anticap
20th August 2010, 16:53
Note to moderators: I've converted the following from the Google Books image format to text; there should be no problem reproducing a single entry here, under the 'Fair Use' doctrine.
Following is the entry "aesthetics", contributed by Janet Wolff, from A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (http://books.google.com/books?id=q4QwNP_K1pYC), edited by Tom Bottomore, et al.
This piece could apply to any of the cultural sub-forums; I chose literature simply because it is mentioned most often in the piece.
***
There is no systematic theory of art to be found in the writings of Marx and Engels. Both writers had an early, and lifelong, interest in aesthetics and the arts, however, and their various brief discussions of such questions have formed the basis for numerous attempts, particularly in the last few decades, to produce a specifically Marxist aesthetics. The scattered statements of Marx and Engels on the arts have been collected in recently edited volumes, and referred to in books surveying the development of Marxist thought on aesthetics (Arvon 1973; Laing 1978). Not surprisingly, the fragmentary nature of these comments has produced a variety of emphases and positions in the work of later writers. This entry begins by briefly identifying some of these starting-points in the work of Marx and Engels and the way in which they have proved suggestive for various authors. It then looks at some central themes in the history of Marxist aesthetics and in recent work in this field.
Aesthetics in the work of Marx and Engels
A humanist aesthetics has been constructed from Marx's comments on the nature of art as creative labour, no different in quality from other (non-alienated) labour (Vázquez 1973). When Marx talks (Capital I, ch. 5, sect. 1) about the essentially human character of labour, comparing the architect and the bee, it is significant that the architect is invoked merely as an example of a human worker and not as a privileged category of artist. The notion that all non-alienated labour is creative, and hence intrinsically the same as artistic labour, provides the basis for a humanist aesthetics which successfully demystifies art by encouraging us to look at its historical development and separation from other activities (see ALIENATION).
A corollary of this view is the recognition that under capitalism art, like other forms of labour, increasingly becomes alienated labour. Art itself becomes a commodity, and the relations of artistic production reduce the position of the artist to one of an exploited labourer, producing surplus value. As Marx says (Theories of Surplus Value, pt. I, Appendix on 'Productive and Unproductive Labour') 'capitalist production is hostile to certain branches of spiritual production, for example, art and poetry'. He goes on to clarify the transformation of artistic labour under capitalism:
Milton, who did the Paradise Lost for five pounds, was an unproductive labourer. On the other hand, the writer who turns out stuff for his publisher in factory style, is a productive labourer.... The literary proletarian of Leipzig, who fabricates books ... under the direction of his publisher, is a productive labourer; for his product is from the outlet subsumed under capital, and comes into being only for the purpose of increasing that capital. A singer who sells her song for her own account is an unproductive labourer. But the same singer commissioned by an entrepreneur to sing in order to make money for him is a productive labourer; for she produces capital.
This analysis of the distortion of artistic labour and of cultural products under capitalism is the premiss of later critiques of the 'culture industry' (for example by Adorno and Horkheimer) in which regulation by the law of value and the transformation of cultural products into commodities are said to reduce culture and the arts to the status of conformist, repetitive, worthless things, whose function is to ensure political quietude. From Marx's general theory of commodity fetishism, the Marxist aesthetician, Lukács, developed a theory of art. In his major philosophical work, History and Class Consciousnesses, Lukács described the reified and fragmented nature of human life and experience under capitalism, analysing the impact of commodity fetishism on consciousness. Reified thought fails to perceive the totality of social and economic relations. The whole of the rest of Lukács's life was devoted to work on literature and aesthetics, in which the concept of 'totality' remains central. In Lukács's view, great literature is that which manages to penetrate beyond surface appearances, to perceive and expose the social totality, with all its contradictions.
Related to this is the theory of realism in art. In Lukács's opinion, good 'realist' literature portrays the totality through the use of 'typical' characters. This notion of realism receives support from other writing by the founders of Marxism, and in particular from two important letters written by Engels in the 1880s to aspiring women novelists. In these letters Engels firmly rejects so called 'tendency-literature' -- literature which carries an explicit political message -- in favour of the 'realist' text, out of which a correct political analysis may still emerge. 'The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art. The realism I allude to may crop out even in spite of the author's opinions' (letter to Margaret Harkness, April 1888, in Marx and Engels On Literature and Art (1973), p. 116). He goes on to give the example of Balzac, who presents 'a most wonderfully realistic history of French "Society"', despite the fact that he is a legitimist, whose 'sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction'. The notion of realism, as the accurate portrayal of a society and its structural (class) conflicts, through the use of 'types', has been a central one in Marxist aesthetics.
