Radical aesthetics has flourished since the 1960s. New schools of criticism have emerged with astonishing rapidity along with new objects of concern and scrutiny. There is no lack of disgust for the standardized and commercial cultural products of advanced industrial society. Contemporary aesthetics has become disillusioned with political ideologies and mass movements. Even humanism and its enlightenment offshoots have been castigated for their reliance on universal assumptions and categories. The particular is now what counts, as well as unique forms of experience. Identity has similarly turned into a matter of increasing interest following the collapse of the civil rights movement, the poor people’s movements, and the great protests against the Vietnam War. Legitimate concerns have arisen for dealing with ever more specific forms of prejudice. As a consequence, aesthetics now highlights questions of subjectivity. In doing so, however, it often evades the importance of ideals and categories that articulate more general understandings of solidarity. There is a pressing need to reestablish the connection between cultural criticism and constructive political thinking, one that calls for rethinking the most basic traditions of modern political aesthetics.
Perhaps the place to begin is with the liberal heritage of modernity. In the aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848, the European bourgeoisie surrendered its most radical philosophical and political values along with its revolutionary posture in exchange for economic hegemony under the conservative and aristocratic regimes of autocrats like Napoleon III and Bismarck. The goal of realizing the republican values of political liberty and equality under the law, which inspired bourgeois philosophy and the French Revolution, thus fell into the hands of socialist movements based in the working class that grew so rapidly during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. To put it simply, social democracy wound up shouldering a dual burden: it sought both to fulfill the universal political aspirations of the bourgeoisie and champion the economic interests of the proletariat. Its leaders were thus preoccupied with political and economic demands rather than experimental cultural ones. Unconcerned about the effects of an already nascent mass culture, skeptical of “salon anarchists” and modernist experiments, social democratic activists wished to provide workers with the classical and bourgeois liberal heritage that had been substantively denied them. Against a tide of reaction, social democracy committed itself to the liberal political legacy of the Enlightenment and sought to contest economic exploitation and provide Bildung for its proletarian constituency.
To be sure, the movement had a place for artists like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. But the aesthetic views of social democracy somewhat mechanically corresponded to its political needs. Classical humanism and realism not only seemed to depict the reality of capitalism but also fostered the consciousness necessary for the creation of a new socialist order. If Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens exposed the workings of capitalism, Molière showed the corrosive effects of snobbery and hypocrisy, Gotthold Lessing highlighted the injustice of anti-Semitism in Nathan the Wise (1779), and Goethe manifested that great and unrealized notion of “personality” that capitalism seemed to stunt. Consequently, as Max Weber noted, an “elective affinity” appeared between the values to which social democrats were politically committed and the choice of artistic outlook that would give those values sustenance in the struggle.
A paradox resulted. The most politically radical mass movements of the time, whose leading aestheticians were Franz Mehring and Georgi Plekhanov, were generally considered culturally conservative by writers and artists who had little attachment to the classical, realist, or naturalist traditions. Leon Trotsky and other socialist politicians like Paul Levi, the German communist leader, were more daring in their tastes. But they constituted a tiny minority. Socialist attempts to build on the cultural heritage of the bourgeoisie created an aversion to a burgeoning modernist avant-garde whose preoccupation with subjectivity was becoming ever more vehement and pronounced. The works favored by social democrats were not simply propagandistic in character; rather, they highlighted the experiences of oppression and the sentiments of resistance among workers. Even following World War I, when the movement grudgingly tolerated new modernist tastes in the arts, its real literary heroes were not giants of their genres like Picasso, Schoenberg, Joyce, and Proust. Workers instead embraced writers like Sinclair Lewis, author of Main Street (1920) and Babbit (1922), and Upton Sinclair, who gained world acclaim with The Jungle (1906). Nevertheless, the socialist labor movement did not insist that its members toe any political line on the arts.
