Few would deny that the work of the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács was central to the thinking of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. His 1923 masterwork History and Class Consciousness is one of the Ur-texts of the movement and of the era in general. One certainly hears less about his essay “The Old Culture and the New Culture” from 1919. However, this essay played a very interesting and complicated role in the development of New Left thought in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in its reception in mid-1970s socialist Hungary. In what follows, I will concentrate on the initial reception and perception of Lukács by the New Left, focusing on one of the movement’s leading West German thinkers, Hans Magnus Enzensberger. I will argue that Enzensberger’s reading of Lukács informed the (semi-)official reception of Western New Left thinking in Cold War Hungary, and suggest that the (ab)use of Lukács’s thought that characterizes this process of reception also contributed—if in a subtle way that is almost impossible to textually document—to the initial theorizing of the function, nature, and practice of underground publishing (i.e., samizdat).1
Cold War Exchanges
In the early 1970s, during a relatively liberal era in Hungary, a book project was proposed by the publishing house most closely associated with the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party.2 This anthology was designed to introduce contemporary West European and North American New Left thinking to the public. György Dalos, a writer, translator, and oppositional intellectual was contacted and asked to cover the German language material for the project. He happily accepted the offer and set to work on the selection and translation of texts.
In his work, Dalos relied on an earlier inspiration. In May 1970 he had met Hans Magnus Enzensberger, at an international conference of poets in Budapest. At that meeting, Enzensberger handed a copy of the most recent issue of his journal Kursbuch to the young Hungarian poet, and Dalos was so impressed that he became an avid reader of the periodical which, despite its theoretical-political orientation, was available in the library of the Hungarian Association of Writers. Upon considering the possible texts for the book project, he remembered an essay by the editor of the journal, Enzensberger himself. This essay, entitled “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” was an example of radical, New Left media theory, and it was also critical of Lukács.3
Dalos’s story is an instance of the traffic of people, ideas, and texts between East and West in the Cold War era, and an example of the now widely recognized porousness of the Iron Curtain,4 which was not as hermetically sealed a dividing line as Cold War studies have traditionally led us to believe. The episode above also illustrates the surprising and coincidental nature of events in such exchanges. A young,5 unknown Hungarian poet, writer and anti-establishment intellectual, György Dalos, had the opportunity to meet Enzensberger, West German public intellectual par excellence, just two years after Dalos was sentenced to suspended imprisonment because of his role in an “extreme left” student organization, lost his job, and was banned from publishing and traveling. He was released following the intervention of none other than György Lukács. No less surprising might be the fact that the German intellectual could freely distribute copies of his very influential journal Kursbuch, a “mandatory reading for the [student] movement of 1968.”6 And it is an equally unexpected turn of events to find that shortly after all this, the Hungarian poet was offered work by the publishing house of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, and entrusted with the selection and translation of New Left texts.