More broadly, theories of the relationship between art or literature and the society in which it arises are indebted to Marx's formulation, in the 1859 Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, of the metaphor of base and superstructure, in which the aesthetic is explicitly cited as part of the superstructure, and as one of the 'ideological forms' in which class conflict is carried out. An early formulation of this view of art as the ideological expression of its age is found in the work of Plekhanov, for whom 'literature and art are the mirror of social life' (Arvon 1973, p. 12). At its crudest, such an account reduces art to nothing more than a reflection of social relations and class structure, automatically produced out of these material features. More complex accounts of art as ideology can be found in the work of more recent writers, for example, Goldmann.
Lastly, a rather different tradition in Marxist aesthetics emphasizes the revolutionary potential of art, and the question of commitment for the artist. As Engels's comments on realism make clear, he himself placed more importance on objective description than on overt partisanship. Nevertheless, Marxists have extracted a theory of radicalism in the arts from the writings of Marx and Engels. Lenin recommended that the writer should put his art at the service of the party (1905 (1970) pp. 22-7). (Those who have used this as evidence of his philistinism, however, ignore his other essays on art and literature, in particular his studies of Tolstoy (ibid. pp. 43-62).) From the Marxist notion that 'men make their own history', and that consciousness plays a crucial role in political transformation, aestheticians and artists from Mayakovsky, Brecht and Benjamin to present-day film-makers such as Godard and Pasolini have drawn a programme for revolutionary aesthetic practice.
Major themes in Marxist aesthetics
The concept of realism has remained central for a good deal of Marxist aesthetics, including its variants of socialist realism (whether official Soviet or Chinese versions, or those of Western Marxism; see Laing 1973 and Arvon 1973). It has also been the focus of two kinds of attack. The first goes back to an early debate between Lukács and Brecht (Bloch 1977; see Arvon 1973), in which Brecht argues that classical nineteenth-century realist literature is no longer appropriate for twentieth-century readers or audiences, and in particular that it has no power to radicalize. Clearly, the issue now becomes one of the evaluation of art or literature either in terms of its accurate, and critical, portrayal of society, or primarily in terms of its revolutionary potential. The present-day version of this debate counter-poses the avant-garde and the formally innovative to the more traditional narrative forms in art, literature and drama, proponents of the former arguing that the latter encourage passive and uncritical viewing, however radical the content of the work. The second attack on realism is related to this argument. It maintains that traditional realism, based as it is on a unified and coherent narrative, obscures real contradictions and oppositions in what it reflects, and projects an artificial unity in its representation of the world. The modernist text, on the other hand, is able to capture the contradictory, and to allow the hidden and the silenced to speak, by techniques of textual fragmentation and interruption. This tendency has been influenced by the work of Pierre Macherey, a collaborator of Althusser, and also by French semiologists such as Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva.
The theory of art as ideology has been greatly refined and modified in recent work, particularly in Western Marxism, but also in East Germany and the USSR. Art, though still understood as ideological in an important sense, is not dismissed as mere reflection of social life, but is seen as expressing ideology in mediated form. In particular, the forms and codes of representation have been given their due, as central processes and conventions through which ideology is produced in literary and artistic form. The influence of STRUCTURALISM and semiotics has been important, as has the revival of interest in the work of the Russian Formalists (Bennett 1979). The institutions and practices of the arts are similarly increasingly regarded as essential to an understanding of the production and nature of texts -- for example, the role of mediators such as publishers, galleries, critics, and so on. The latter, however, have so far only been taken seriously by a few writers, many of them Marxist sociologists of the arts or the media. Last, the role of audiences and readers has been recognized as partly constitutive of the work of art itself, often by authors citing in support Marx's comment in the introduction to the Grundrisse that 'consumption produces production'. Hermeneutic theory, semiotics, and reception-aesthetics -- most of them not themselves within the Marxist tradition -- have provided insights and tools for the analysis of the active role of recipients in producing cultural works and their meanings. That is to say, the 'meaning' of a work is no longer regarded as fixed, but is seen as dependent on its audience.
