REALISM, TOTALITY AND THE MILITANT CITOYEN

OR, WHAT DOES LUKÁCS HAVE TO DO WITH CONTEMPORARY ART?

Gail Day

The theme of this essay – Georg Lukács and contemporary art – is not the most obvious of subjects, its conjoined terms being deeply incongruous, their contiguity seemingly precluded by his harsh criticisms of aesthetic modernism. Lukács seemed barely able to consider the new literature of his own period; I am merely thinking of the montage practices of the interwar period, not imagining his likely response to the type of art work produced towards the end of his life, let alone subsequently. Moreover, Lukács’s interest in the ‘visual’ arts is limited; when he does address modern art, he often struggles to comprehend it, comparing the paintings of Paul Cézanne unfavourably with those of, for example, Rembrandt.1 Such problems do not apply to Lukács’s most famous interlocutor and critic: we feel we can readily speak of ‘Brecht and contemporary art’, as did the curators of the 2009 Istanbul Biennial, who made Bertolt Brecht, Elizabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill’s ‘What Keeps Mankind Alive?’ from The Threepenny Opera the thread of their selection.2 The problem extends further than questions of Lukács’s aesthetic judgments. There is something of his strong sense of historical evolution and decay, his commitment to ‘the general line of development’, and his untroubled rhetoric of ‘nation’, ‘people’ and ‘masses’ that seems of another time and place. Then there is the humanism of his intellectual universe – albeit one appended to a hard selflessness of one placing himself in the service of the revolution – and his (sometimes quite aggressive) modus operandi in debates. One of the main tasks of this essay is to overcome the (warranted) scepticism prompted by its premise: that Lukács might have something to offer for the critical consideration of art today. Doing so requires looking beyond many received ideas, and, to a degree, demands that we not approach the undertaking by drawing up checklists of where art does or does not match up to Lukács’s strictures. To be clear from the outset: I do not think Lukács would approve of the art I will discuss. The mission is not to establish some notion of ‘Lukácsian art’, nor do I claim that, having been long overlooked by art writers, Lukács actually represents the way forwards for considering contemporary aesthetic practices. My aim is both more modest and perverse. I will suggest that the points of contact between Lukács and visual art today can be found in some unexpected places, often emerging from precisely the type of features that Lukács famously criticized (description, reportage, montage or ‘Brechtian’ modes). In the process, some of the dichotomies for which Lukács is usually known will start to unravel or reverse; another will come to the fore, although this one names a historico-political obstruction that Lukács seeks to dislodge.

I

In discussions of ‘contemporary art’, the category itself has come under increasing scrutiny.3 Is it not, as a number of commentators have suggested, little more than a marketing category devised by the major auction houses? For some time there has been a significant strand of left criticism that has seen in art – and visual art especially – nothing but the marks of ‘the commodity’. This line of critique has become rather too undifferentiated, with all aspects of (non-amateur) artistic production – from open celebrations of conspicuous wealth through to work genuinely seeking radical democratic effect – tarred by the same brush. As one of the theorists known for extending homologies between the commodity-form and cultural forms, Lukács might be understood as a progenitor for such criticism, ‘reification’ having become a dominant motif for the critical common sense of today’s cultural theory (albeit largely by way of simplified versions of ‘the spectacle’, ‘the colonization of everyday life’ or ‘the culture industry’). But over the course of the twentieth century, the sense that came to prevail increasingly lacked commitment to, or faith in, the power and effectivity of agency (whether collective or individual) – influenced by the series of political setbacks and defeats, the compromising of the socialist vision, the collapse of the revolutionary ideal and the associated developments in postwar social and cultural theory. In crucial, if highly attenuated, ways this commitment fundamentally shaped Lukács’s account. For him, criticism of the object is displaced by a notion of criticism in or through human action; this recognition of the dynamic imbrication of subject and object (through a praxis of mutual transformation) underpins his outlook and – despite experiencing some of the setbacks just mentioned – this political philosophy provides resistance to the extending reificatory powers of capital. With this conception, Lukács’s work often meditates upon the gap between Sein (what is) and Sollen (what ‘ought’ to be), the gap between the existing state of things under capitalism and the desired transformation of human social relations. Deriving from his early engagement with Kierkegaard, and inflected by Hegel’s distinction between the real and the rational, this contrast of Sein und Sollen – or, more precisely, the question of how to pass from the former to the latter – was translated into the politicized terms of Marxism, becoming a vital strand in his aesthetic writings on realism. I want to argue that this critical problem returns – in ways caught between subliminal registration and conscious deliberation – for a number of key artists working today.