Cultural politics assumed a different character in the Communist International. Lenin cared little about aesthetic issues beyond his view that art should not venture into direct criticism of the revolution. But Anatoly Lunacharsky, his first Commissar for Enlightenment and Education, was a devoted admirer of Proust, while Trotsky supported Russian futurism and the modernist avant-garde in works like Literature and Revolution (1924). Following Stalin’s rise to power, commitment to the party line on aesthetic matters became more stringent. This was especially true during the 1930s, which witnessed the growing subordination of aesthetic concerns to the Soviet party’s more immediate political priorities. The aesthetic politics of the time can be seen as an uncritical cultural reflection of the terror-ridden “consolidation” program within the Soviet Union, and of the country’s attempt to rally all external “progressive” parties—both democratic and antifascist—around a European “popular front.” Wishing to draw a line of demarcation between antifascist and fascist forces, the Communist International attempted to provide the cultural foundation for a political alliance with the progressive bourgeoisie and its social democratic supporters. As a consequence, the Comintern stoutly embraced realism and crudely vilified all divergent artistic styles. But the communist acceptance of traditional realism was actually a concession. As far as Stalin and his apparatchik cultural commissar, Andrei Zhdanov, were concerned, the task for Soviet artists was to infuse the old realism with a new, prescribed content. The result was socialist realism, a form that would retain the descriptive emphasis of the old realism while liquidating its critical and reflexive character, and would thus conform to the dictates of communist politics. Given the way in which the realist tradition became tainted by this totalitarian enterprise, and the vehemence with which it was attacked by the modernist avant-garde, even the salience of its more “critical” variants can no longer be presupposed. Nevertheless, the realist aesthetic has a role to play in any progressive understanding of cultural politics.
Realism and Revolution
Georg Lukács can be seen as a traitor to modernism. A major figure of the bohemian intelligentsia in Budapest before World War I, he was the author of daring avant-garde works of criticism like Soul and Form (1910) and Theory of the Novel (1920), and the heterodox Marxist classic History and Class Consciousness (1923). However, his writings of the 1930s and ’40s, including The Historical Novel (1937) and Studies in European Realism (1948), are usually condemned for their sterility and subservience to Stalinist orthodoxy. Lukács remained a staunch communist until the end of his life. He also never denied his initial support for Stalin. But there is a way in which these works of literary criticism raise questions that transcend Lukács’s political affiliations and even provide the basis for an immanent critique of them. His arguments are actually more nuanced than his critics choose to believe. Henry Pachter, the socialist political thinker, had a point in suggesting that Lukács was actually engaged in a “guerrilla war” against the worst excesses of Stalin’s cultural policy. In fact, even while Stalin was still alive, in 1948, Lukács insisted that “a great realist literature could play the leading part, hitherto always denied to it, in the democratic rebirth of nations.” This theme runs through his late work. Indeed, his writings on realism exhibit a philosophical and aesthetic coherence that demands to be taken seriously.
Lukács maintained that the great realists reflected the social order of their time as a “mediated totality.” In contrast to socialist realism, the issue here is not how workers—or, by implication, the party—is represented. Instead, it is a matter of how literature illuminates the contradictions that allow the “position” of the working class to be understood. The author’s politics is not a preeminent concern either, as is evident in Lukács’s admiration for Balzac and Thomas Mann. What counts is how a writer provides an “objective” rendering of his epoch for a reader, who can then clearly see how real social forces and institutions directly and indirectly affect the lives of fictional characters and the choices that they make. It is the attempt to rationally comprehend reality as an “ensemble of social relations,” as Marx put it, that supposedly offers the critical insight into the production and reproduction of capitalist oppression—as well as, in principle, any other form of oppression. Thus, according to Lukács, the commitment to the realist enterprise creates a link between the rationalist and democratic ideals of the revolutionary bourgeoisie and the proletarian attempts to build a better world.
Lukács’s aesthetic expresses the concerns and values of the antifascist Popular Front of the 1930s. It also maintains the Comintern line of political demarcation. On the one side are the forces of democracy, reason, science, and progress. On the other side are the exponents of subjectivism, intuition, irrationalism, and chaos. Where the former inherently stand in opposition to fascist values and culture, the latter create an ideological climate in which fascism can thrive—beyond the subjective intentions of the author in question. Such was the claim that informed the famous essay by Lukács, “Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline” (1934), which launched a huge debate on the left about the political role of modernism in general and expressionism in particular. The argument is clear: if reality is not understood in objective, rational, and historical terms, it becomes a chaos whose meaning will be arbitrarily determined through merely experiential means. Modernism gives just such a fundamental epistemological primacy to intuition and direct experience, and precisely for this reason, Lukács considers it a form of irrationalism, whose idea of radicalism is ultimately indeterminate, ahistorical, and apocalyptic. Even worse, since this indecipherable chaos necessarily becomes unbearable, it engenders feelings of despair and a desire to escape from freedom by seeking salvation in some form of authority that can end the nightmare once and for all.