There were other, related events involving Dalos, Lukács and other members of their circles that offer further examples of the fascinatingly complex history of the late 1960s and early 1970s Hungarian (oppositional) intellectual sphere and its international embeddedness. Less than six months before his death, Lukács published a letter in the Times Literary Supplement, which, for the first time, drew Western attention to the work of the so called “Budapest School,” made up of his students and disciples.7 Lukács died in the summer of 1971, and it only took a couple of years for practically all the members of the Budapest School to be forced into exile by a conservative turn in Hungarian politics in the mid-1970s.8 The ousting of the Budapest School was not the only consequence of this turn. For example, the manuscript of Miklós Haraszti’s Darabbér (A Worker in a Worker’s State: Piece-Rates in Hungary) was confiscated by the authorities, and its author, Dalos’s friend and a 1968 activist, was brought to trial.9 This book, which was first published in 1975 in German and English, then in 1980 in French, and later on in a dozen other languages, could only be read in its original Hungarian as a samizdat publication until its first legal publication in Hungary as late as 1989.10 The person who helped to arrange its German publication—with a foreword by the 1972 Nobel recipient in literature, Heinrich Böll—was Enzensberger.11
Enzensberger as a Reader of Lukács
Enzensberger’s “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” illustrates the fact that the movement of ideas across the Iron Curtain had the same complexity as personal encounters. To trace the essay’s contribution to intercultural intellectual exchanges, we must first discuss some of its arguments. In my reading, the heart of the essay lies in section 15, “The Media: An Empty Category of Marxist Theory.” It is in this part of the essay that Enzensberger infamously criticizes Lukács (calling him a “reactionary, backward looking nostalgic”12) and, strange as this coupling may sound, Marshall McLuhan. His critique of Lukács and McLuhan allows him to map the two possible scenarios for the future: a socialist one and a (neo)liberal one. This section of the essay mentions the most important theoreticians of fifty years of Marxist media criticism (Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht, Horkheimer), but only in one single paragraph. Somewhat idiosyncratically, Enzensberger decides to discuss Lukács in more detail, despite the fact that Lukács never really engaged in questions of the media per se. Enzensberger focuses his attention on one of Lukács’s earliest Marxist pieces, “The Old Culture and the New Culture.”13 In this essay, Lukács analyzes the characteristics of the old, bourgeois culture, and contrasts it with the new, communist culture. In Enzensberger’s view, Lukács’s interpretation of the new culture misunderstands and overlooks crucial features of his subject. While the old culture basically deconstructs itself (and with itself the whole of the capitalist system),14 Lukács’s description of the new culture is—unintentionally, but all the more tellingly—riddled, according to Enzensberger, with “voids” and “vacuums”: Lukács does not recognize the potential of the then emerging new visual media. In Enzensberger’s view, it is these vacuums that invite those ideas that have been promoted most visibly by McLuhan.15 He concentrates on the following passage from the Lukács text:
Anything that culture produces [can] have real cultural value only if it is in itself valuable, if the creation of each individual product is from the standpoint of its maker a single, finite process. It must, moreover, be a process conditioned by the human potentialities and capabilities of the creator. The most typical example of such a process is the work of art, where the entire genesis of the work is exclusively the result of the artist’s labour and each detail of the work that emerges is determined by the individual qualities of the artist. In highly developed mechanical industry on the other hand, any connection between the product and the creator is abolished. The human being serves the machine, he adapts to it. Production becomes completely independent of the human potentialities and capabilities of the worker.16
Enzensberger adds to this a quote from Benjamin, which aptly summarizes his opinion as well: “This is where the philistine concept of art turns up with all its deadly obtuseness—an idea to which all technical considerations are foreign and which feels that with the provocative appearance of the new technology its end has come” (28).17
The central idea of “The Old Culture and the New Culture” is a well-known Marxist insight: capitalism will inevitably destroy itself because of the contradictions within the system. Lukács focuses on two interrelated aspects of the supposed self-destruction: on the economic and on the cultural. The cultural destruction of capitalism that is brought about by the system itself was to remain one of his paramount concerns throughout his career.18 According to him, the investigation of any aspect of capitalist society leads, by necessity, to the investigation of the whole system. From all of the potential aspects of that system, in this essay he singles out culture.19 This is how Lukács’s essay begins:
The development of society is a unified process. This means that a certain phase of development cannot take place in any area of social life without exerting an impact on all other areas. Through this unity and coherence of social development it is possible to grasp and achieve an understanding of the same process from the standpoint of one social phenomenon or another. Thus, one can speak of culture in its apparent isolation from other social phenomena, for when we correctly grasp the culture of any period, we grasp with it the root of the whole development of the period, just as when we begin with an analysis of the economic relations.20
Lukács elaborates on several components of the self-destructive process and claims that bourgeois culture has already collapsed. This collapse will only be followed by a similarly self-induced, economic collapse. Culture, by definition, cannot exist in “finance capitalism” for several interconnected reasons. First, it lacks the social preconditions: the class that produced culture in the pre-capitalist era no longer exists, precisely because of the peculiar logic of capitalist economy. In capitalism all social classes, including the bourgeoisie, are driven “into the service of production,”21 hence are no longer in a position to be able to produce culture. Individuals, various groups of people, and social classes alike become “slaves of production.”22 Second, since society becomes one huge market, it logically follows that cultural products (that previously possessed other kinds of value as well) become commodities without exception. Third, due to the capitalist division of labor, the previously existing organic, harmonious, and continuous relations between product and producer and among the products themselves cease to exist. The fourth and deepest root of the crisis is that the very ideology of individual freedom that helped the bourgeoisie come into power, and which was progressive at the time of its emergence during the French Revolution, can no longer be granted to every member of society. Individual freedom is subsumed under the logic of capital. The rest of the essay details the characteristics of a communist culture to come and Enzensberger only dwells on one of these. He singles out Lukács’s undeniable insistence on the organic nature of the future (communist) culture, both in terms of the relationship between producer and product (the end of commodification and reification), and in terms of cultural products themselves (the end of an inorganic, anarchic, individualist culture).