Prompted by a series of translations in the 1960s and 1970s, the anglophone reception of Lukács was simultaneously a site of his appearance and disappearance. Attention to Lukács epitomized the moment of the New Left, and, as a result, his work also became a central focus of criticism. In the 1970s, radical discourses in art were much influenced by the ‘critique of representation’ that emerged through ‘neo-Brechtian’ film theory (associated in Screen with the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, or Jean-Marie Straub and Daniéle Huillet), and also through approaches to photography and video developed through second-wave conceptual art. This approach was complemented, in subsequent years, by the development of a specifically postmodern interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory.4 Lukács was generally presented as the point of polemical contrast. A critique of Lukácsian realism – along with his suspicion of modernist fragmentation and the methods of reportage – was prominent to these developments (although Lukács’s critics were often prone to conflating his account of bourgeois realism simplistically with Zhdanovist Socialist Realism). These debates still linger and continue to impinge upon the discursive parameters of today’s critical practices.

Yet, since the 1990s, something akin to a realist impulse has re-emerged in artists formed through or informed by these arguments. What has often been referred to as the social or political ‘turn’ in art invites reconsideration of the substance of Lukács’s approach to realism. Even if most artists still prefer to avoid any talk of ‘totality’, the efforts of many practitioners today can be said to aspire to ‘portray’ contemporary social totality. There is no space here to take on debates over ‘relational’ or ‘post-relational’ practices, many of which reject the task of ‘representation’ altogether (let alone that of ‘portrayal’), seeing it as inherently dated and problematic.5 Suffice it to say that whatever the specific line of art-politics preferred, there has emerged, in response to the post-1989 reordering of the world and the extensions of the neoliberal economic sphere, a felt urgency not only to describe, witness or give testimony to the new phase of capital accumulation, but also to account for, analyse, respond to and intervene in it, and to imagine how we might even exceed capital’s social relations. Indeed, even ‘descriptive’ methods of documentary reportage are now being deployed by visual artists towards what we could characterize as explicitly ‘narrative’ ends.

II

1 Allan Sekula, Volunteer Watching, Volunteer Smiling (Isla de Ons, 12/19/02), 2002–3, horizontal diptych, colour photographs, from Black Tide/Marea negra. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Above all it has been Allan Sekula’s work that has been framed as an example of revived ‘critical realism’. The use of the term by the artist himself, and by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who first applied it to Sekula’s practice, is not without a certain irony, one provoked by the need to navigate the legacy of the Brecht–Lukács conjunction – and specifically, to avoid forsaking Brecht’s critique of Lukács in making the critical-realist  claim.6 Nevertheless, the ironic distancing goes only so far: Sekula remains notable for taking seriously the Lukácsian contribution, refusing to duck the concept that leaves so many others uneasy: that of social totality. Especially well versed in debates concerning politicized aesthetics, Sekula seeks to go beyond the historical dichotomy abbreviated by the names ‘Lukács’ and ‘Brecht’, preferring to focus on their common cognitive-aesthetic, or realist, commitment. Already, in the early 1980s, we find Sekula describing his approach as a realism ‘against the grain’ or as ‘a realism not of appearances or social facts but of everyday experience in and against the grip of advanced capitalism’.7 The emphasis here on a ‘realism not of appearances or social facts’ touches on his engagement with Lukács’s critique of immediacy, although photography – as Sekula knows – was fundamentally problematized by this very attribute, figuring in Lukács’s essays adjectivally as a byword for naturalism. (Interestingly, despite their differences, we can find photography serving much the same essential role for Brecht and Adorno.) Sekula’s point, then, is also – and here Benjamin proves important – to challenge the widespread denigration of the photograph and to rescue its critical potentials from a triple problem: the downplaying of photography by the dominant aesthetic discourse; photography’s ‘art-ification’ (prominent from the 1960s and 1970s); and the ‘postmodern’ reaction to these developments. As Sekula argues, photography attracts him, first, because of its ‘unavoidable social referentiality’ – albeit one that needed to be handled with care – and, secondly, by the way the life-world interpellates the photographer as ‘already a social actor’.8 Seeking out a form of ‘extended documentary’, he criticizes the lack of reflexivity to be found in much traditional social documentary.9 However, Sekula also steps back from artistic fascinations with the ‘fatalistic play of quotations and “appropriations” of already existing images’ then current, as well as from approaches that posit the ‘idealist isolation of the “image-world” from its material conditions’.10 With his later projects, such as Fish Story – a large work comprising photographs, diagrams, captions and essays, and around which the claims to ‘critical realism’ congregated – Sekula uses the literal and metaphoric capacities of seafaring to delineate a picture of the modern maritime economy, to reflect on the history of its representations, and to challenge late twentieth-century theoretical preoccupations with digital speed, flows and ‘de-materiality’. Black Tide (2002/3) developed these themes [1].

