Some links, to follow up on the presentation:
http://www.francis-bacon.cx/ (more Francis Bacon)
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Creeley.html (more Creeley reading)
And I suggest checking out some 1-size books of Bacon’s work at the Rock if youse got the time.
Here is that other paper I wrote for Bewes’ Aesthetics and Politics class…for anyone interested in Adorno, Lukacs, and/or debates within Marxist aesthetics…
Crafting a Marxist Aesthetics: The Lukacs - Adorno Realism Debates
Debate within Western Marxist aesthetics has, historically, taken as a point of focus the relative value of realism and modernism. At stake are claims about the nature of reality—is it a comprehensible whole? Is the role of art to duplicate it? In this paper, I will critically examine two major players in this debate—Georg Lukacs and Theodor Adorno—and, by presenting their fraught exchange, show the difficulty of crafting what is a truly Marxist, and truly aesthetic, philosophy.
Lukacs, at the outset of his essay Realism in the Balance, identifies “three main currents” in contemporary literature: “authentic” realism, the kind of literature he advocates; “pseudo-realism,” or conservative literature bent on justifying the status quo; and avant-garde modernism—what he sometimes labels Surrealism, or Expressionism—whose “main trend is its growing distance from, and progressive dissolution of, realism.” (L29) Lukacs’ critique of modernism is threefold: 1) That it fetishizes subjective (fragmented) impressions, instead of seeking to make objective reality (a totality) comprehensible 2) That it is formalist, that its movements value style over content (e.g. impressionism is an idealistic reaction to naturalism, simply another –ism); and 3) That it privileges a bourgeois subject, and is inaccessible to the masses.
Art’s task, for Lukacs, is mimetic: it is supposed to faithfully represent the world as it actually is. He writes about this as a kind of breakthrough, using a number of verbs (“penetrate,” “probe,” “uncover,” etc.) that are predicated on a base/superstructure model in which a superficial appearance is pierced to discover the underlying essence (i.e. objective reality, true totality). The notion of an underlying whole (totality) is distinctly Hegelian, indebted to the concept of the Absolute Idea. Realist literature moves toward sensual presentation of this Idea, which, in a Marxist analysis, involves discovering the class/economic structures that drive the world. This depiction of relations of the whole is an objective truth, and thus differs entirely from the kind of subjective truth that marks modernist literature. An author like Joyce’s presentation of the fragmented consciousness of man is irresponsible in that it abandons the task of objectively depicting totality. The notion of objectivity is crucial here: as Lukacs writes, “If literature is a particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected, then it becomes of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as it truly is.” (Lukacs 33) If man’s consciousness is fragmented, it is due to the crisis of late capitalist society of which he finds himself a part; the underlying reality remains whole and in tact: “As a result of the objective structure of this economic system, the surface of capitalism appears to ‘disintegrate’…Obviously this must be reflected in the consciousness of the men who live in this society, and hence too in the consciousness of poets and thinkers.” (Lukacs 32, italics mine) Literature, to perform its proper social role, should avoid this situation and make the conditions of this society more comprehensible, rather than fetishizing its incomprehensibility by lapsing into “mere” subjectivism.
Adorno, in his Reconciliation under Duress, opposes Lukacs on multiple grounds, accusing him of dogmatism, abstraction, of being undialectical, and of reducing art to a social science. Lukacs’ notion of comprehensibility is deeply disturbing to Adorno, as it marks a kind of totalitarian impulse to gain control over the world through representation (Adorno calls mimesis a “vulgar-materialist shibboleth to which he [Lukacs] doggedly clings.” (Adorno 153) Adorno shares a debt to Hegel, but is not interested in the pursuit of the Absolute Idea / totality, but rather in Hegel’s notion of the dialectic. Adorno’s negative dialectics moves not toward final understanding, but again and again away from it—emphasizing the Hegelian continual critical effort to refine the idea, without any transcendent Idea at the end of the road. The tension of non-identity is what is crucially worth preserving for Adorno. This is why Lukacs’ philosophy represents a kind of dogma for him; why he feels compelled to overturn Lukacs’ statement “the true is the whole” to read “the whole is the untrue.” (Lecture 3/7/06) Works of art do justice to world not when they allow us to comprehend it, but when they remain incomprehensible—when they resist simple interpretation, or appropriation by concept/category, at every turn. This “residue of incomprehensibility” is precisely what grants the artwork its status as an autonomous object. The Kantian notion of autonomy is incorporated into Adorno’s Marxist aesthetic as a way to explain art’s revolutionary power: although the work of art remains a product of its social/cultural circumstances, it, through its irreducibility to a concept, helps to liberate us from a reified way of looking at the world. If art is reduced, as it is alleged Lukacs would like, to a social science—a way to transfer objective facts about the world—it would lose this power.