Enzensberger’s reading of Lukács is to some extent justified: the latter clearly feels nostalgic about a mythical, pre-capitalist era, which was supposedly characterized by “organic culture.” However, the sense of culture that Lukács maintains had been under constant attack at least since the middle of the twentieth century, both from inside and out.23 Contested as the term and its meanings had become by the late 1960s, Enzensberger nevertheless chooses to focus on them. In this respect, his argument about a Marxist theory of culture does not only seem dated and slightly misleading from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, but arguably from that of the time of its original publication as well.
Enzensberger’s own argument is as follows: in the recent past,24 a new kind of media has appeared in the form of the electronic media, which, like any significant new development in the life of modern societies, requires our critical attention. Our understanding of it needs to be politically informed and a Marxist approach is the most adequate tool for that.25 One needs therefore to look for existing Marxist scholarship and also consider actual political action informed by a Marxist understanding of the given phenomenon. At this point one has two options: if the existing scholarship is incomplete or unsatisfactory, it needs to be revised or supplemented; and if there is a non-Marxist approach to the same issues, it needs to be subjected to merciless critique, for such an approach will inevitably miss the point. Enzensberger’s essay follows the first option: through Lukács, he criticizes existing Marxist scholarship. He finds that Lukács’s biggest mistake lies in his misconceptualization of the character and the potential of the new culture. The reason I think Enzensberger’s argument results in a non sequitur is that he implicitly equates “culture” with “media,” but the sense in which Lukács uses the term is different. Lukács’s essay dates from 1919, when, though film and radio already existed, the widespread use of electronic media was still unthinkable. Lukács does not talk about the (electronic) media, and while some of his observations about culture in general can be applied to it, this would need to be done with more caution than Enzensberger shows.26
Not only does Enzensberger share Lukács’s Marxist dialectics, but many of his points, ironically, also echo those that he criticized and ridiculed in Lukács. He writes: “Monopoly capitalism develops the consciousness-shaping industry more quickly and more extensively than other sectors of production; it must at the same time fetter it” (14). This dialectic—the argument is again one to be found in Lukács—is expected to result in the self-destruction of the (capitalist) system. What Enzensberger proposes is that we should not wait for that to happen, but intervene in the process. He refers explicitly to a socialist intervention, but he is careful to point out that the alternative is neither to be found in an “improved” capitalism, nor is it to be sought in the existing practice of the socialist countries: the system can only be “overcome by releasing the emancipatory potential inherent in the new productive forces—a potential which capitalism must sabotage just as surely as Soviet revisionism, because it would endanger the rule of both systems” (14).27 The new socialist forces, Enzensberger urges, are to leave behind all the outdated, useless strategies and characteristics of the Old Left prominently represented by Lukács, and put to good use the huge potential of the new electronic media, especially in order to mobilize the masses (see section 2 in “Constituents”). Equally significantly, Enzensberger also refers to the goal of turning new electronic media, “fettered” by both the capitalist and the socialist systems, into real “communications media.” Neither system wants people to be able to communicate with each other without some kind of a central control, let alone experience how easily those very people can be mobilized.