Similar challenges to an art of (uncritical) appropriation – to the reduction of the ‘image-world’ to something divorced from materiality (or of the world itself to image), and the complacent tendencies within aesthetic self-reflexivity – can be found voiced by a few other artists and film-makers, such as Harun Farocki and Martha Rosler. It has also been picked up, in widely varying ways, by younger practitioners, such as Ursula Biemann, Hito Steyerl and Oliver Ressler. Crucial to this mode of realism is a certain reflexivity about reflexivity, a willingness to subject basic counter-intuitive lessons familiar from modern art or film theory to a more sustained consideration, and a determination to avoid the dangers of aesthetic internalization. In the hands of a number of artists, the distinction between the representation of politics and the politics of representation does not simply lead to the assumed critical superiority of the constructed image, nor does it conclude with a prohibition on representing politics, as it did for so many first-wave neo-Brechtians. Rather, it is taken as an imperative to explore the dialectics of the materiality of the image qua image, of materiality in the image, and the materialism of representation’s own social embeddedness (which would acknowledge the image’s veiling, and the roles of the fetish and ‘real abstraction’ in representation).11

Sekula is especially interested in how photography has a ‘way of suppressing in a static moment its often dialogical social origins’.12 His combinations of texts and images with picture-story formats or slide sequences, then, can be seen not only as efforts to provoke Eisensteinian ‘third meanings’. Nor, following Brecht’s well-known comments that photographs of the AEG or Krupp factories failed to show anything of the social reality of these sites, should we see his work simply as the montagist’s attempt to rectify this problem by constructing something artificial.13 More exactly, Sekula’s strategies should be understood as attempts to release social distillates from their reified suspension, to reactivate something of social process evacuated by the stilling of life (a ‘stilling’ that is not restricted to photography, the time-based work of film or video being equally susceptible to the forces of social hypostasis). We will return to this theme.

III

While generally displaying hostility towards the idea of ‘totality’, contemporary cultural theory has nevertheless translated Lukács’s concept of reification into what might be called (in its derogatory sense) a ‘totalizing’ account in which capital’s power is posited as near universal. This flattened-out account of capitalist reification is the type of argument to which the Russian-based workgroup Chto Delat objects when, in ‘Declarations on Politics, Knowledge and Art’ (and with echoes of Brecht and Leon Trotsky), its members assert that ‘capitalism is not a totality’.14 Naturally, much turns here on how ‘totality’ is conceived. It is certainly possible to accept the idea that capitalism is a totality – that is, to disagree with the statement offered by Chto Delat – while still sharing the intended challenge to its widespread conceptualization as closed and undifferentiated, and – crucially – as a seamless unity beyond contestation.

In ‘Realism in the Balance’ (1938), Lukács argues that the world market of capitalism presents us with the most totalized social form to date.15 It was a point he had been making since the early 1920s, and it did not mean that he conceived capitalism as all-powerful or as non-contradictory. Rather, he saw himself as reiterating Marx and Engels in describing capitalism’s unique integration of political, economic and social aspects of life, and also, as he puts it, the way capital is a force that ‘permeates the spatiotemporal character of phenomena’.16 An additional dynamic to the 1938 discussion was introduced by Ernst Bloch, who accused Lukács of adhering to an outdated classicalidealist conception of reality as cohesive and unified.17 In response, Lukács distinguishes the harmonious totality of classical idealism from the unified-and-fragmentary totality (contradictory unity) of the globalized market economy. But as Lukács emphasizes, their dispute did not essentially concern the analysis of socioeconomic or historical features, but was philosophical in character; that is, their difference was over the way thought – and specifically, dialectical thought – engages with the surrounding reality.18

We can glimpse here some of the complexity to Lukács’s conceptualization of totality. It is customary to distinguish neo-Kantian, Hegelian and Marxist phases to Lukács’s thought, and, further, to demarcate within the latter the more ‘political’ essays of the 1920s from the ‘aesthetic’ work that dominated subsequent years. While there are some important changes to the way he contextualizes totality and weights it, there is nevertheless a remarkable consistency to his approach from The Theory of the Novel onwards.19 Totality is characterized most succinctly by Lukács himself as ‘a structured and historically determined overall complex’, albeit one that needs to be grasped dynamically (as concrete unity, and as both systematic and historically relative).20 At different moments, totality is used to refer to the external world, to thought’s hold on that world, to the subject’s action upon the world, to artistic representation as such or to the ways art relates to the world (structurally, or in terms of its representational relation to the world, as both form and content). In The Theory of the Novel – where the concept of capitalism is still only implicit – we find allusions to the lost ‘spontaneous totality of being’,21 the ‘spontaneously rounded, sensuously present totality’22 or the epic’s ‘extensive totality of life’,23 as well as the limitless ‘real totality’ of our world,24 which is contrasted to, and contained by, the ‘created’ or ‘constructed totality’ of the novel.25 In his political essays – ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’ (1919), ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’ (1921) and ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ (1923) – Lukács alludes to the ‘totality of the process’ to which political action must relate (the larger historical perspective he demands of the proletarian movement);26 the knowable totality and the totality to be known;27 totality of the object and the totality of the subject.28 Different classes are also understood to constitute totalities.29 Totality is a point of view;30 it is both a ‘conceptual reproduction of reality’31 and an act of knowledge formation, a necessary presupposition for understanding reality;32 it features as the historical process33 or the social process.34 Moreover, as Lukács later insists in ‘Realism in the Balance’, the ways in which totality appears to us are contradictory: when capitalism is relatively stable, it is experienced partially and yet people assume it to be ‘total’; conversely, in the midst of crises, when the totality asserts itself, it seems as if the whole had disintegrated.35 Totality appears simultaneously as fragment and whole, but does so disjointedly and unevenly.