The question of aesthetics and politics continues to be central to contemporary Marxist aesthetics (Baxandall 1972). It is linked to the debates about realism discussed above. A revival of interest in the work of Benjamin has given rise to a focus on the possibility of revolutionizing the means of artistic production as a political act and strategy, rather than concentrating entirely on questions of radical content or even the form of cultural products. Another aspect of the present-day debate is an examination, for example by socialist playwrights, of the question whether radical ideas are most usefully expressed on television, with its potential mass audience as well as its scope for technical innovation and 'Brechtian' devices, or in the theatre, with its relative freedom from structural, professional, and, in the case of community or street theatre, ideological constraints, but its far smaller audiences. Finally, concomitant with the development of a feminist critique of Marxism itself (see FEMINISM), there has recently grown up a socialist-feminist cultural practice and theory, in which patriarchal themes in the arts and patriarchal relations in the theatre and other cultural institutions are subjected to criticism and reversal, in conjunction with a central emphasis on questions of class and ideology.
Last, the development of a Marxist aesthetics has thrown into question the notion of aesthetic value. The recognition that not only the arts themselves, but also the practices and institutions of art criticism, must be construed as ideological and interest-related, exposes the relative and arbitrary nature of the conferral of value on works of art. Until recently this was not thought by Marxist aestheticians to be a problem, and writers such as Lukács managed to preserve a 'great tradition' in literature, perhaps surprisingly close to the great tradition of mainstream bourgeois criticism, by invoking certain political-aesthetic criteria. The question of the relation between 'high' and popular art, like that of the partial perspective of the critic, was rarely addressed. The problem of value is currently confronted by Marxists in a number of ways, ranging from a willing acceptance of the relativist implications of the critique of ideology to an attempt to reassert absolute standards of beauty and value on the basis of supposed human universals of an anthropological or psychological kind (see also ART; CULTURE; LITERATURE).
Reading
Arvon, Henri 1973: Marxist Esthetics.
Baxandall, Lee (ed.) 1972: Radical Perspectives in the Arts.
Bennett, Tony 1979: Formalism and Marxism.
Bloch, Ernst et al. 1977: Aesthetics and Politics.
Laing, David 1978: The Marxist Theory of Art.
Lenin, V.I. 1905 (1967): On Literature and Art.
Vázquez, Adolfo Sanches 1973: Art and Society.
Essays in Marxist Aesthetics.
Williams, Raymond 1977: Marxism and Literature.
JANET WOLFF
Following is the entry "aesthetics", contributed by Janet Wolff, from A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (http://books.google.com/books?id=q4QwNP_K1pYC), edited by Tom Bottomore, et al.
This piece could apply to any of the cultural sub-forums; I chose literature simply because it is mentioned most often in the piece.
***
There is no systematic theory of art to be found in the writings of Marx and Engels. Both writers had an early, and lifelong, interest in aesthetics and the arts, however, and their various brief discussions of such questions have formed the basis for numerous attempts, particularly in the last few decades, to produce a specifically Marxist aesthetics. The scattered statements of Marx and Engels on the arts have been collected in recently edited volumes, and referred to in books surveying the development of Marxist thought on aesthetics (Arvon 1973; Laing 1978). Not surprisingly, the fragmentary nature of these comments has produced a variety of emphases and positions in the work of later writers. This entry begins by briefly identifying some of these starting-points in the work of Marx and Engels and the way in which they have proved suggestive for various authors. It then looks at some central themes in the history of Marxist aesthetics and in recent work in this field.
Aesthetics in the work of Marx and Engels
A humanist aesthetics has been constructed from Marx's comments on the nature of art as creative labour, no different in quality from other (non-alienated) labour (Vázquez 1973). When Marx talks (Capital I, ch. 5, sect. 1) about the essentially human character of labour, comparing the architect and the bee, it is significant that the architect is invoked merely as an example of a human worker and not as a privileged category of artist. The notion that all non-alienated labour is creative, and hence intrinsically the same as artistic labour, provides the basis for a humanist aesthetics which successfully demystifies art by encouraging us to look at its historical development and separation from other activities (see ALIENATION).