As for the basic differences between the Old and the New Left, Enzensberger introduces some radical observations. He accuses the contemporary Left (the generation of 1968) of nurturing deep-seated bourgeois attitudes and values. For this reason, he argues, the Left is not in the position to initiate the steps necessary for gaining control of the new electronic media. It is only this control that would make it possible for the Left to use them for those political purposes that would enable a real socialist transformation.28 The paragraph is worth quoting in full:
These resistances and fears are strengthened by a series of cultural factors which, for the most part, operate unconsciously, and which are to be explained by the social history of the participants in today’s Left movement—namely their bourgeois class background. It often seems as if it were precisely because of their progressive potential that the media are felt to be an immense threatening power; because for the first time they present a basic challenge to bourgeois culture and thereby to the privileges of the bourgeois intelligentsia—a challenge far more radical than any self-doubt this social group can display. In the New Left’s opposition to the media, old bourgeois fears such as the fear of “the masses” seem to be reappearing along with equally old bourgeois longings for pre-industrial times dressed up in progressive clothing (18).
It is not hard to see Lukács as one of Enzensberger’s main targets in the above quote: according to Enzensberger, Lukács is one of the “reactionary, backward looking nostalgic[s]” who are unable to see the potentialities of the new media and by this lack of recognition eventually contribute to the triumph of either the non-Leftists or the apolitical groups (countercultural groups that deify McLuhan and the attitude associated with him and his followers).
Enzensberger is one of the fifty intellectuals listed as being New Left thinkers in Michael Denning’s mapping of the sociogenesis of the New Left in his important essay “Socioanalysis of Culture.”29 The biggest problem this generation faced, claims Denning, was to find answers to the question: “how to invent a Marxism without class?”30 This issue became even more pressing after 1968 and forced these thinkers to arrive at a cardinal question: who should, who could be the agent of change?
For the previous generation of Western Marxists that included Lukács, Gramsci, Benjamin and others, this was not even a question. For most of them, the agent of change was by necessity the proletariat. 1968 showed that a crucial change was underway in society in this respect as well. In many ways, the hopes of 1968 did not materialize, and the widespread disappointment among leftist intellectuals eventually led to serious reconsiderations. If the working class, as it was depicted in classic Marxist thought, no longer existed, who could then take its place and mission?
The oldest figure on Denning’s list of New Left thinkers, Roland Barthes, has something quite unorthodox to say in 1972: “one of the tasks of this century is to learn how the petite bourgeoisie can itself become a progressive class. I believe that if we do not find the answer to that question, history might hang fire for a long time. [. . .] There is no social class, no group that is safe from this general contagion of petit-bourgeois culture.”31 The relationship of progressive culture to bourgeois culture has had a rather contested history in the works of leftist intellectuals. The issue was addressed by Marx, Lukács (also in the very essay Enzensberger quotes), Horkheimer and Adorno (in a way that was to be criticized by Enzensberger), and Enzensberger himself could not avoid reflecting on the matter, either.
The petite bourgeoisie was quite obviously not a candidate for undertaking the role of the proletariat either for Lukács (both for historical and ideological reasons) or for Enzensberger (for ideological reasons). But it is at this point where we can see most clearly why Enzensberger’s project to “use” Lukács as a (negative) reference point was, from the beginning, misguided. Apart from the fact that Lukács’s essay is not about the media, and that its observations can be applied to it only with some difficulty, there are also some larger, conceptual problems. They center on the changing notions of culture in the twentieth century and also on the relation between a Marxist theory of culture and a Marxist aesthetics. As Denning puts this, “[b]y 1950, it would be odd to think of a specifically Marxist theory of culture, the way there was, from Mehring and Plekhanov to Christopher Caudwell and Ernst Fischer, a Marxist aesthetics.”32 Lukács contributed, in very significant ways, both to the theory of culture and to aesthetics. In fact, his essay “The Old Culture and the New Culture” is regarded as one of Marxism’s most remarkable additions to contemporary cultural theory. The latter, that is, the theory of cultural revolution was, undeniably, at the center of Western New Left thinking (with an interesting mix of references to the writings of Lukács, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, and others).