Totality is not to be taken as something ‘out there’ bearing down upon us and yet beyond our ken.36 Despite its considerable weightiness in Lukács’s writing, the concept is surprisingly modest in what it performs; it simply demands that we consider the interrelations and interactions between different phenomena, that we relate the parts to the whole – and that we conceive these parts – the whole and all their relations – as mutable, as both materially constraining and subject to human actions. For Lukács, the category of totality is the crux of dialectical methodology and central to Marx’s own analysis. The late-twentieth-century anxiety that has come to be associated with the impossibility of understanding or representing totality (a view disseminated especially by Fredric Jameson) is absent in Lukács’s writings. It is not that the question of totality’s unreachableness is unacknowledged, but rather that this impossibility of grasping its entirety is treated by Lukács as little more than a banal truism, or, worse, as a weak way to think. Essentially, Lukács’s sense of the modern world is one of a permanently open totality, yet one that is not conceived as some free-flowing vitalistic flux, but as subject to specific determinations, resistances, concretizations and actions. Already in The Theory of the Novel, Lukács outlines how our access to totality has lost the self-sufficient immanence that characterized the world of the ancients (where the ‘totality of being’ is described as symbiotic and seamlessly connected with the epic form);37 thenceforth humanity faces an ‘endless path of an approximation that is never fully accomplished’ and will ‘always be incomplete’.38 This characterization translates in his early Marxist essays into the ‘aspiration towards totality’, where our task is not to attempt to grasp the ‘plenitude of the totality’ but rather to think from totality’s point of view (that is, to conceive ourselves as a vector in, and as subject and object of, the historical process).39 This attitude is echoed yet again in his later essays on critical realism in art, where he is fairly scornful about literary efforts ‘to portray the totality of a society in’, as he puts it, ‘the crude sense of the word’.40 Advanced artists, he argues, are committed to ‘the ambition to portray the social whole’, but since the object before them is an ever-changing ‘infinite reality’ that they ‘cannot exhaust’, the exploration of totality’s substance has to be ‘active, unceasing’, the results only ever an approximation.41 The ‘ideal of totality’ in art should not be understood as a fixed sight or yardstick, but grasped as a fluid ‘guiding principle’.42 In any case, he suggests, art best approaches the question of totality through intensive rather than extensive means; by, for example, addressing ‘a particular segment of life’.43 What he calls the ‘mere extensive totality’ is taken to be typical of that ‘crude’ understanding to which he objects.44 Thus, the partial perspectives prevalent in many recent art works are no reason per se to see them as inherently antipathetic to Lukács’s arguments. Rather, the question to consider is whether their limited scope provides a positive focus for reflection, or whether they fail by dissolving into mere partiality. The outlook here can be compared to a point made in his 1921 essay on Rosa Luxemburg (his immediate topic here being political, rather than aesthetic, praxis). Attention to the isolated parts of a phenomenon is not the problem; ‘what is decisive’, Lukács argues, is whether those parts are conceived as interconnected with one another and integrated within a totality, whether addressing them in isolation serves to understand the whole (or, on the contrary, if it remains an ‘autonomous’ end in itself).45 We can observe that in recent art works the facets of current reality explored rarely rest solely in their particularities – certainly not for any intelligent viewer; instead, they escalate their scale of bearing, serving as ‘aspects’.

