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A review by jesswalsh
Aesthetics and Politics by Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin
3.0
The translations are good, although at times they suffer from grammar so clunky that you can feel the original German trying to claw its way onto the page.
The real fundamental issue with this book is: what is the point of it? On paper, the concept of positing critique/reply style mini essays on Marxist Aesthetic theory against each other seems positive in that it could stimulate dialectic analysis and position theory within a historical framework. In reality, though, it quickly devolves into personal opinion and hang ups veiled in academic language. For example, Lukács can seemingly only conceptualise art as novels, and throughout the only time a piece of non-literature art is mentioned is a brief reference to Picasso’s Guernica. Actual consideration of art and aesthetic takes a back seat to arch comments about the rigorousness of another critic’s theoretical approach. There is not a speck of praxis to be had and the thinkers represented in the book come off, at best, as catty, aloof, and superficial. The choice, for example, to include the correspondence from Adorno to Benjamin wherein in the midst of general quibbling he remarks ‘The laughter of the audience at a cinema... is anything but good and revolutionary; instead, it is full of the worst bourgeois sadism’ in a letter dated 18th March 1936 - 11 days after German forces re-militarised the Rhineland and violated the treaty of Versailles - smacks of ‘complaining about the colour of the curtains while the house burns down’.
There certainly is an important place in Marxist theory for aesthetics. The field itself is of great worth. Given the material conditions at the time - the successes and failures of the ‘popular front’ movements and the USSR, the respective positions of the contributors within governments or parties - it is not surprising that the form that aesthetic analysis takes here seems to be animated by reactionary and personal ideas. This is not to say that the essays and correspondence do not have worth, though perhaps a harsher editor could have presented the material in a more critical way and given the overall theoretical field a better sheen. The concluding afterword by Jameson does go some way towards this and is a redeeming feature. It is measured, realistic in analysis and both sympathetic towards the problems faced by the thinkers presented in this book and critical of their vindictive and narrow-minded approaches.
The real fundamental issue with this book is: what is the point of it? On paper, the concept of positing critique/reply style mini essays on Marxist Aesthetic theory against each other seems positive in that it could stimulate dialectic analysis and position theory within a historical framework. In reality, though, it quickly devolves into personal opinion and hang ups veiled in academic language. For example, Lukács can seemingly only conceptualise art as novels, and throughout the only time a piece of non-literature art is mentioned is a brief reference to Picasso’s Guernica. Actual consideration of art and aesthetic takes a back seat to arch comments about the rigorousness of another critic’s theoretical approach. There is not a speck of praxis to be had and the thinkers represented in the book come off, at best, as catty, aloof, and superficial. The choice, for example, to include the correspondence from Adorno to Benjamin wherein in the midst of general quibbling he remarks ‘The laughter of the audience at a cinema... is anything but good and revolutionary; instead, it is full of the worst bourgeois sadism’ in a letter dated 18th March 1936 - 11 days after German forces re-militarised the Rhineland and violated the treaty of Versailles - smacks of ‘complaining about the colour of the curtains while the house burns down’.
There certainly is an important place in Marxist theory for aesthetics. The field itself is of great worth. Given the material conditions at the time - the successes and failures of the ‘popular front’ movements and the USSR, the respective positions of the contributors within governments or parties - it is not surprising that the form that aesthetic analysis takes here seems to be animated by reactionary and personal ideas. This is not to say that the essays and correspondence do not have worth, though perhaps a harsher editor could have presented the material in a more critical way and given the overall theoretical field a better sheen. The concluding afterword by Jameson does go some way towards this and is a redeeming feature. It is measured, realistic in analysis and both sympathetic towards the problems faced by the thinkers presented in this book and critical of their vindictive and narrow-minded approaches.