Hungarian Afterlives: A Curious Case of Reception History
Dalos translated Enzensberger’s essay and included it in his proposed material covering the German-language New Left thinking of the period. Other similar texts (radical, New Left, Western Marxist) were translated both from German and English and found their way into the proposed book. The editors were well-aware of the “risk factors”—that the ideas formulated in many of the texts were too leftist and too radical—and tried a technique that had worked many times before. They tried to counterbalance the radicalism of many of the included texts with an “appropriate” foreword by a most reliable and always loyal comrade, Béla Köpeczi, who was the director of the General Directorate of Publishers. This time, however, the trick did not work. Despite the editors’ cunning and careful strategizing, the anthology was not given a green light. Numerous things were found to be politically unacceptable in a good number of the texts, and the Enzensberger essay stood out among them. It mentions the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, criticizes the Soviet Union, and—most importantly and most unacceptably— it challenges some of Lukács’s key ideas. After his very recent death on June 4, 1971, Lukács became practically untouchable in his home country.
A couple of years passed, and in the mid-1970s two unrelated events occurred in the complicated and grotesque afterlife of the translation. In 1974, Béla Köpeczi published a monograph entitled Az “új baloldal” ideológiája [The Ideology of the “New Left”], which, to the great surprise of all those originally involved, contained passages from Enzensberger’s essay, along with Köpeczi’s comments on it, though not touching on the politically still sensitive issue of the critique of Lukács.
Around the same time, a mass communication and media scholar, András Szekfü, who worked for the Mass Communication Research Center33 in Budapest, once again proposed the essay for publication. The history and activity of the Mass Communication Research Center is worth mentioning here.34 It was launched as a research institute on July 1, 1969, with the conference “On Language and Communication.” Institutionally, it was part of the Hungarian Radio and Television Company, where a smaller unit dedicated to the scholarly analysis of the social reception of mass media in Hungary had already operated since 1963.35 It was the first of its kind in the Soviet bloc, both in terms of the field and scope of research and also in its institutional structure.36 Wide-ranging research was carried out at the center, including research on media reception, taste communities, stereotypes, prejudices, public opinion, sociocultural changes in society, spare-time activities of workers, visual culture, the media reception of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and so on. In all their research they tried—in what back then was a revolutionary way—to use interdisciplinary approaches and the most advanced empirical research methods. The institute was also unique in that it was allowed to invite international scholars.37 The center had its own periodical (Jel-Kép) and more than three hundred book publications can also be associated with the center, on average more than fifteen volumes per year.38
Learning from experience, Szekfü tried to publish the manuscript through his own institution (the Mass Communication Research Center), in a book series not intended for public circulation.39 He took the greatest care possible when choosing to do the censoring in advance and on his own, in the hope that this way the eventual publication would not be blocked. He omitted the openly critical references to the Soviet Union and to Lukács, and he also shortened the text. His hopes, however, proved to be vain. The publication, even in its self-censored form and in a book series not available to the public, was deemed dangerous. The most he could do was to let it circulate among his students as samizdat.40
The Hungarian translation of the Enzensberger essay remained in manuscript for over three decades. In 2008 Szekfü published a collection of essays on media and communication-related issues41 that he wrote during the 1970s and 1980s that could not see the light at the time of their writing for political reasons. The Hungarian version of the Enzensberger essay was included as an appendix, for the first time in its entirety, complemented by the reminiscences of Szekfü and the translator, Dalos.42
The quasi-official contemporary reception of Western New Left thinking in Hungary, including its use and abuse of Lukács, is documented by Béla Köpeczi’s book,43 which clearly used those very texts that were consulted and (at least partially) translated for the planned New Left anthology.44 Köpeczi was reliable and highly enough placed in both the formal and informal hierarchies of communist Hungary that he could propose such a book for publication. The most obvious and important difference between the aborted anthology and Köpeczi’s monograph on Western New Left thinking is that the former would have included translated texts from that tradition while the latter is in fact an interpretation of those texts from a very definite viewpoint, which is clearly not New Leftist. Although Köpeczi does quote from the original texts, Az “új baloldal” ideológiája remains a quasi-scholarly work marred by ideological and political constraints.