IV

Insufficient attention has been paid to the fact that Lukács takes Socialist Realism to be only a potential aesthetic.46 Given that Socialist Realism had already held official status for some twenty years when Lukács made this remark in 1956, his perspective should give us pause.47 At one level, he was marking his distance from the legacy of Zhdanovism, but the allegoresis of Lukács’s essays – as veiled critique of the narrowing horizons of Soviet Socialist Realism and of Stalinist politics and culture – is just a part of what is going on. Centrally at stake is the question of social transitivity, a topic that is often lodged under terms such as ‘the inner poetry of life’ or ‘the poetry of things’, by which Lukács seems to mean the activities and struggles of human relations.48 His contrasting figure is that of ‘still lives’, an expression encompassing both the rigidities of reified forms and the failure of social agents to act within and upon the world (the paralysis of social life itself, akin to Sartre’s dead totalities, or to Marx’s account of the power of dead over living labour). We find ‘still lives’ at various levels: there are, of course, the ‘still lives’ of individual characters; but we also find the ‘still lives’ of a plot-as-plot or the stilling of the genre of the Bildungsroman. (Cézanne’s portraits – specifically his paintings of people, rather than his paintings of nature morte – are also seen as ‘still lives’.) Ultimately, the category of ‘still lives’ even comes to characterize the approach he supports, insinuating itself into the very modality of bourgeois critical realism. Increasingly, Lukács identifies a stilling of lives in his most favoured art works. Nineteenth-century naturalism comes to be understood not so much as the external ‘other’ to realism – ‘the conflict between realism and naturalism’ described by Lukács in 194849 – but as realism’s own immanent reduction. Most interestingly, by 1956, the problem of ‘still lives’ is used to characterize a situation between, on the one hand, a critical realism that Lukács finds to be ever more stalled, and on the other, the socialist realism that is yet to be actualized.

2 Allan Sekula, Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black], 1999–2000, single slide from 14-minute continuous sequence. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Thomas Mann’s work was taken to be exemplary of critical realism (and of its internal limits), forming the subject of one of Lukács’s most admired essays – ‘In Search of Bourgeois Man’ – prepared in the mid-1940s.50 Mann’s work, Lukács believes, had drawn progressively closer to socialism, but because German culture lacked traditions comparable to the militant citoyen or to the Russian grazhdanin, Mann’s ‘search for bourgeois man’ – that is, his efforts to grasp bourgeois social totality – remained unrealized; the ability to understand the world more fully required a commitment to practical action within it. The militant invoked in Lukács’s discussion of Mann, then, might be understood simply as a literary protagonist, or as the problem of Mann the artist, but it is important to recognize how the militant citoyen acquires a more extended role in Lukács’s argument, featuring as a moment of social process and as the condition for transitivity. Indeed, we find Lukács making the essential point already in the early 1920s: ‘The totality of an object’, he argues, ‘can only be posited if the positing subject is itself a totality.’51 While it may come as little surprise to encounter this argument in History and Class Consciousness, it might be less expected of his later writings on realism; yet the subject that posits itself as a totality is here being reworked through the idea of the militant citoyen. Returning to contemporary anxieties over the unattainability of totality, we can note that the central problem resides, not, as so often assumed, with the unprecedented complexity of today’s world or with the reification of life; nor does it really concern the difficulties of depicting or representing that totality. Rather, our confrontation with the question of totality – even our efforts to delineate its mere outlines descriptively – is inseparable from, dependent on, the subject’s claim upon, and to, totality. What we find surfacing in Lukács’s study of Mann, then, is no simple defence and celebration of critical realism, but rather a probing of its connection to, and limitations for, social transitivity.

3 Radek Community, still from Manifestations, 2001, video of Moscow action. Photo: courtesy of Petr Bystrov on behalf of the artists.

V

A significant stream of art today explicitly commits itself to the figure of the militant (as often militants sans papiers as citoyens). The protestors and syndicalists who feature in Sekula’s photo sequence of the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, Waiting for Tear Gas [2] and in his video essay Lottery of the Sea (2006) would be obvious examples (not just by way of representation – the figurative inclusion of the militant in the work – but also through embodiment in the rejection of the techniques and subjectpositioning of professional photojournalism).52 In videos such as Venezuela from Below (2004), Five Factories (2006) or Comuna under Construction (2010), Oliver Ressler and Dario Azzellini explore the role of workers’ councils or community-based organizers building participatory democracy through the Bolivarian revolution. Taking a different approach, the now-disbanded Radek Community [3] staged demonstrations at a Moscow junction, bearing red flags and banners with slogans such as the World Social Forum’s ‘Another World is Possible’ and appropriating the rush-hour crowds assembling to cross the road. As the lights change, the insignia of protest unfurl. Resonant with the history of representations of revolutionary masses (from early Soviet newsreels to Sergei Eisenstein’s restaging of 1917), the work is laden with a Dada-Situationist humour and pathos. Such resonances highlight the historical absence of the grazhdanin, and yet the work resists full melancholic immersion (although this, in turn, forces further reflection on avant-gardism-as-vanguardism or -as-voluntarism, and on art’s relations with social transformation – indeed, it is this oscillation that is interesting).

