from the perspective of topical political and social issues. Indeed, ‘no one is annoyed at seeing art subordinated to political ideals’.13 However, after 1848, with the failure of the bourgeois revolution, the suppression of socialism and the onset of the Bonapartist reaction, modern art became ‘homeless and began to lose all practical function’.14 The Second Empire may be the period of the great naturalists, such as Flaubert, but generally this was a period of popular-cultural decline, a period of ‘bad taste’ and ‘inarticulate trash’.15 Accordingly, the post-1848 period of French culture is also a period of crisis for a popular audience for serious art. With the cultural marginalisation of the naturalists, the possibility of a broad cross-class audience for art that deals with contemporary social issues also declines.
This narrative of art’s public crisis after 1848 is, of course, the great overarching theme which connects Hauser to Lukács, Adorno and the Western Marxist tradition. The sociological details may be different, but the question remains the same: How is it possible for art and literature to produce and sustain a critical public in conditions where looking, reading and learning are manipulated and suppressed by mass entertainment and the seductions of the commodity form? Hauser’s response, however, is different from that of Lukács and Adorno in key respects. For Lukács, as is well known, this crisis represents the triumph of bourgeois reification in the working class and the atomisation of class consciousness. The response of artists, therefore, should be to treat artistic struggles as a direct extension of social struggles. That is, art should situate itself in its struggle for a critical public within the wider struggle between socialism and capitalism. But for Lukács, this is never a matter of presenting ‘correct’ or topical political themes, but of generating a consciousness of capitalism as a totality – hence the importance of literature and realism for Lukács in his war against the effects of social atomisation. For Lukács, the realist novel of the early half of the nineteenth century was the high point of bourgeois cultural achievement, insofar as it was able to create a synoptic view of the struggle between classes as a fictive totalisation of the social world. This novelistic totalisation of the social world was, therefore, a far more progressive form of literary production in a culture where the reification of social relations brought about a fragmentation of social and political consciousness in the working class.16 This is why Lukács was such a fierce critic of modernism and the modern theory of allegory as responses to this crisis (although ironically he treats Benjamin’s sympathetic analysis of Baroque allegory as a confirmation of his own position). Modernism and its allegorical appropriation of the aesthetic fragment denies the typical and ‘destroys the coherence of the world’.17 As a result, it leaves the consciousness of the subjects of the novel in a reified state and prevents the writer from investing the actions of his or her hero with any socially transformative potential. In essence, it confines writers, their subjects and audience to a melancholic world of ‘abstract particularity’.18
With the development of modern competitive capitalism and modern forms of social administration, the attack on ‘abstract particularity’ and the defence of the early bourgeois novel becomes a defence of a classical, ideal public for art in historically unpropitious circumstances. This is because for Lukács the fundamental struggle between capitalism and socialism is also about reclaiming and defending the memory and future possibility of an undivided humanness and creativity, of which the cultural achievements and public virtues of ancient Greece (though not its specific forms) remain a guiding model, as they did for Marx. Lukács’s ideal reader and spectator, therefore, is one for whom the philosophical embodiments of literature and art engage the reader and spectator in a process of intense self-transformation and shared ethical dialogue with others. Moreover, it is only literature and its philosophical criticism which can achieve this, because it involves the reader in sustained critical study. This is why the figure of the critic himself or herself is in fact Lukács’s ideal reader and spectator, someone who is capable of seeing beyond the seductions and thrall of immediate details and sensations to the underlying universal plan or structure. In short, the ideal reader or spectator is Lukács himself; and the Communist Party the place where such readers and spectators might be trained.
