By David Black
Forms of culture (art, law, religion, technology) are created in historical time, but often attain an independent validity which may render them inaccessible to their creators, e.g. a work of art such as a painting may, when first exhibited in a gallery, may be acclaimed as profound, original and daring; yet might get labelled as kitsch when it is mass reproduced to hang in suburban parlors.
This phenomenon was already taking hold in the late 19th century when the German sociologist, George Simmel (1858-1918) began to correlate cultural developments with the increasing fragmentation of the work process as described by Karl Marx. Subjectively, the individual ‘spirit’ feels alienated from an ‘objective life’ (work) dominated by exchange value and money. By the same token (literally) money cam provide the means to establish a private realm of relative cultural freedom, separated off from the grind of alienated and quantified objectification.
The theorists of the Second International (1889-1916) based their formulations on the base-superstructure model, resulting in a sociological Marxism ‘without aesthetics’. Marx’s doctrine was reduced to economics and politics, with its philosophical essence reduced to positivist sociology. Artists and all other cultural personifications were thought to produce their works as simple reflections of the economic base, according to their class position within the epiphenomena of institutional and ideological formations.
To correct this shortcoming, Simmel, in The Philosophy of Money, aims to
‘construct a new storey beneath historical materialism such that the explanatory value of the incorporation of economic life into the causes of intellectual culture is preserved, while these economic forms themselves are recognized as the result of more profound valuations and currents of psychological or even metaphysical preconditions.’
To establish this philosophically, Simmel, who was schooled in the Neo-Kantian school of sociology, utilises what Kant had expressly ruled out as a source of validity: Plato’s ‘realm of the forms’.
‘The ordinary idea is: here is the natural world, there the transcendental, we belong to one of the two. No, we belong to a third, inexpressible realm, of which both the natural and the transcendental are reflections, projections, falsifications, interpretations.’
For Simmel, this underivable, value-creating reason lies beyond the distinction of subject and object; beyond the alienation of the human subject from the ‘everyday’ world of production, distribution and exchange. Simmel says it is a ‘typical tragedy of spirit to reside in the opposition between the realm of ideas and reality.’
In Kant’s Aesthetics, objective judgements, apart from those of ‘common sense’, don’t apply to works of art. The ‘taste’ of the individual may or may not be shared by other individuals. In all cases the judgement is subjective. Developments in artistic technique, form and content are assigned to the natural ‘genius’, whose talents cannot be accounted for objectively. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the unifying of formal reason for the scientific investigation of objective reality is determined exclusively by the individual observer. But, in Simmel’s version of Neo-Kantianism, Kant’s a priori forms – the ‘essence of our intellect’ – are seen as ‘calling forth nature itself’. The unity of society is not then determined by the abstractions of the individual observer, but is social: ‘directly realized by its own elements because these elements are themselves conscious and synthesizing units.’ Hence the consciousness of constituting with others a unity is ‘actually all there is . . . to this unity.’
George Lukács (1885-1971) and Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) were students of Simmel in Heidelberg, during the years preceding the First World War.
Lukács, in his History of Modern Drama (1909). which is influenced by Simmel, addresses ‘the tendency to depersonalization and reduction of quality to quantity in bourgeois society’, and ‘the desire to reduce everything to figures and formulae’. The modern world had negated the Romanticist dream of an authentic world based on aesthetics and ethics rather than economics and nihilistic growth. Society had become the arena of tragedy, reflected in dramas about the conflict between the aspiration of personal fulfilment and reified reality. Lukács, as an unahamed classicist, saw Marxian socialism as presenting a synthesizing unity which, however, in the conditions of the time (the pre-1914 Belle Époque and the high tide of militarism and imperialism) seemed unattainable short of a ‘miracle’. Such a ‘miracle’ had occurred with the advent of medieval Catholicism. When the time came to give the Marxian synthesis its artistic expression, this would ‘necessarily take a form as severe as rigorous of the genuine art of the Middle Ages (Giotto, Dante), and not the purely individual art, pushing individualism to the extreme, which is produced by our own times.’
In Soul and Form (1911) Lukács considers Keirkegaard’s grappling with the threefold fragmentation in the Protestant world of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. As there was no prospect any social force bridging the division between the three spheres, the only ‘genuine’ solution to Keirkegaard’s mind was a ‘leap of faith’. In his case this meant the ‘gesture’ towards God of sacrificing his relationship with Regina Olsen, the love of his life. Lukács saw Keirkegaard’s critique of the antinomies of bourgeois society as profound, but judged the gesture in-itself to be empty and futile. Lukács argued that to be possessed by ‘goodness’ requires a Meister Eckhardt-inspired ‘poverty of spirit’ as way of ‘preparing oneself for virtue.’
‘Do you remember Sonia, Prince Myshkin. Alexei Karamazov. In Dostoevsky? You asked me if there any good humans and here they are. And you see, even their goodness is fruitless confusing and without result… Whom did Prince Myshkin help, Didn’t he actually bring tragedy wherever he went? Goodness is no guarantee of being able to help; it is however, the safeguard of the absolute and perceptive desire to help.’
Bloch was asked in 1974 by Michael Lowy: why did Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy have so much an influence on Western Europe?
‘Bloch: A new culture begins with them, and it has now reached only its Merovingian stage. I myself participated in this general feeling when I wrote in Geist der Utopie [Spirit of Utopia] that the Russian Revolution was the act of a new Praetorian Guard “who enthroned Christ as Emperor for the first time.” This was still the mythical Russia. With Christ as Emperor!… For us, this was Russian Christianity, the spiritual universe of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Why did all of Western Europe see only this imaginary Russia? It was an impulse which was religious as well as moral, and it elicited this passion for the “Russian soul” – you understand that I’m consciously using the kitsch term for it-for something that we made glimmer in front of our eyes and that didn’t exist in reality.’
Of his intellectual friendship with Lukcács, Bloch recalled:
‘When we had been separated for several months and met again, we discovered that we had both worked in exactly the same direction. I could continue where he had left off, and he continue where I had left off. We were like communicating vessels; he was always at the same level…. There are parts and ideas in [Lukacs’] History and Class Consciousness which are expressions of a common point of view and which really came from me, just as parts of Geist der Utopie and aspects of its contents originated in conversations with Lukacs, to the point that both of us found it hard to say, “This is my idea, this is yours.” We were really in profound agreement.’
According to Bloch, also under Simmel’s influence, Marxism had identified the fundamental contradiction in capitalism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Bloch termed this the ‘contemporaneous [or synchronous] contradiction’. But, there is a secondary network of non-synchronous contradictions inherited from earlier societies but which survive into capitalism, and which may be incorporated, left alone, or destroyed, according to the ‘progress’ of capitalist development. These social forms, he believed, could not be ignored.
As Bloch prepared to publish The Spirit of Utopia, Lukács took a momentous ‘leap of faith’ of joining the Communist Party. He became Minister of Culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which lasted for six months in 1919.
TO BE CONTINUED