4 Chto Delat, still from Partisan Songspiel: A Belgrade Story, 2009, video. Photo: courtesy of the artists.

The Radeks are named after the left councilist Karl Radek;53 similarly, the words Chto Delat? – What is to be done? – recall both the nineteenth-century novel by Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Lenin’s famous 1902 pamphlet on the tasks of political organization. Both groups have produced works that take us to the point where we must consider not just their open political contents, but the very links between aesthetics and politics. Chronicles of Perestroika (2008) by Dmitry Vilensky, a member of Chto Delat, assembles documentary footage of mass gatherings in Saint Petersburg between 1987 and 1991. Accompanied by Mikhail Krutik’s score, reminiscent of the music of silent cinema, this short film draws forth a triple historical comparison and complex set of hopes, disappointments – and reminders. In Partisan Songspiel: A Belgrade Story [4], a scripted video performance operates as a morality play in which a monument to the Yugoslav partisans comes to life as chorus and serves as counterpoint to the four main characters (the Worker, the Lesbian, a Romany Woman and an Injured War Veteran). Despite suffering similarly at the hands of neoliberal repression (personified by a business leader, a city politician, a war profiteer and their bodyguards), and despite expressing some partial empathy for one another’s plight (each taking turn to tell us the life story of another), the oppressed types are unable to overcome their local interests and social prejudices to achieve solidarity. The statue-chorus is both classic meta-commentary and political conscience, pointing to what has been forgotten and what, in our aspirations for a better future, is being politically overlooked. In Builders [5] – a video work composed primarily of a sequence of stills in which members of Chto Delat appear together in various affable interactions on a low wall – the voice-over dialogue reflects on their varying attitudes towards the late Socialist Realist painting The Builders of Bratsk (1960–1) – sometimes known as They Built Bratsk Hydro-Electric Power Station or Constructors of the Bratsk Hydropower Station – by Viktor E. Popkov, and offers further observations on unity and organization in the present.54 Eventually acquiring the collective form and postures of Popkov’s assembly, Chto Delat constructs a tableau vivant (a quintessential allegorical form); however, this animation of Popkov is paradoxically frozen (and stilled photographically). An aesthetic-political aporia (both a circumscription by ‘art’ and an injunction to exceed its limits) unfolds through a number of tensions: the painting and its restaging; the world built by Popkov’s figures and the future being invoked by Chto Delat; worker-builders represented in art, artist-constructors taking their places; the initial appearance of some casual flash-lit snapshots of friends larking about at night contrasting with a deliberately managed set echoing the devices of the canvas (the wall, the darkened background, the sharp lighting of the figures); jumps in the sequence of fixed shots contrasting with the continuity of dialogue. Mimesis is not here a passive reflection but a conscious act of making (as if to reclaim or recoup the originary magic).

5 Chto Delat, still from Builders, 2004, video. Photo: courtesy of the artists.

6 Freee, Protest is Beautiful, 2007, billboard poster. Photo: courtesy of the artists.

This intransitive circling – with its aesthetic and political dimensions – dramatizes a dominant problematic of recent art, which might be understood as the difficulties of direct commensuration, and the troubles of relaying, between aesthetics and politics as such. The problem is at once internalized by the work and resisted. It is registered in, for example, the knowing efforts of Chto Delat to stage occupations of the role of the militant citoyen or Radek Community’s attempt to ‘force’ its representation. Sometimes it is embedded in tropes, as in Sekula’s Lottery of the Sea, where the accumulation of the metaphors ‘from below’ and ‘linking’, on one hand, and the unleashing of ‘linking’ as metonyms and associative chains, on the other, begin to imply models of social transformation: ways of emerging, anticipating, organizing and breaking through political and social impasse. And what is mourned in Freee’s Protest is Beautiful [6]? Political dissent, the aestheticization and commodification of rebellion (Freee’s works often take the form of billboards, advertising slogans, posters or shop signs), or the way the aesthetic repeatedly circumscribes the political aspirations in art – what has been called its ‘Midas touch’?55 It would be fatuous to hold artists to account for the intransitive situation. That their work addresses these problems – absorbing them as themes (explicitly and implicitly), or registering them more structurally, while pushing the issues to their limits, even if voluntaristically – seems significant enough.56