Its interpretation of the ways Lukács is referred to in a good number of New Left texts makes this very evident. Köpeczi has no choice but to address the Lukács “thread” in New Left thinking, and he uses this opportunity to provide a reading of the great philosopher through the criticism of the ways in which he is treated in New Left texts. The ironic element here is that one Lukács is played out against another Lukács: according to Köpeczi, the New Left claimed the wrong Lukács for itself. The Lukács important for the New Left is the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness—in other words, the pre-Sovietized Lukács. But this is not the only book from 1923 that is used by the New Left; Marxism and Philosophy by Karl Korsch is a similarly central source text.45 Köpeczi uses a three-fold method to “amend” the “wrong” interpretation of these texts: he refers to an even higher authority, Lenin, he cites Lukács’s self-criticism (such as the preface to the 1967 edition of History and Class Consciousness), and he provides his own reading and analysis of the texts in question.46
The main problem with such “leftist communists” of the 1920s as Lukács and Korsch is that they put too much emphasis on “revolutionizing” the consciousness of the proletariat, and too little on the more “objective” circumstances and historical necessities (e.g., class struggle, economic circumstances, the leading role of the party, etc.). The key term here for Enzensberger and others in the New Left tradition is consciousness. Some branches of the New Left want a cultural revolution via the revolutionizing of the people’s consciousness, but, according to Enzensberger, they fail to recognize the ways to achieve this. Interestingly enough, while Enzensberger needs to criticize Lukács precisely in order to arrive at the significance of the proper use of the new mass media and mass communication devices, the quasi-official Hungarian interpretation of Western New Left thinking in the 1970s found one of Enzensberger’s biggest mistakes in “overemphasizing” the role of consciousness in revolutionizing the people. As Köpeczi insists, the pre-Sovietized Lukács (the one that the New Left held in such high esteem) placed far too much emphasis on the role of consciousness. Köpeczi’s contemporary interpretation thus reveals the fundamental connection between the early Lukács and Enzensberger, even as the latter criticizes the former because of what he sees as unambiguous signs of a dangerous and defensive technophobia.
Despite the twisted history of the Hungarian translation of “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” and the very limited access to it, this manifesto of early 1970s New Left thinking was read and discussed in Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s. Tracing the story of this unofficial reception would be yet another episode in Hungarian intellectual and (socialist) institutional history, but it is clear that it was partly due to the translation and samizdat distribution of Enzensberger’s essay that his view of Lukács, which was so important in defining contemporary Western Marxism, became a little better known in his home country.
Although “The Old Culture and the New Culture” is one of Lukács’s few early Marxist essays that were published first in Hungarian and only later in German, for it to become better known and influential in Hungary, it first needed to be severely, and perhaps unjustly, criticized in a New Left German language media theory essay. Lukács’s text found its way back to its literal and figurative “home” via translation and retranslation, having become part of many (sometimes conflicting and conflicted) traditions.
Notes
1. The institutional and personal links that support this claim are much stronger than the textual ones. As for the latter, one would have to look into the (mass-)media-related samizdat writings from the 1970s and 1980s in Hungary. As for the former, one only needs to recall the fact that the institution (Mass Communication Research Center) that commissioned the translation of the essay “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” by Enzensberger in the mid-1970s was a workplace that provided shelter for many intellectuals who later became prominent figures of the democratic opposition.
2. Kossuth Publishing House, Budapest, Hungary.
3. The original German title is “Baukasten zu einer Theorie der Medien” and it was first published in Kursbuch (20) March 1970.
4. For details see Autio-Sarasmo and Miklóssy, eds. Reassessing Cold War Europe.
5. He was twenty-seven years old in 1970.
6. See Jürgen Kaube’s “obituary” for the journal in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 12, 2008, quoted by Harms, “Living Mitteleuropa,” 675. In describing certain characteristics of Hungarian-German intellectual exchange I rely on this work.