This yearning for a lost or muted ideal reader or spectator is also constitutive of Adorno’s post-war aesthetic philosophy. But if the crisis of art’s reception is as vivid in Adorno as in Lukács, it is addressed from an opposing perspective. Adorno may remain committed to the notion of an ideal, trained reader or spectator, but he is absolutely opposed to the historical veracity of achieving this within a classical framework. For Adorno, the crisis of art’s public in the modern epoch is also, at the same time, the release of a multitude of aesthetic subjectivities, which in their autonomy from the state, the Church and political parties, question the very claims to reason and freedom of bourgeois society: ‘by congealing into an entity itself – rather than obeying existing social norms and thus proving itself to be “socially useful” – art criticises society just by being there’.19 ‘In an age of repressive collectivism, the power of resistance to compact majorities resides in the lonely, exposed producer of art.’20 In this light, modernism’s melancholic fragmentation and abstract particularity is divested of its aesthetic insubstantiality to become the very means of resistance to, and self-definition of, the modern itself. Adorno’s defence of modernism is, essentially, a recognition of the overwhelming failure of classical culture to cognise the realities of a divided and unreconciled capitalist world. Hence ugliness and the fragmentary and disaffirmative take on an unprecedented truth content, insofar as they render problematic the self-repression of bourgeois reason and progress. Thus, Adorno’s defence of modernism involves a different sense of philosophical responsibility in the face of the artwork. For Adorno the relationship between ethics and aesthetics does not reside in the execution of a historically proven form which then might sustain a resistance to the forces of anomie and reaction, but in a commitment to the critical transformation of the formal categories of art itself as an ethical ideal. Consequently, if this involves a wider engagement with the problems of modern culture than literature, it also involves a revision of Hegel’s demand that art is in greater need of philosophy under modernity than in antiquity. As Hegel says in the Aesthetics: ‘Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating again, but for knowing philosophically what art is.’21 Hegel’s advance over Kant to an understanding of art as a conceptual and cognitive entity, however, was at the expense of the heterogeneity of the object itself; the artwork was simply the bearer of ‘spirit’ alongside other metaphysical systems, reducing the facticity of each work to the mood of a particular Weltanschauung. Lukács’s philosophical aesthetics is the clear inheritor of the philosophical cognition of the artwork as the embodiment of an external unity. For Adorno, however, such a priorism can only lead to the identity of the thing with its other and thus to a theoretical prejudgement of truth in the name of an abstract and heteronomous truth, as with Lukács’s version of realism against modernism. Adorno’s overriding preoccupation, therefore, was to philosophically reinvent matters of judgement in order that they might be equal to the art of the epoch. This meant re-evaluating the philosophical character of the modern artwork from a non-identitary, negative position. The philosophical truth of the modern artwork lies not in its claims on conceptual access to some notion of the social totality (albeit metaphoric), but through its fragmentary formal identity itself, that is its actual non-reconciliation with social reality. As such, this disaffirmative and non-reconciliatory reading of the art brings to philosophical consciousness a qualitatively different set of demands for the ideal reader and spectator of the modern epoch. For Adorno’s negative Romanticism is principally a commitment to art’s powers of self-transformation.
This means that the ethics of the ideal reader or spectator are, at a fundamental level freed from the political demands and sentiment of class-specific interests. In Adorno, the ideal reader or spectator is first and foremost a defender of the formal qualities of the authentic work of art, and not its would-be radical or partisan content. Indeed, Adorno inverts the terms of engagement of the partisan, calling on the ideal reader or spectator to defend the authentic work of art as a political and class-specific act. Thus, there is a way of reading Adorno’s philosophical aesthetics as reproducing the demands of the ideal classical reader and spectator at a ‘higher’ level, and therefore reformulating the cognitive ambitions of the classical spectator for the modern epoch. But even if this is plausible, Adorno’s reader and spectator imply a quite different understanding of the public domain. Adorno’s radical nominalism, his absolute commitment to looking at the artwork as a source of non-reconcilable particularity, leaves him with little sense of the artwork as a transmittable shared experience. If art is to resist its accommodation to the external forces of instrumental reason it must demand from its interpreters an absolute existential fidelity to the ultimate non-conceptual content of its truth. That is, the interpretation of the work must always accept the limits of any discursive reconstruction of its identity.