VI

While much recent art has dispensed with the experiencing humanist self as its subject, and would therefore seem light years from Lukács, its own ‘predicaments’ and ‘dilemmas’ turn on this same pursuit of the functional role of the militant citoyen/sans papiers. As noted earlier, in Lukács’s account, ‘still life’ finally comes to characterize the hiatus reached by bourgeois critical realism, its inability – as he sees in Mann’s work – to progress beyond a certain point, and to pass from advanced forms of bourgeois to a fully socialist realism (the latter understood as something more complex than the phenomenon claiming the designation). However, it is vital to recognize the extent to which this impasse was also pressured from the other side, by the difficulty of connecting to the conditions for this socialist-realism-still-to-come, a socialist form of realism that could ward off the contingent pressures of the Zhdanovist legacy and inherit instead those qualities Lukács valued in critical realism. There was thus a gap between the present state of things and the desired future: the incapacity of the present to deliver the socialist future, of course, but, more critically, a lack of tangible ‘feelers’ that might connect Sein to Sollen, and that might endow Sollen with more than just an abstract disposition. The problem of intransitivity was there for Lukács too: his withdrawal from political debate after 1930 should be seen not merely as a retreat into aesthetic issues, but as an intensification of political questions within his reflections on art – as nothing less than the politicization of narrative and aesthetic quandaries.57 Unlike Mann, the artists briefly considered here are explicitly committed to the projects of social emancipation, although they find themselves in circumstances where the prospects for realization seem far more uncertain. And so we find much recent art living out a problem noted by Lukács in The Theory of the Novel: the need to navigate the gap between the intelligible ‘I’ of the novel’s protagonist and the empirical ‘I’ – roughly, between ‘art’ and ‘life’.58 Lukács understands this difficulty as emerging not simply from the distance between Sein and Sollen, but from their hypostatization – a reification of difference into opposition, a reified stilling of both historical time and dialectical temporality. The bifurcation of these two ‘I’s is attributed to the introjection of this hypostatization within Sollen itself.59 An inflection on this subject resurfaces in his disagreements with Adorno – for example, in ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, one of Lukács’s least propitious essays from the 1950s – where he raises the problem of the fissure between concrete and abstract possibility.60 And we can see its force working through the art works considered. Through their efforts to make raids on the structural function of the ‘militant’, to seize hold of its fantasized forms, to reanimate its legacies afresh, or to embed its motive forces in tropic meditations, the frequent summoning of the figure of social agency by some of the most compelling artists working today vividly presents the critical dilemma that Lukács’s writing confronted: the problem of Sollen becoming an abstract claim; the imperative to make it over into a dynamic force for praxis, a desire seeking to create the possibilities for its realization; the urgency to retrieve Sollen from its reduction to no more than a utopic placeholder or protected space for critical thought. Whatever Lukács’s drawbacks, his reflections offer important delineations of challenges now facing us even more acutely, and an example of how emancipatory ambitions refract through aesthetic-political mediations.

This essay first appeared in Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall (eds.), Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence – Aesthetics, Politics, Literature (Continuum: New York and London, 2011). The author and editors of this volume would like to express their thanks to the artists discussed for their generosity in providing photographs of their work and permission to reproduce them.

1 Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic, trans. A. D. Kahn (Merlin Press: London, 1973), p. 138.

2 See What, How, Whom, What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Texts (İstanbul Kültür Sanat Vakfi: Istanbul, 2009). Brecht’s relation to modern art was complex, and was certainly not as straightforwardly affirmative as is often suggested by debates that pit him against Lukács.

3 See, for example, the special edition of October entitled ‘Questionnaire on “The Contemporary”’ (October, vol. 130 [Fall 2009], pp. 3–124).

4 I address the problems with the postmodern interpretation of Benjamin in ‘Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 22, no. 1 (1999) and Dialectical Passions: Negation and Postwar Art Theory (Columbia University Press: New York, 2010).

5 Interestingly, the relational emphasis on ‘experience’ and ‘involvement’ comes close to Lukács’s category of ‘portrayal’ through ‘narrative’ (as opposed to ‘description’ and spectatorial distance).

6 See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Allan Sekula: Photography between Discourse and Document’, in Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Richter Verlag: Rotterdam and Düsseldorf, 1995); also Hilde Van Gelder (ed.), Constantin Meunier: A Dialogue with Allan Sekula (Leuven University Press: Leuven, 2005) and Jan Baetens and Hilde Van Gelder (eds.), Critical Realism in Contemporary Art: Around Allan Sekula’s Photography (Leuven University Press: Leuven, 2006).

7 Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design: Halifax, 1984), p. x.

8 Ibid., p. ix.

9 Ibid., p. x.

10 Ibid., p. xii.

11 Approaches vary considerably. If Steyerl holds to the politics of representation (and for her, the ‘politics’ in this phrase remains vital), Ressler is prepared to argue for the dissolution of highly reflexive practice into an approach that reclaims the powers of the document: Oliver Ressler, ‘Approaches to Future Alternative Societies’, interview by Zanny Begg, <http://www.ressler.at/approaches-to-future-alternative-societies/>, accessed 29 September 2013. Nevertheless, their difference needs to be grasped not as dichotomous, but as a tensile distinction.

12 Sekula, Photography Against the Grain, op. cit., p. x.

13 Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Threepenny Lawsuit’, in Marc Silberman (ed. and trans.), Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio (Methuen: London, 2000), p. 165. The comments are mostly encountered in Walter Benjamin’s quotation of Brecht: Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, in Selected Writings, vol. 2 (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999), p. 526. In a manuscript entitled ‘No Insight through Photography’, Brecht attributes the argument to Fritz Sternberg, but this time the reference is to a photograph of the Ford factory (Brecht, ‘No Insight through Photography [c. 1930], in Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio, p. 144). See also David Cunningham, ‘Capitalist and Bourgeois Epic: Lukács, Abstraction and the Novel’, in Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall (eds.), Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence – Aesthetics, Politics, Literature (Continuum: New York and London, 2011).

