Andrew's Wiki
Marxism Modernism

Etc

• Passivity, the belief that humans can’t do anything, is a similar result to that of commodity fetishism: the effective disappearance of human actors as agents from the historical stage
• Modernism’s Qualities (from Felski 23)
  • “aesthetic self-consciousness
  • “simultaneity, juxtaposition, and montage
  • “paradox, ambiguity, and uncertainty
  • “dehumanization of the subject.”

Lukacs, Brecht Debate

• Both were exiles from fascism and were debating during the 30s whether 19th c realism or 20th c modernism would provide a model for struggle against fascism
• Why did they diff?
  • Emphasized diff parts of Marxism
  • Disagreed about what was happening during interwar period
  • Approaches
    • Lukacs: at the core “a traditional ethical and aesthetic humanism, drawn with patrician and idealist strokes…and deeply committed to the continuity of European classical culture.”
    • Brecht: “attempted to apply notions of scientific experimentation and economic production in search of a modernist aesthetic attuned to the technical and collectivist twentieth century” 75
• Lukacs over whole 30s attacked modernism, and in doing so “resembled” and “underpinned” Soviet policy, while Brecht wants to avoid any orthodoxy attack on experimentation
  • However, don’t see them as totally mutually exclusive: critics have misrepresented the debate in favor of Brecht; and both of them were figures who were “both inside and outside the socialist camp” and Brecht isn’t an arch-modernist (disliked Baudelaire, Rilke, Kafka, Dostoevsky) b/c so militant
• Lukacs: realism v naturalism
  • Realism
    • 1789-1848: bourgeoisie creates a vital, rich realism, which is continuous w/the great Western literary tradish (ie Shax), as it fights against aristocracy and absolutism
    • Scott, Stendhal, Goethe, Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac
    • realism: “literary mode in which the lives of individual characters were portrayed as part of a narrative which situated them within the entire historical dynamics of their society.”
      • historical realism: using retrospective voice, “contain epic hierarchy of events and objects” revealing “what is essential and significant in the historically conditioned transformation of individual character” 78
    • in it, history is a process, individual experience “mediated by particular groups,” so that the individuals are active and agents, at the same time “unique and representative”
      • (not via allegory, ie personifications) (characters are full and round) (they are both subjects and objects of history)
    • the events of their lives show “the crucial currents helping to shape the present and the future” (the significance of daily life)
    • human relationships comment on social institutions in a way that reverses reification: narrator present human interaction in such a way that it reveals social institutions, politics, economics
    • Balzac lived at a time when capitalist transformation wasn’t complete, and thus easy for him to “apprehend social change as a network of individual stories” – he could still SEE and participates in social change occurring, could still see people producing objects (unlike the later Zola, when capitalist accg to Lukacs is “fully evolved”)
      • and cf Engels on Balzac to see why he would care about a reactionary like Balzac
  • naturalism
    • after 1850; Zola, Balzac
      • they had no access to the forces of historical change, b/c by now the forces all look automatic
    • all you can do now is describe, observe
      • narrative: factual, not realist.
      • author: an observer, not an actor.
    • instead of seeing character as developing within and around history which is also changing, history is seen as a given
      • “immediate empirical reality as an objectified ‘given,’ abstracted from individual and historical change” 80
      • events are a background: why? b/c person no longer seen as having agency, not “changeable through purposive human action”
    • emphasis not given in order to reflect historical movement and social totality, but instead in regard to mere form. it’s artificial, not organic.
      • they try to make up for this “gulf” between the sensuous and historical, they fill it with symbols, metaphors: this is “arbitrary and fortuitous” and tries to force a sense of social totality
    • it’s a mere “finished product”
    • we started w/an author who can’t see the totality and doesn’t participate in it, and it ends up with a reader who is “a passive observer of mechanically ordered occurrences”
    • We no longer have a narrative voice that has vision and omniscience
    • There is no real cause and effect anymore, so reverts to psychologizing the characters, but b/c bound to nothing, fleeting: “Static situations with fetishized objects are described, alternating with isolated, fleeting, subjective impressions—an abstract objectivity alternating with a false subjectivity” 81
      • as you can tell, this model of naturalism becomes his model for modernism: modernism for him has “mechanical split between subject and object, between immediate phenomena and historical essence” instead of “dialectical interplay” and is robbed of the “mediations” between subject and society; it is the true “vulgar materialism” (the fact alone) and presents events and feelings divorced from totality (the person alone)
  • the language here is mechanical v organic
• So, modernism is “chasm between subject and object” 81