7. Lukács, “Letter.”
8. Exiled students of Lukács include Ágnes Heller, György Márkus, and Ferenc Fehér.
9. Haraszti became a very important member of the Hungarian democratic opposition and a leading figure in underground publishing from the 1970s. Between 1981 and the fall of communism in 1989 he was the editor of Beszélő, the flagship publication of the underground opposition. After the transition he was an MP in Hungary, and between 2004 and 2010 he served as the Representative on Freedom of the Media of OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe) in Vienna.
10. One of its many contemporary reviewers in the West praises the book for its “concrete description of social relations in a Hungarian factory” and claims that “one can draw important conclusions about the nature of this [i.e., Hungarian] society and work relations under state capitalism.” See Faber, “Review,” 310.
11. Enzensberger also published some of Dalos’s early poems in Kursbuch in the 1970s.
12. See Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory.” References to the English translation of the essay will henceforth be indicated in the text.
13. Lukács talks about the arts rather than the media. However, for Enzensberger, they seem to have merged (though he does not specify when): “What used to be called art, has now, in the strict Hegelian sense, been dialectically surpassed by and in the media.” See Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory,” 31. Lukács’s essay was first published in Hungarian in 1919 and in German in 1920.
14. “[T]he culture of the capitalist epoch had collapsed in itself and prior to the occurrence of economic and political breakdown.” Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory,” 22.
15. McLuhan also gets his share of criticism from Enzensberger and is characterized as a “ventriloquist charlatan full of provocative idiocy.” See Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory,” 29.
16. Lukács, “The Old Culture and the New Culture,” 28.
17. The reader can find traces of a certain kind of “technophobia” in Lukács as early as 1913, in his piece about the poetics of the film, and much later in a chapter on film in his Aesthetics, as well as in a late interview in May 1968 about the “new Hungarian movies.” For a scholarly review of the first two, see Kelecsényi, “Lukács György esztétikája” and Lukács, “A filmnek a mai magyar kultúrában.”
18. For more on this see Márkus, “Life and the Soul.”
19. As early as 1962, in the essay “The Industrialization of the Mind” Enzensberger already, though indirectly, criticizes Lukács: “Equally inadequate is the term cultural industry, which has become common usage in Europe after World War II. It reflects, more than the scope of the phenomenon itself, the social status of those who have tried to analyze it: university professors and academic writers, people whom the power elite has relegated to the reservation of what passes as ‘cultural life’ and who consequently have resigned themselves to wear the unfortunate name of cultural critics. In other words, they are certified as harmless; they are supposed to think in terms of Kultur and not in terms of power.” Enzensberger, “The Industrialization of the Mind,” 4 (italics added).
20. Lukács, “The Old Culture and the New Culture,” 21.
21. Lukács, “The Old Culture and the New Culture,” 21.
22. Lukács, “The Old Culture and the New Culture,” 22.
23. The scholarly literature on this topic is immense. As for the first part of the claim, see Denning, “The Socioanalysis of Culture,” for the second, Szeman, “Culture and Globalization.”
24. In “Industrialization of the Mind” he is more specific about the birth of mass media (part of which the electronic media becomes with the appearance and widespread use of radio, and later television): “The mind-making industry is really a product of the last hundred years.” See Enzensberger, “The Industrialization of the Mind,” 40.
25. What makes Enzensberger’s essay so important, among other factors, is exactly this point: he attempts to read a new, very significant and influential social phenomenon, that is, the emergence of mass media and mass communication politically. In order to do that from a Marxist perspective, he is unable to avoid engaging with the young Lukács’s thought.
26. As a result of this logic, Enzensberger claims that due to the lack of any potentially politically active Marxist interpretation, Lukács’s oversight creates a “void” that necessarily invites other interpretations. The most visible, misleading, self-deceiving of those is that of McLuhan. It is misleading, dangerous and to be avoided precisely because, in Enzensberger’s view, it lacks any political valence.
27. Among other factors, it was the proposal of something that would fit neither capitalism, nor (existing) socialism that made Enzensberger’s piece unacceptable and unpublishable in Hungary.