A corollary of this view is the recognition that under capitalism art, like other forms of labour, increasingly becomes alienated labour. Art itself becomes a commodity, and the relations of artistic production reduce the position of the artist to one of an exploited labourer, producing surplus value. As Marx says (Theories of Surplus Value, pt. I, Appendix on 'Productive and Unproductive Labour') 'capitalist production is hostile to certain branches of spiritual production, for example, art and poetry'. He goes on to clarify the transformation of artistic labour under capitalism:
Milton, who did the Paradise Lost for five pounds, was an unproductive labourer. On the other hand, the writer who turns out stuff for his publisher in factory style, is a productive labourer.... The literary proletarian of Leipzig, who fabricates books ... under the direction of his publisher, is a productive labourer; for his product is from the outlet subsumed under capital, and comes into being only for the purpose of increasing that capital. A singer who sells her song for her own account is an unproductive labourer. But the same singer commissioned by an entrepreneur to sing in order to make money for him is a productive labourer; for she produces capital.
This analysis of the distortion of artistic labour and of cultural products under capitalism is the premiss of later critiques of the 'culture industry' (for example by Adorno and Horkheimer) in which regulation by the law of value and the transformation of cultural products into commodities are said to reduce culture and the arts to the status of conformist, repetitive, worthless things, whose function is to ensure political quietude. From Marx's general theory of commodity fetishism, the Marxist aesthetician, Lukács, developed a theory of art. In his major philosophical work, History and Class Consciousnesses, Lukács described the reified and fragmented nature of human life and experience under capitalism, analysing the impact of commodity fetishism on consciousness. Reified thought fails to perceive the totality of social and economic relations. The whole of the rest of Lukács's life was devoted to work on literature and aesthetics, in which the concept of 'totality' remains central. In Lukács's view, great literature is that which manages to penetrate beyond surface appearances, to perceive and expose the social totality, with all its contradictions.
Related to this is the theory of realism in art. In Lukács's opinion, good 'realist' literature portrays the totality through the use of 'typical' characters. This notion of realism receives support from other writing by the founders of Marxism, and in particular from two important letters written by Engels in the 1880s to aspiring women novelists. In these letters Engels firmly rejects so called 'tendency-literature' -- literature which carries an explicit political message -- in favour of the 'realist' text, out of which a correct political analysis may still emerge. 'The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art. The realism I allude to may crop out even in spite of the author's opinions' (letter to Margaret Harkness, April 1888, in Marx and Engels On Literature and Art (1973), p. 116). He goes on to give the example of Balzac, who presents 'a most wonderfully realistic history of French "Society"', despite the fact that he is a legitimist, whose 'sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction'. The notion of realism, as the accurate portrayal of a society and its structural (class) conflicts, through the use of 'types', has been a central one in Marxist aesthetics.
More broadly, theories of the relationship between art or literature and the society in which it arises are indebted to Marx's formulation, in the 1859 Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, of the metaphor of base and superstructure, in which the aesthetic is explicitly cited as part of the superstructure, and as one of the 'ideological forms' in which class conflict is carried out. An early formulation of this view of art as the ideological expression of its age is found in the work of Plekhanov, for whom 'literature and art are the mirror of social life' (Arvon 1973, p. 12). At its crudest, such an account reduces art to nothing more than a reflection of social relations and class structure, automatically produced out of these material features. More complex accounts of art as ideology can be found in the work of more recent writers, for example, Goldmann.
Lastly, a rather different tradition in Marxist aesthetics emphasizes the revolutionary potential of art, and the question of commitment for the artist. As Engels's comments on realism make clear, he himself placed more importance on objective description than on overt partisanship. Nevertheless, Marxists have extracted a theory of radicalism in the arts from the writings of Marx and Engels. Lenin recommended that the writer should put his art at the service of the party (1905 (1970) pp. 22-7). (Those who have used this as evidence of his philistinism, however, ignore his other essays on art and literature, in particular his studies of Tolstoy (ibid. pp. 43-62).) From the Marxist notion that 'men make their own history', and that consciousness plays a crucial role in political transformation, aestheticians and artists from Mayakovsky, Brecht and Benjamin to present-day film-makers such as Godard and Pasolini have drawn a programme for revolutionary aesthetic practice.
