Scan barcode
A review by elliot_burr
Aesthetics and Politics by Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin
5.0
Almost certainly my favourite book on communism I've yet read. A clash of the titans.
Lukács impresses early on by making the strongest possible case for the losing position of socialist realism, beating the shit out of poor Bloch in the process. Jesterly Brecht makes an early appearance in the footnotes to Lukács' essay, a couple of drive-by nose-tweaks that set the stage for a subsequent long-form takedown that foregrounds the need for the freedom of artists to experiment and play -- unsurprising coming from the only actual artist represented among the writers this book collects.
The following portions of the book that concern Benjamin are the low-point here. It's not Benjamin's fault; the decision to represent his thought through diary entries and letters simply puts him at a disadvantage compared to the more rigorous showings of his peers, who actually wrote these essays for publication. Theodor Adorno/'Teddie Weisengrund' (lol)'s letters critiquing various works by Benjamin are relatively uninteresting for similar reasons.
Unlike Benjamin, though, Adorno gets the chance to redeem himself in the book's final section, two full essays wherein he absolutely lays down the law. In the first he gives Lukács a right proper seeing-to, totally demolishing his arguments for socialist realism in with full confidence and rigor. Standout diss:
"Lukács quotes approvingly from my work on the ageing of modern music [...] I do not bregrudge him this; 'Only those thoughts are true which fail to understand themselves' [a self-quote!], and no author can lay claim to proprietary rights over them. Nevertheless, it will need a better argument than Lukács to take these rights away from me."
Beside this passage I annotated, in block caps, one word: BOSS.
On Lukács, subordinate as he was to soviet ideology, Adorno concludes: "here is a man who is desperately tugging at his chains, imagining all the while that their clanking heralds the onward march of the world-spirit. He remains dazzled by the power that would never take his insubordinate ideas to heart, even if it tolerated them."
Less obviously antipathic, and therefore slightly less magisterial (though still strong), is the critique of Brecht and Sartre in Adorno's next and final essay, where he finally advances the claim that, in the postwar era of consumer capitalism, where even political art is appropriated and commodified by the culture industry, the only truly radical work is that which, explicitly political or not, makes itself formally intolerable to that industry's tastes and trends. Samuel Beckett is treated as an ideal model.
I get this reasoning, and sympathise, but find it ultimately unsatisfactory -- as does Fredric Jameson, whose outro efficiently lays out the strengths and weaknesses of all these thinkers and opens the door for a redemption of Lukács, whose ideal of artistic realism was improper for its time but may have new relevance today, in a time when high literature is in love with pastiche and the techniques of modernism are hegemonic in the culture industry -- in the irony of advertising, the quick-cut montage of film.
Of course, Jameson's "today" is today's yesterday, and this book hasn't answered my questions about the aesthetics proper to the capitalist world of 2020. But it's a hell of a primer and an essential point of departure. Loved it.
Lukács impresses early on by making the strongest possible case for the losing position of socialist realism, beating the shit out of poor Bloch in the process. Jesterly Brecht makes an early appearance in the footnotes to Lukács' essay, a couple of drive-by nose-tweaks that set the stage for a subsequent long-form takedown that foregrounds the need for the freedom of artists to experiment and play -- unsurprising coming from the only actual artist represented among the writers this book collects.
The following portions of the book that concern Benjamin are the low-point here. It's not Benjamin's fault; the decision to represent his thought through diary entries and letters simply puts him at a disadvantage compared to the more rigorous showings of his peers, who actually wrote these essays for publication. Theodor Adorno/'Teddie Weisengrund' (lol)'s letters critiquing various works by Benjamin are relatively uninteresting for similar reasons.
Unlike Benjamin, though, Adorno gets the chance to redeem himself in the book's final section, two full essays wherein he absolutely lays down the law. In the first he gives Lukács a right proper seeing-to, totally demolishing his arguments for socialist realism in with full confidence and rigor. Standout diss:
"Lukács quotes approvingly from my work on the ageing of modern music [...] I do not bregrudge him this; 'Only those thoughts are true which fail to understand themselves' [a self-quote!], and no author can lay claim to proprietary rights over them. Nevertheless, it will need a better argument than Lukács to take these rights away from me."
Beside this passage I annotated, in block caps, one word: BOSS.
On Lukács, subordinate as he was to soviet ideology, Adorno concludes: "here is a man who is desperately tugging at his chains, imagining all the while that their clanking heralds the onward march of the world-spirit. He remains dazzled by the power that would never take his insubordinate ideas to heart, even if it tolerated them."
Less obviously antipathic, and therefore slightly less magisterial (though still strong), is the critique of Brecht and Sartre in Adorno's next and final essay, where he finally advances the claim that, in the postwar era of consumer capitalism, where even political art is appropriated and commodified by the culture industry, the only truly radical work is that which, explicitly political or not, makes itself formally intolerable to that industry's tastes and trends. Samuel Beckett is treated as an ideal model.
I get this reasoning, and sympathise, but find it ultimately unsatisfactory -- as does Fredric Jameson, whose outro efficiently lays out the strengths and weaknesses of all these thinkers and opens the door for a redemption of Lukács, whose ideal of artistic realism was improper for its time but may have new relevance today, in a time when high literature is in love with pastiche and the techniques of modernism are hegemonic in the culture industry -- in the irony of advertising, the quick-cut montage of film.
Of course, Jameson's "today" is today's yesterday, and this book hasn't answered my questions about the aesthetics proper to the capitalist world of 2020. But it's a hell of a primer and an essential point of departure. Loved it.