Lukács did not take the generic differences between literature and painting or music into account. He also clearly attempted to chain future artistic production to a particular style inherited from Balzac, Tolstoy, and Thomas Mann. The debate over expressionism that he initiated in 1934, moreover, took place after the original excitement about the new avant-garde had passed. But there were still Communist members and sympathizers who had learned much from the prewar aesthetic movements and who feared the new dogmatism regarding cultural matters. Certain thinkers therefore raised their voices to oppose Lukács, the most prominent of whom were Ernst Bloch and Bertolt Brecht. They insisted that Lukács was engaging in a mechanistic formalism that identified realism with one historical style, that he chose to ignore the unrealized utopian moments of joy, wonder, and play evident in modernist works, and that he dogmatically eliminated their introduction of formal innovations like stream of consciousness, montage, etc. In short, they argued, Lukács equated the modernist experiment with mere decadence—and they were right.
Not all of Lukács’s arguments, however, are wrong or misguided. Writers claiming to be political and realistic should be interrogated about the ways in which they depict society. It is not illegitimate to insist that reality has an objective structure and that the quality of its depiction should be open to political discussion. If reality cannot be comprehended in its determinate workings, then its rational transformation becomes impossible. Whether building the will to engage in such a transformation requires realism, of course, is another matter. It doesn’t. Art, more broadly, does have an impact on the political climate by evoking unacknowledged problems. It can always shed new light on experiences of exploitation, repression, terror, and love. But there is also truth to Lukács’s contention that neoromanticism and irrationalism helped shape the conditions in which fascism could thrive. Perhaps he conflated aesthetic criticism with social theory. More to the point, Lukács asked all writers to write the works that he wished to read. His position ultimately came down to the belief that art must perform a particular function, and if it does not, then all other functions it might perform are thereby invalidated. Assuming that the realist form is inherently progressive, while the modernist form is inherently reactionary, he made no attempt to comprehend the positive and progressive ways in which modernism generated sentiments of resistance. Quite simply, Lukács refused to consider the legitimacy of cultural and aesthetic concerns that were not anticipated by Hegel or Marx.
Modernism and Utopia
Modernism was an international movement that reverberated throughout Europe during the roughly fifty years prior to the rise of Hitler in 1933. It shattered traditional linguistic, visual, and theatrical conventions. It promulgated free verse, stream of consciousness, montage, photomontage, collage, and numerous other formal innovations in order to illuminate experiences that older forms and devices could not (or would not) explore. Modernism also expanded our understanding of what constitutes art. New recognition was accorded the contributions of African and Oceanic culture, medieval painting and sculpture, and more. Modernists longed to transcend the limitations of a capitalist status quo and foster the longing for a liberating alternative. Modernist rebels may have suffered from romantic anticapitalism, but they also fastened onto moments of the totality, particular forms of repression, that neither the radical bourgeoisie nor the working class was willing to challenge. Their stance regarding the transformation of the status quo may have been utopian, but the problems they uncovered did not all require utopian solutions.
Modernism became popular with the middle classes during the 1920s. Mainstream publishers such as Samuel Fischer and the Insel Verlag brought out expressionist anthologies like The Uprising (1919) and The Twilight of Humanity (1920) by Kurt Pinthus. In 1920 the “Austrian terror” Oskar Kokoschka secured a teaching post at Dresden, and Max Beckmann, Walter Hasenclever, and a host of others followed suit. The Hermitage began building its spectacular modernist collection, and the New York Grand Armory Show of 1913, despite initially hostile reactions to it, prefigured what would become an influx of European avant-garde works into the major museums of the United States. Bohemia entered the academy and many of its members became respected, if often controversial, figures in the mainstream cultural life of the 1920s. This cultural influence was intertwined with a political message that offered an abstract opposition to, rather than any concrete confrontation with, the status quo. The modernist avant-garde never appreciated either political liberalism or social democracy. Democratic ideals seemed to play into mass society with its commercialism and loss of cultural standards. The unique experience of society thereby seemed imperiled, along with the ability to transform the character of everyday life. As the twentieth century dawned, contrary to popular opinion, it was not Marxists who were concerned with issues like alienation, reification, and the loss of subjectivity. Modernists were preoccupied with these phenomena even if they posed few solutions for dealing with them. Artistic revolutionaries sought to explore the internal world beyond objectivity and the possibilities of experiencing and reorganizing the object according to the desires of the subject. This occurred in different ways depending on the genre: free verse was pitted against rhyme, montage was employed against narrative, new tonal scales changed the way we hear, and line or color supplanted the consensual image.