For Adorno, then, the crisis of art’s reception in the modern epoch cannot be contested or ameliorated by treating art as a form of social praxis with clearly definable discursive responsibilities to ‘explain’ and ‘educate’. In fact art’s respect for its audience and for human autonomy lies in a refusal to accept the claims of art’s social function. Art respects the masses by opposing what the forces of domination assume the masses deserve. In this sense the artwork acts as a form of remembrance (for a world before domination), rather than as an outright intervention into social reality; art transforms consciousness not by dictating to the reader or spectator the virtue of a particular idea or set of contents, but through the truth of its forms. From this perspective Adorno’s ideal reader or spectator is one who defends the pre-figurative truth of the artwork against the transformation of art into a mere fact or datum of communication. Consequently, Adorno advances an extraordinary reversal in terms for the Marxist understanding of art and its audience under modernity. Adorno’s emphasis upon sustaining the non-reconcilable identity of art produces a radical decentring of art and its readers and spectators from any dialogic encounter with a common culture. Art can only sustain its authenticity by defeating all attempts to render it a readily available, shared experience. In essence, then, the Adornian ideal reader or spectator is one who learns to read the modern work of art closely as a ‘self-enclosed’ and non-communicable experience.
Both Lukács’s and Adorno’s ideal readers and spectators are strong partisan figures, in which are reflected the critical demands of the mass cultural age. In Hauser, by contrast, the ideal reader or spectator is less of an ethically insistent presence and more of a diversified and contingent concept. This is because for Hauser the ‘watershed’ of 1848 and the rise of modern forms of mass communication and administration are not treated as producing an irreconcilable split between art and its possible public. That is, the absence of a ‘unified’ serious public for art after 1848 in France, is not judged as an ideal point of origin that has to be redeemed or matched. Thus the crisis of art’s reception under modernity is less a problem of defining an ideal reader or spectator who can best contest this sense of historical closure, than an opportunity to examine the new diversification of art and its audience. Accordingly, the principle concern of The Social History of Art is how a sociology of art’s institutions might throw light on the adaptation of art to changing social forces and the balance of class power. In this way, Hauser is concerned to rectify what he sees as the failure of historical materialism to trace the interrelations and divisions between high culture and mass culture in ways that avoid the absolutism of a Lukácsian or Adornian position. What preoccupies Hauser, above all else, is to develop a methodology that will address the predicament of art and its public without transforming this predicament into a heteronomous fait accompli. However, this does not mean that Hauser does not share Lukács’ and Adorno’s concern with the derogation and degeneration of aesthetic attention under capitalism, but that this never becomes an issue of epistemological refinement and an ethical burden. For what drives Hauser’s sociology of modernity is a strong version of art as embodied technology. Hence the massive development of the forces of production and radical transformation of the relations of production in the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth is not presented as a narrative of decline for art despite its reifying and atomising effects. Art and technology for Hauser are dialectically inseparable. In this, The Social History of Art as a whole, but particularly the final section of Volume 4, is the first sustained materialist defence of art as technik in an English-speaking art-historical context. As a consequence, it is the first introduction of Benjamin’s theses on technology and art into a British culture dominated – particularly on the left – by romanticised, craft-based notions of skill, popular appeal and aesthetic value. Hauser had read Benjamin’s ‘L’Oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée’ in the 1936 volume of Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, which was the only available publication of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ until the 1960s.22 In Britain in the 1950s Benjamin had little or no audience; his writing wasn’t translated until the late 1960s and early 1970s. This places Hauser’s The Social History of Art in a very privileged position, insofar as he uses Benjamin’s theses on art and technology to divest a theory of cultural crisis of an undifferentiated sense of cultural decline, and therefore, of the ‘primitive’ and nostalgic nostrums which were dominant on both the right and left. As he says in The Social History of Art:
The logical mistake they make [Carlyle, Ruskin, William Morris] consisted in an all too narrow definition of technics, in failing to recognize the technical nature of every… manipulation of things, of every contact with objective reality. Art always makes use of a material, technical, tool-like device, of an appliance, a ‘machine’, and does so so openly that this indirectness and materialism of the means of expression can even be described as one of its most essential characteristics. Art is perhaps altogether the most sensual, the most sensuous ‘expression’ of the human spirit, and already bound as such to something concrete outside itself, to a technique, to an instrument, no matter whether this instrument is a weaver’s loom or a weaving machine, a paint brush or a camera…23