28. He goes as far in his use of irony as to say that “they are obviously fixated on the Iskra model.” See Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory,” 19.
29. Denning, “The Socioanalysis of Culture,” 82.
30. See Denning, “The Socioanalysis of Culture,” 84. See also King, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 165, who argues that Enzensberger “attributes [the lack of a class basis] to the success of the ‘consciousness industry,’ to a large extent liquidating the political consciousness of the general population.”
31. Barthes, “The Fatality of Culture,” 154–55.
32. Denning, “The Socioanalysis of Culture,” 79.
33. Tömegkommunikációs Kutatóközpont.
34. My summary is based on Terestyéni, “Volt egyszer egy Tömegkommunikációs Kutatóközpont . . .”
35. In 1985 the center chose to become independent and in 1988, its name was changed to “Hungarian Public Opinion Research Center.” The new, freely elected government abolished it in 1991. On December 15, 1991, a new institution was created, largely employing researchers from the old one, but this time institutionally a part of the prestigious research center network of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The new name was (and still is): Communication Theory Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Eötvös Loránd University.
36. For more on this (and similar institutions in the Soviet bloc) see Szekfü, “An Untitled Overview.”
37. Including George Gerbner and Percy Tannenbaum from the United States, Kaarle Nordenstreng from Finland, James Halloran from England, Boris Firsov and V. A. Jadov from the Soviet Union. See Terestyéni, “Volt egyszer egy Tömegkommunikációs Kutatóközpont . . .”
38. It was this center that published some classic texts of media and communication studies, for the first time in Hungarian, including Raymond Williams’s On Television.
39. The center published several book series, but not all of them were made available for the public. Some of them were intended only for an “inner circle,” that is, researchers and high-ranking bureaucrats in the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party.
40. Some of these students later became important figures in the media and communication spheres of post-communist Hungary (personal interview with Szekfü on June 3, 2014).
41. Szekfü, A cápa utolsó tangója.
42. Seven years later, in today’s Hungary, we still cannot talk about any critical, scholarly, journalistic, or public reception of this very original and important essay by Enzensberger and his polemics with Lukács. But this very silence speaks volumes. It speaks to both the original, early 1970s context in which the essay was written, translated, censored, and eventually banned from publication, and also to the present political, academic, and media environment that chooses not to reflect on such a brilliantly provocative text. The above account is based on the reminiscences of András Szekfü and György Dalos, published in Szekfü, A cápa utolsó tangója, and e-mail communication and personal interviews with Szekfü between 2009 and 2015.
43. Köpeczi was an important and influential figure in socialist era Hungary: a university professor, cultural and literary historian, politician, minister of education, and a leading authority on censorship.
44. In most cases he gives no credit to the translators of the texts that he generously quotes, sometimes at length. This is the case also with the Hungarian translation of the Enzensberger essay: Dalos’s name never appears in the book, although Köpeczi quotes a long paragraph from his translation. See Köpeczi, Az “új baloldal” ideológiája, 137. If one takes a look at the bibliographic information provided in the monograph, one can—to a limited extent—reconstruct the material of the proposed anthology. Köpeczi quotes from or refers to sources in English (both from the United Kingdom and the United States), French, German, and Italian. One finds such names in the notes section as, for example, B. Reid, E. Mandel, C. Bettelheim, A. Groz, W. Hollingsworth Whyte, H. Lefebvre, H. Marcuse, N. Mailer, R. Debray, B. Seale, C. Reich, T. Roszak, E. Schwartz, R. Dutschke, R. Rossanda, R. Vaneighem, G. Debord, D. Cohn-Bendit, A. Touraine, C. Prevost, S. Hall, R. Williams, E. Thompson, T. Fawthrop, R. Blackburn, and W. Rochet.
45. Köpeczi, Az „új baloldal” ideológiája, 84.
46. Köpeczi, Az „új baloldal” ideológiája, 84. (The reference is to Lenin’s “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder,” 137–38 on Enzensberger, and 85–86, 197–99 on Lukács.)
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