That this is a debate within Marxist aesthetics is something important to keep in mind. As Marxists, one of the accusations these writers constantly had to ward off was of being overly “Idealist” (as opposed to materialist); this of course means different things for different theorists. For Lukacs it is associated with an over-reliance on form and a disregard for content. Lukacs accuses modernists of this “formalism,” that they are more concerned with style than reality: “It is symptomatic of the entire process that each movement in the past confined its attention entirely to the movement immediately preceding it; thus Impressionism concerned itself exclusively with Naturalism, and so on. Hence neither theory nor practice ever advanced beyond the stage of abstract confrontation.” (Lukacs 40)
Adorno responds, “What looks like formalism to him, really means the structuring of the elements of a work in accordance with laws appropriate to them…The objectivity he misses in modern art and which he expects from the subject-matter when placed in ‘perspective,’ is in fact achieved by the procedures and techniques which dissolve the subject-matter and reorganize it in a way which does create a perspective—but these are the very procedures and techniques he wishes to sweep away.” (Adorno 153) For Adorno, art does not ever deal with reality but only with un-reality, or “appearance,” and thus must not make claims to do otherwise. “Art does not become knowledge with reference to mere immediate reality, i.e. by doing justice to a reality which veils its own essence its truth in favour of a merely classificatory order. Art and reality can only converge if art crystallizes out its own formal laws.” (Adorno 159-60) Art can only concentrate on matters of style—to deny this is, as he says earlier in the essay, “symptomatic of the dogmatic sclerosis of content.” It is perhaps for this reason that Adorno’s own style of writing is so complex, difficult, and relevant.
However, one of the main thrusts of Lukacs’ argument—the value of accessibility—is perhaps less easily dismissible within a Marxist aesthetic, even behind the shield of Adorno. What is the ideal relation between literature and the masses? For Lukacs, literature is supposed to reveal the underlying reality; it plays an edifying and mobilizing role: “Through the mediation of realist literature the soul of the masses is made receptive for an understanding of the great, progressive and democratic epochs of human history” (Lukacs 56) And elsewhere: “A vital relationship to the life of the people, a progressive development of the masses’ own experiences—this is the great social mission of literature.” (Lukacs 57) Modernist literature is to be condemned because its “excessive” stylistic experimentation is only accessible to the bourgeoisie, and fails to have relevancy in “a struggle for a genuine popular culture” (Lukacs 57).
Adorno does not have a model for popular culture to replace Lukacs; in fact, he is extremely skeptical of all forms of mass culture as such. This refusal to put faith into art as mass industry—and his refusal, unlike Lukacs, to be taken under the wing of Stalinist Russia (and, later, to join in solidarity the student movements in ’68)—is what places, for many, his status as a Marxist under fire, as well as what makes his aesthetic theory so compelling for others. For Adorno, true artwork is fundamentally inaccessible, has some “enigmatic” quality that defies interpretation. It must remain out of politics—must refrain from attempting to move the masses, as Lukacs would expect—although, again, this is “an apoliticism that is in fact deeply political.” (Adorno 177) Adorno’s style itself is consciously inaccessible—a trait for which Lukacs would fault him. But it at least adheres to its own stylistic principles: Adorno’s “tortuous” style does resist appropriation at every turn, through its layers of contradiction, reliance on metaphor, and unwillingness to settle on any straightforward “thesis”— whereas Lukacs’ dense, dogmatic philosophical style is not exactly the stuff of the proletariat breakfast table.
As theories, Adorno’s seems to be the more internally consistent—even if this quality results precisely from its refusal to be consistent. As an aesthetic philosophy, too, Adorno’s is more compelling: his incorporation of Kantian autonomy opens up a role for the work of art beyond mere mimesis or instrumental transfer of content. As Marxist theories, both seem to have points of weakness: Lukacs’ hypocritical idealism (his “dogmatic sclerosis of content”), and his formalism (his obstinate clinging to realists of the past as the only proper models); and Adorno’s also obstinate inaccessibility to the masses. But to try to identify what makes a philosophy “truly Marxist” seems to be missing the point—that the aesthetic and the political have a more fraught, complicated relationship in Adorno’s work is to its credit, or, at least, what makes it less easily susceptible to critique.