In Britain in the early 1950s this defence of the labour theory of culture was far in advance of any comparable attempt at a sociology of culture, as, for example, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958), which was still attached in many ways to the ‘organicism’ it was critiquing.24 This is because Hauser had a clear understanding of what a defence of the labour theory of culture implied for a defence of cultural democracy. The whole history of industrial art, he argues, can
be represented as the continuous renewal and improvement of the technical means of expression, and when this is developing normally and smoothly, it can be defined as the complete exploitation and control of these means, as the harmonious adjustment of ability and purpose, of the vehicles and content of expression.25
Questions of value in art, therefore, are not compromised by advancements in the technological production of art, but are actually grounded in, and emerge through, this process. Art is simply the description we give to the inseparability of technological prosthesis and human expression. This allows Hauser to base his analysis of modernity and art on an ‘open’ model of communication and the dialogic, rather than on a narrative of redemption as in Adorno and Lukács. Indeed what is remarkable (and some would say highly questionable) about this reading of modernity, in contrast to Adorno’s, is the lack of a grand sense of the loss of historical reason. Unlike Adorno’s sense of the artwork’s necessary culpability in a post-Holocaust world of faded utopias, Hauser’s modernity appears evolutionist and almost sanguine. In the final section of Volume 4 of The Social History of Art, there is some evidence for this in the way the ideological struggles that underwrite the early avant-garde’s anti-capitalism are given a pallid, stylistic treatment. But what Hauser’s sociology loses in its failure to register the darkness and divisions of modernity, it makes up for in its sensitivity to its different publics and the possibility of art’s non-aesthetic intervention into everyday life. In this, Hauser is always acutely aware that the work of art is never just for a subject in the abstract, but part of a wider process of socialisation that can have unpredictable emancipatory effects. Thus he is particularly attuned to those points in the development of mass culture where quantity turns into quality. As he says of Charles Dickens: ‘Dickens penetrates into wider circles than Balzac. With the aid of the cheap monthly instalments, he wins a completely new class for literature, a class of people who had never read novels before.’26 This sense of the expansion of literary and rudimentary cultural skills through the technological impact of mass culture is something that always underscores Hauser’s ideal reader and spectator. Dickens’s novels, for Hauser, may be the work of a petit-bourgeois anti-intellectual with a sentimental attachment to working-class authenticity, but their cognitive complexities and wide range of experiences produced forms of identification and dis-identification which provide scope for increased self-consciousness. As Hauser declares in The Philosophy of Art History (1958): ‘The products of mass culture not only ruin people’s taste [but] also open the eyes of the majority for the first time to fields of life which they never came in contact with before.’27 Now, Adorno might well have been prepared to accept this evaluation, but he would have never justified it as a matter of cultural practice.
It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that Hauser’s reading of modernity in terms of the suppressed communicative potential of art should have been an influence on Peter Bürger’s sociology of the avant-garde and Habermas’s anti-Adornian communicative-action theory. Habermas, like Hauser, takes it as axiomatic that the ‘truths’ of art can be released into everyday experience through rational discussion. As Habermas said in reply to his postmodern critics in the early 1980s:
If aesthetic experience is incorporated into the context of individual life-histories, if it is utilised to illuminate a situation and to throw light on individual life-problems – then art enters into a language game which is no longer that of aesthetic criticism but belongs, rather, to everyday communicative practice.28
However, Hauser does not have a communicative-action theory of art as such, rather, what he does possess is a view of art as a potential discursive force in individual life histories. Thus, although it is important to acknowledge the part Hauser’s sensitivity to the discursive function of art plays in Habermas’s anti-Adornian aesthetic theory, we should also be clear that Hauser is not a precursor or model for Habermas and communicative-action theory. Hauser’s critical relationship to Adorno and Lukács is far more complex and troubled than his development of a dialogic theory of art would suggest. This is overwhelmingly evident in Hauser’s most theoretically ‘dialogic’ text, The Sociology of Art (1982), first published in German in 1974.29 In many respects this is Hauser’s final engagement with orthodox Marxism and the legacy of Adorno and Lukács, and a revision of his more conventional ideal spectator in The Social History of Art. Accordingly he returns to the crucial issues of art’s relationship to ‘knowledge’ and ‘totality’ in order to reposition himself within, and against, Adorno’s and Lukács’s opposing models of the ideal reader and spectator. For Hauser as with Adorno and Lukács, aesthetic evaluation is overwhelmingly an ethical dialogue between the self and the other as a potential mastery over unreason. But Hauser, unlike Adorno and Lukács, sees this as principally a practical category, in which aesthetic judgements and learning are productive forces in the lives of the subject and others. The notion of self-transformation through exposure to the transcendental promise of the artwork – so central, in their respective ways, to both of Adorno’s and Lukács’ models of the ideal reader and spectator – is divested, therefore, of what I would call a submission to the idea of art as ‘other’. The consciousness of the artwork becomes a matter of ‘ordinary’ cognition. However, this is not to confuse matters of practicality with matters of abstract political effectivity or scientific adequacy or any other kind of shibboleth of those keen to elide all mention of knowledge in art with instrumentalism. As Hauser argues:
We try in art, as we do in moral practice and in the individual sciences, to discover the nature of the world with which we have to deal and how we may best survive in it. Works of art are deposits of experiences and are directed, like all cultural achievements, towards practical ends.30
As a source of knowledge, the artwork achieves its ends through the disparate creative and cognitive uses to which it is put in the individual’s own life. As such, its truth relation to the world is not contained in any intellectual transmittance of the truth content of the work of art itself, but in how the content is evaluated and put to work.
‘Truth’ always resides in the work of art. That is it is a law – however, stylised, fantastic, or absurd the structure may be as a whole – the elements from which a work of art is put together derive from the world of experiences and not from a supersensual, supernatural world of ideas.31
The truth content of the artwork, therefore, is identifiable as an ‘intellectual’ experience insofar as it enjoins the reader and spectator in a consciousness of his or her own existence and the existence of others. Art’s importance lies in its ‘participation in the human endeavour to come to terms with reality and survive in the struggle for existence’.32 In this sense, art is always ‘concerned with altering life’ and a means of ‘taking possession of the world’.33
This reader-reception theory of spectatorship is a suggestive response to the problem of art’s social dysfunctionality, because it places the contingent uses of the artwork over and above any abstract ethical defence of the artwork’s formal values. In the 1980s and 1990s this approach became a mainstay of theories of spectatorship of popular culture. The dominant reader or spectator of popular culture is one who treats the form or text as a source from which divergent meanings can be made. As a result there is little or no respect for authorial intentions and the formal integrity of the work. The ‘undisciplined’ reader or spectator takes what is appropriate to his or her own needs and interests, ignoring the contextual meanings in which the work is embedded. Cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s treated this kind of reader or spectator as liberatory in its rejection of the reader or spectator who learns to subordinate his or her interests to the demands of authorial intention.34 For Hauser this would certainly have had a great deal of appeal. Hauser’s ideal reader or spectator is likewise concerned with opening up aesthetic judgement to the evaluations and needs of everyday experience. But Hauser was not strictly writing about the included consumer of popular culture, he was writing about the excluded consumer of art. In this he retains an Adornian and Lukácsian commitment to the artwork as the ever-present reminder of cultural and social division, and therefore not something that is simply assimilable to reader-reception theory. Unlike contemporary cultural-studies theorists, he is opposed to collapsing the ‘ordinary’ user of art into the ‘ordinary’ user of popular culture; art’s truths may have a discursive impact on individual life histories in the way popular culture does on a mass scale, but the apprehension of these truths involves forms of understanding and sensitivity that popular culture cannot afford to countenance in its pursuit of profit, sensation and community.35 In these terms, Hauser’s ideal spectator is an interesting resolution of the class-bound consumer of art. Instead of fighting to defend the idea of aesthetic or proletarian vigilance in matters of aesthetic evaluation, he opens up the educated spectator of art to an extra-aesthetic account of use value. In conditions of mass technological dissemination, the destruction of left-modernism, and the market integration of art, the pursuit of an overweening ideal spectator produces a fantasy of resistance. The production and evaluation of meaning must begin from a sense of art’s historical contingency and, therefore, from the immediate problems of contemporary production and reception. For Hauser, ironically, this has Lukácsian-type ambitions. The contingent conditions of production and reception of the artwork are both permeated by, and reveal, the traces of the social totality. But this knowledge is not, as it is with Lukács, to be sought and channelled self-consciously in any singular practice, which as Adorno identified, reifies the idea of ‘totality’ in Lukács’s aesthetics in the preferred form of the social realist novel. On the contrary this knowledge is to be found in a plurality of forms and activities, and as such recognises that many different kinds of art acquire their value in ‘conjunction with the totality of life’.36 That is, because art is produced out of the struggles and necessities of existence, it is already embedded in the social totality of life.