Modernism embraced a utopian outlook from its inception. It was vague, arbitrary, and often self-referential. But it expressed the longing for an alternative—any alternative (for better or worse), so long as it was total. This was the glue that bound modernists to one another in spite of their differing political attitudes. The point was to be in opposition. Abstract and indeterminate understandings of politics became intertwined with very concrete experiments that projected new ways of hearing, seeing, and portraying the world. Thus a perspective emerges with which to assess the continuity and discontinuity that characterizes the relation between modernism and “postmodernism.”
Postmodernism and the Crisis of Radical Purpose
Like modernism, postmodernism embraces many diverse tendencies, and its legacy is also conflicted and contested. Some adherents would surely object to any general characterization of it. There is, nonetheless, a logic that defines the postmodern undertaking. Its thinkers all begin with an assault on philosophical absolutes and metaphysical universals. All deny the possibility of impartial judgments, or objectivity, and all highlight the moment of ambiguity and individuality. Though grand claims often emerge, whether in terms of a “postmodern tradition” or of histories of modernity, in principle, all postmodernists reject the grand narrative and the privileging of methodological coherence. All attempt to liberate subjectivity from intractable systems or claims. But the postmodern imagination has little of the utopian impulse that once inspired modernism. Totalizing narratives and scientific rationalism are seen by leading postmodern thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard and Zygmunt Baumann as among the principal ideological sources for modern totalitarianism and genocide. The postmodern imperative is for theory to explode all “essentialist” claims, and for this reason, modernist artists like Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, and Kafka are seen as prophets.
Postmodern interpretations of subjectivity have indeed become tied to ever more specific and existential understandings of identity that contest the standardizing and universalizing power of the culture industry. But they also celebrate the fragmentation that followed the collapse of the social movements that had arisen in the 1950s and ’60s. This leads such interpretations to conflate culture and politics, identity and solidarity, subjectivity and resistance, and enables them to turn intuition into a criterion of truth. Where modernism sought to explode immanence in favor of transcendence, however, postmodernism also denies transcendence. It rejects the possibility of depicting either a narrative account of reality or a liberating alternative. According to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, indeed, categories and discursive formulations can only prove partial with regard to their truth content. Utopia vanishes—only subjectivity remains.
Distinctions between fact and value ring hollow. Generic and disciplinary boundaries between philosophy, criticism, and art become arbitrary as well. The crucial innovation of the postmodern, indeed, is that language hides rather than illuminates the existing imbalances of power. Giving primacy to discursive truth is, therefore, already to accept the paradigm in which power manifests itself. Attempts at epistemological coherence, acknowledgments of the primacy of discursive truth, and any reference to objectivity for matters of judgment are seen by postmodernists as misplaced responses to a purely arbitrary procedure that buttresses the status quo. With the ability of the culture industry to transform all meanings into its own codes, or significations, the attempt to impose standards is both impractical and utopian. Mass society renders rationalistic concerns irrelevant as it generates fad after fad, perspective after perspective, commodity after commodity, all the while domesticating whatever liberating moments have been engendered. Foucault insisted that the traditional metaphysical subject should be “decentered,” so that the threatened experiential moment of subjectivity can serve as the focal point for resisting power and the (rational) paradigms that hide its exercise.
“Essentialism” may or many not deserve, using Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, “strategic” support. Either way the ethical ability to distinguish freedom from license is compromised. Solidarity becomes an instrumental rather than a moral aim, and it is the same with reciprocity. At the end of the day there is only the incessant need to deconstruct consensual meanings and highlight the multiplicity of possible significations that any object or text can display. In a sense, then, postmodernism fosters the desire to play with reality and consistently alter its signified character. But this kind of activity is only possible in terms of privileging an experiential desire beyond political exigency and discursive rationality. Any attempt to constrain such desire justifies rebellion, so that ultimately rebellion becomes nihilism. If all categories are arbitrary, all theories merely relative in their truth claims, and any commitment to deliberation merely an expression of power, then all responses to the given order become equally valid (or invalid).
Experiential desire rules: no reason exists why critique should assume primacy over acceptance of the given order. Radicalism becomes one style, text, or approach among many. If any object can produce a multiplicity of significations, all of which are equally valid, then why try to signify any purpose at all other than ambiguity? Irony assumes particular importance in fostering this goal precisely because it allows for distance from the real, isolation from others, and—ultimately—indifference. The postmodern encounter with the real is nihilistic in the most urbane way. Conformity becomes indistinguishable from nonconformity and deconstruction from reconstruction. Thus the inability to make a moral, political, or cultural judgment from the standpoint of positive norms is itself elevated into a fundamental aesthetic principle.