14 Chto Delat, ‘Declaration on Knowledge, Politics and Art’, in Chto Delat? special issue, ‘When Artists Struggle Together’ (2008). <http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=494&Itemid=233&lang=en>, accessed 26 September 2013.

15 Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics (New Left Books: London, 1977), p. 21.

16 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Merlin Press: London, 1971), p. 23.

17 Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., pp. 16–27. Bloch, of course, was defending Expressionism. In the cultural field more generally, however, his characterization of Lukács has stuck firm.

18 Ibid., p. 31.

19 The ‘Hegelianism’ of The Theory of the Novel has to be understood carefully: its account of the modern period, and of the novel as its form, is reminiscent of the dynamics described by Hegel’s unhappy consciousness (but it is not Hegelian in failing to progress beyond this aporetic stage). Unlike Hegel’s, Lukács’s account of alienation is historical and distinguished from objectification.

20 Cited in István Mészáros, ‘Totality’, in Tom Bottomore (ed.), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Blackwell: London, 1983), p. 479. Mészáros’s reference is to Lukács, A marxista filosófia feladatai az ui demokráciában (The tasks of Marxist philosophy in the new democracy) (Székesfóvárosi Irodalmr Intézet: Budapest, 1948).

21 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971), p. 38.

22 Ibid., p. 46.

23 Ibid., p. 56.

24 Ibid., p. 54.

25 Ibid., pp. 38, 54.

26 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 198.

27 Ibid., p. 39.

28 Ibid., p. 28.

29 Ibid., p. 28–9.

30 Ibid., pp. 20, 27, 29.

31 Ibid., p. 10.

32 Ibid., p. 21–2.

33 Ibid., p. 24.

34 Ibid., p. 22.

35 Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., p. 32.

36 Note Lukács’s insistence in ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’: ‘We repeat: the category of totality does not reduce its various elements to an undifferentiated uniformity, to identity. The apparent independence and autonomy which they possess in the capitalist system of production is an illusion only in so far as they are involved in a dynamic dialectical relationship with one another and can be thought of as the dynamic dialectical aspects of an equally dynamic and dialectical whole.’ Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., pp. 12–13.

37 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, op. cit., pp. 34–9.

38 Ibid., p. 34.

39 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 198.

40 Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. J. and N. Mander (Merlin Press: London, 1963), p. 99.

41 Ibid., pp. 97–8, 99, 100.

42 Ibid., p. 100.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 28. Lukács’s outlook might be compared and contrasted with that of Adorno, who argued in his 1931 lecture that ‘the mind is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality’. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, Telos, no. 31 (Spring 1977), p. 133.

46 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, op. cit., pp. 96, 115. This found an interesting reprise in the 1980s with Jameson’s project of ‘cognitive mapping’: it too was a hypothesis awaiting – without any guarantee – its realization. See Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1988).

47 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, op. cit., p. 96.

48 Lukács, Writer and Critic, op. cit., pp. 126, 136.

49 Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and others, trans. E. Bone (Merlin Press: London, 2002), p. 5.

50 Georg Lukács, Essays on Thomas Mann (Merlin Press: London, 1964), pp. 13–46.

51 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 28.

52 For an extended discussion of photographic representations of protest, see Steve Edwards, ‘Commons and Crowds: Figuring Photography from Above and Below’, Third Text, vol. 23, no. 4 (2009), pp. 447–64.

53 Karl Radek was secretary for the executive of the Communist International, supported the Left Opposition from 1924 to 1929, and died in a Russian camp in 1939.

54 Popkov’s painting (oil on canvas, 183 × 300 cm, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) is associated with the period of the Krushchev ‘thaw’, and, in the artist’s career, as an example of Popkov’s ‘severe style’.

55 Peter Bürger, ‘Aporias of Modern Aesthetics’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds.), Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics (ICA: London, 1991), p. 14.

56 As Sekula noted in an essay from 1976–8, a ‘didactic and critical representation’ is a necessary part of, but will not be sufficient for, social transformation: for that, a ‘larger, encompassing praxis is necessary’. Sekula, Photography Against the Grain, op. cit., 75.

57 Mészáros is particularly attuned to this continuity; see István Mészáros, Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic (Merlin Press: London, 1972). See also Jameson’s comment that Lukács’s political theories were essentially aesthetic or narrative: Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1971), pp. 163, 190.

58 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, op. cit., p. 48.

59 Ibid.

60 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, op. cit., p. 21ff. This is discussed in more detail in Day, Dialectical Passions, op. cit. The ‘feelers’ mentioned earlier in the paragraph derive from Adorno’s intervention.