Interestingly, Hauser calls this ‘activist’ impulse of the artwork realist, taking care to distinguish this concept from any confusion with a vulgar Marxist or conventional stylistic notion of realist aesthetics. This is certainly fortuitous for my broader argument in this essay. Because, as I have argued elsewhere, the importance of Hauser’s contribution to the ‘de(right-wing)-Hegelianisation’ and ‘de-Kantianisation’ of art history and philosophical aesthetics in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s is in his realist insistence on a differentiated and stratified understanding of the crisis of art’s production and reception.37 That is, in rejecting the aestheticism of neo-Kantianism and the philosophical heteronomy of a conservative Hegelian Marxism, Hauser’s turn to sociology owes a significant debt to the realist implications of Marx’s method in the Grundrisse.38 When Marx talks in the Grundrisse about historical materialism as an interrelational approach to individuals and social groups, there is a clear implication that Marxism is not a metatheory, but the explanatory and dialectical setting for interdisciplinary work. All Hauser’s writing from The Social History of Art onwards pursues this interdisciplinary ideal. As he argues in The Philosophy of Art History, the artwork is the outcome of at ‘least three different types of conditions: psychological, sociological and stylistic’.39 Essentially, Hauser’s aim is to break with both empiricism and the reductive materialism of orthodox or vulgar Marxism through an insistence on the multiple mechanisms underlying the production and consumption of art.40 In this regard what was exemplary about Hauser’s writing in the 1950s and 1960s was that it began to analyse the artistic subject, art object and audience as a conceptually distinct, if ontologically related, set of problems. Thus the notion of art’s audience was extracted from the realms of art-historical vagueness to be grounded in specific class and institutional settings, just as the interpretation of the object was divested of pseudo-objectification. The interpretation of art is ‘necessarily involved in [a process of] misrepresentation’.41 Similarly the artistic subject was lifted out of the homogeneity of the precedents of tradition or the ‘constraints of bourgeois society’ to function as an agent of his or her own dissonant and dissident reason. The artist is ‘always creating for himself new possibilities in no way prescribed by his society’,42 what Hauser calls the interrelationship of spontaneity and convention.43 It is a mistake, therefore, to settle for a Hauser who explains the aesthetic reductively in terms of social and material forces.44 On the contrary, Hauser’s achievement, specifically in The Philosophy of Art History and The Sociology of Art, is to treat the question of value in art as a determinate historical and cultural problem without prescribing how this problem might be ‘resolved’ socially and formally. In this, his sensitivity to the necessary self-consciousness of the modern artwork and self-becoming of the artist under the conditions of art’s alienation is Adornian. But in opposition to Adorno, he treats the adverse conditions of modernity as the means through which art’s practical values are to be tested. This makes his sense of the historical bereavement of art weak, but it makes his sense of the contingent dialogic possibilities of art strong. For what remains important about Hauser’s work is its resistance to any theorisation of aesthetic value outside of the concrete realisation of artistic practices and their audiences. As such, if this makes his ‘practical’ ideal spectator less available to defend the achievements of modernist high culture or even the place of art in the revolutionary critique of political economy, it at least allows a more inclusive conversation about the problem of value in art to prevail. And, whatever the limits and fantasy of this ‘inclusion’ might actually mean under current historical conditions, this continues to be the critical horizon of any social and dialectical history of art worthy of the name.