Modernists did not proceed in this manner. When they did engage in philosophical justifications for their cultural experiments, by and large, they sought to ascertain the “ground” of experience in what might be considered a phenomenological or quasi-phenomenological manner. Postmodernists, however, often pull a philosophical sleight of hand. Even though they deny the existence of essentialisms or categorical absolutes, they still accept the totally traditional perspective that such a foundation can alone provide the justification for a truth claim. In rejecting the absolute, therefore, postmodernists take it far more seriously than they should. Postmodernists lack notions of historical tendency, or what John Dewey termed “warranted assertions,” and therefore wind up being defined by the very essentialism that they oppose. The postmodern opposition to modernity, in short, is illusory. Its finest advocates exhibit a bad conscience. Such is the source of the crisis of political purpose that now plagues contemporary aesthetics, along with the need for constructing a new approach to cultural radicalism.
Aesthetics, Modernism, and Emancipation
A new political aesthetic begins with a commitment to artistic tolerance. Such tolerance is not inimical to drawing the distinction between politics with its institutional preoccupations, or its need to specify imbalances of power, and radical aesthetics and forms of cultural activism whereby the sentiments of resistance are fueled. There is no need for jargon or convoluted arguments. It is enough to insist that art can evidence many tasks and that there is more than one way for an artist to fulfill them. The need no longer exists to choose between realism and modernism on the one hand, and postmodernism on the other. The old ideological concerns have been rendered irrelevant not by philosophical stratagems but by the conditions of contemporary cultural production. There is no longer anything inherently liberating about any particular style or mode of artistic representation. Representational realism as well as nonrepresentational approaches can serve diverse yet radical purposes. The political value of a work is no more reducible to its formal contestation of hegemonic modes of perception than to its presentation of a prescribed content. Divergent works can forward criticisms and possibilities in different ways. It thus becomes incumbent on a new aesthetic to derive categories that would further the portrayal and extraction of the diverse criticisms and hopes that artistic works may or may not evince.
Neither the social nor the political elements of a work reveal themselves self-evidently, and there is no single form that assures the critical and transcendent character of art. The culture industry not only presents the most diverse styles and commodities to various publics but also creates an interpretive climate that tends to undermine any work’s potentially critical or utopian qualities. Yet there is no reason to assume that the culture industry will necessarily exhaust the critical and transcendent qualities of every work. The culture industry may provide a built-in frame of reference for making aesthetic judgments. But it also allows for different types of contestation whose significance cannot be determined a priori—let alone in terms of privileging the repressed individual experience.
A new political aesthetic should at least prove skeptical of claims that the assertion of subjectivity necessarily constitutes a privileged form of resistance against the existing order. Art is predicated neither on narrative nor on pedagogic aims. Its subversive quality should not be inflated. Art has no predetermined or immanent purpose to serve, and its content remains indeterminate until criticism situates it within a project of resistance and liberation. Situating the work within a complex of interests and principles depends on the degree of objectification that the genre or style allows in terms of discursive categories. It thus made sense for thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who emphasize intuition and the “reality” behind discursive forms, to insist on the primacy of music. While it is useless to create a hierarchy of forms, still, there are differences in the “political” possibilities that music, painting, and literature can project. The degree of objectification serves as the degree to which any work is open to political interpretation. It therefore makes no sense for a progressive aesthetic to subordinate aesthetics to politics, or vice versa. The interest in resistance and liberation can neither be philosophically turned into an absolute of art nor mechanically identified with any genre—and its articulation always occurs with respect to the work in question.
Illuminating the critical insight into any work is possible only if the critic is willing to look for it in the first place. That is impossible if art is turned into the handmaiden of political revolution or identified with the abstract demands of cultural resistance. Interpretative tolerance is the hallmark of any new and radical aesthetic precisely because criticism of the status quo and the ability to project traces of utopia can take manifold forms and assume new meanings in new circumstances. The work of art thus remains unfinished. But it is no longer sufficient to remember Walter Benjamin’s aesthetic injunction to “never forget the best.” The best still needs to be created—and in different ways, that is the fragile and elusive point of intersection for a radical understanding of culture and politics.