Major themes in Marxist aesthetics
The concept of realism has remained central for a good deal of Marxist aesthetics, including its variants of socialist realism (whether official Soviet or Chinese versions, or those of Western Marxism; see Laing 1973 and Arvon 1973). It has also been the focus of two kinds of attack. The first goes back to an early debate between Lukács and Brecht (Bloch 1977; see Arvon 1973), in which Brecht argues that classical nineteenth-century realist literature is no longer appropriate for twentieth-century readers or audiences, and in particular that it has no power to radicalize. Clearly, the issue now becomes one of the evaluation of art or literature either in terms of its accurate, and critical, portrayal of society, or primarily in terms of its revolutionary potential. The present-day version of this debate counter-poses the avant-garde and the formally innovative to the more traditional narrative forms in art, literature and drama, proponents of the former arguing that the latter encourage passive and uncritical viewing, however radical the content of the work. The second attack on realism is related to this argument. It maintains that traditional realism, based as it is on a unified and coherent narrative, obscures real contradictions and oppositions in what it reflects, and projects an artificial unity in its representation of the world. The modernist text, on the other hand, is able to capture the contradictory, and to allow the hidden and the silenced to speak, by techniques of textual fragmentation and interruption. This tendency has been influenced by the work of Pierre Macherey, a collaborator of Althusser, and also by French semiologists such as Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva.
The theory of art as ideology has been greatly refined and modified in recent work, particularly in Western Marxism, but also in East Germany and the USSR. Art, though still understood as ideological in an important sense, is not dismissed as mere reflection of social life, but is seen as expressing ideology in mediated form. In particular, the forms and codes of representation have been given their due, as central processes and conventions through which ideology is produced in literary and artistic form. The influence of STRUCTURALISM and semiotics has been important, as has the revival of interest in the work of the Russian Formalists (Bennett 1979). The institutions and practices of the arts are similarly increasingly regarded as essential to an understanding of the production and nature of texts -- for example, the role of mediators such as publishers, galleries, critics, and so on. The latter, however, have so far only been taken seriously by a few writers, many of them Marxist sociologists of the arts or the media. Last, the role of audiences and readers has been recognized as partly constitutive of the work of art itself, often by authors citing in support Marx's comment in the introduction to the Grundrisse that 'consumption produces production'. Hermeneutic theory, semiotics, and reception-aesthetics -- most of them not themselves within the Marxist tradition -- have provided insights and tools for the analysis of the active role of recipients in producing cultural works and their meanings. That is to say, the 'meaning' of a work is no longer regarded as fixed, but is seen as dependent on its audience.
The question of aesthetics and politics continues to be central to contemporary Marxist aesthetics (Baxandall 1972). It is linked to the debates about realism discussed above. A revival of interest in the work of Benjamin has given rise to a focus on the possibility of revolutionizing the means of artistic production as a political act and strategy, rather than concentrating entirely on questions of radical content or even the form of cultural products. Another aspect of the present-day debate is an examination, for example by socialist playwrights, of the question whether radical ideas are most usefully expressed on television, with its potential mass audience as well as its scope for technical innovation and 'Brechtian' devices, or in the theatre, with its relative freedom from structural, professional, and, in the case of community or street theatre, ideological constraints, but its far smaller audiences. Finally, concomitant with the development of a feminist critique of Marxism itself (see FEMINISM), there has recently grown up a socialist-feminist cultural practice and theory, in which patriarchal themes in the arts and patriarchal relations in the theatre and other cultural institutions are subjected to criticism and reversal, in conjunction with a central emphasis on questions of class and ideology.
Last, the development of a Marxist aesthetics has thrown into question the notion of aesthetic value. The recognition that not only the arts themselves, but also the practices and institutions of art criticism, must be construed as ideological and interest-related, exposes the relative and arbitrary nature of the conferral of value on works of art. Until recently this was not thought by Marxist aestheticians to be a problem, and writers such as Lukács managed to preserve a 'great tradition' in literature, perhaps surprisingly close to the great tradition of mainstream bourgeois criticism, by invoking certain political-aesthetic criteria. The question of the relation between 'high' and popular art, like that of the partial perspective of the critic, was rarely addressed. The problem of value is currently confronted by Marxists in a number of ways, ranging from a willing acceptance of the relativist implications of the critique of ideology to an attempt to reassert absolute standards of beauty and value on the basis of supposed human universals of an anthropological or psychological kind (see also ART; CULTURE; LITERATURE).
Reading
Arvon, Henri 1973: Marxist Esthetics.
Baxandall, Lee (ed.) 1972: Radical Perspectives in the Arts.
Bennett, Tony 1979: Formalism and Marxism.
Bloch, Ernst et al. 1977: Aesthetics and Politics.
Laing, David 1978: The Marxist Theory of Art.
Lenin, V.I. 1905 (1967): On Literature and Art.
Vázquez, Adolfo Sanches 1973: Art and Society.
Essays in Marxist Aesthetics.
Williams, Raymond 1977: Marxism and Literature.
JANET WOLFF