  • had earlier, 1910 Soul and Form, compared symbolism and naturalism b/c the psychic mood in symbolism is seen just as removed from social totality in historical movement as the fact is under naturalism
  • modernism: “fetishized immediacy” that is best seen in montage: “sticking together of disconnected facts” in Lukacs’ words; flat juxtaposition; and in obsession with experimenting
• Modernists aren’t in touch with the masses b/c of division of labor, whereas realism had wide audience and they could learn from realism. They can’t learn from modernist difficult texts.
  • Only by maintaining some continuity w/past lit can you connect with them.
• While modernists do show how capitalism makes people “appurtenances of things,” they do not go beyond this fact
  • Modernists are uncritically reflecting their historical moment; just showing the chaos and not showing where it came from and how we could get somewhere new
  • Instead of fatalism and despair, use the explanatory modes given to you by reason and history 83
    • my counterarg: yet isn’t that just being nostalgic about the past when people really were progressive? (b/c he says that realism occurred in time when bourgeoisie was kind of a progressive force)...the modernists can’t see the progress or the potential future, honey, so how can you make them?
• Lukacs said that to get a proletarian culture, you have to build off optimistic bourgeois lit, “not those resulting from the spreading bourgeois disbelief in any rational and progressive meaning in history” 83 he wants progressivist humanist attitudes, not irrational decay loving ones
• Against Expressionism
  • They only mirror “the mystic irrationalism of imperialist ideology in the years 1905-20.”
  • Their “romantic anti-capitalism” found an answer in themselves only. as individuals: not concrete ones either. bathos instead of human relationships. no society to be found.
  • solipsistic: don’t get beyond their own emotions, making inhumanity “eternal” rather than couched w/in specific historical change, so naturalizes barbarism
  • Don’t get working classes
  • too easily slides into fascism: belief in elite
• Brecht’s work is merely modernism aimed towards the masses: too abstract, doesn’t show concrete movements of history w/in personal experience; and his distancing techniques are only formalism
• Brecht’s attack
  • How can the work of Balzac and Tolstoy somehow transcend their authors’ reactionary natures, and yet modernist works are “tied indissolubly” to bourgeois decay? 85
  • Every socialist movement needs artistic experimentation
  • You can’t control my art! Get off my art!
    • Lukacs’ prescriptions are too narrow, not leaving room for “potential realist possibilities in modern art” 86
• “What we needed, instead, was a wider concept of realism as a confronting of a many-sided, contradictory (and often hidden) historical reality, whatever the formal means which facilitated this.” 86
  • Brecht’s words: “Realism is not a matter of form… Literary forms have to be checked against reality, not against aesthetics—even realist aesthetics. There are many ways of suppressing truth and many ways of stating it.”
  • Shelley and Swift are realists, says Brecht: even though they used “wild fantasy, the grotesque, parable, allegory, typifying of individuals, etc., for realistic purposes” 87
• Experimentation
  • “new formal means…reveal a constantly changing social reality:” artists need to adapt to new reality quickly; that’s not formalism
  • What is actually formalism is trying to retain the old conventional form of realism
• How do we reach modernity?
  • “modern technical and collective life [massive and sprawling]...can be comprehended only through abstractions from the individual’s vantage point. Such a reality may need to be ‘built up’ through a montage of carefully and purposefully juxtaposed nonlinear images if we are to suggest anything of its ‘totality.’”
  • Even modernists’ self-conscious, self-reflexive moments are great for Brecht: says that it reveals the artificial process of “reconstructing the social whole”
• Uneven development (between art and society)
  • Notes that literary forms (this is the literary force of production) can also be separated from their problematic moment in history: just as the forces of production change faster than the relations of production
  • We CAN use the products of this horrid era for “progressive” purposes, so you can use montage, stream of consciousness, monologue, etc in good ways by transforming them: instead of giving a despairing or mythical viewpoint, be socialist.
• Says that the masses are willing to receive innovative art, and the works shouldn’t be instantly accessible b/c the worker (like the artist) needs to be learning more via art: becoming popular, not merely being popular (automatically)
  • Comprehensibility isn’t guaranteed by mimicking
• Last Notes
  • Lukacs thought that you could prepare readers for being a part of a progressive social movement or social totality by vicariously experiencing one via reading a narrative that overcomes the APPARENT contradiction between individual and historical process and shows them together
  • Brecht said that having catharsis in a book will make you less likely to join political action and that having harmonious rounded characters is not a valid response to “Contemporary dehumanization” but a mere “paper solution” 90; and it can’t be closed w/in itself but open so that the reader will go out and complete the job. The author is not to reconcile contradictions but to expose them