Gillian Rose: Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Verso, London: 2024
After the Hungarian Soviet Republic succumbed to the Rumanian invaders in August 1919, George Lukács escaped into exile and moved to Vienna. In between walks around the city with a revolver under his coat, he studied the section in Marx’s Capital entitled ‘The Fetish Character of Commodities – and the Secret it Entails’.
The ‘secret’ is how commodity relations produce what Lukács terms a ‘reified consciousness’ which is unique to capitalism.
Lukács identifies reification in Kantian terms as the antinomy between the subjective idea of what ‘ought’ to be and the ‘objective evolution of society’ which just ‘is’. In Marxian terms. reification subjugates the attitudes and consciousness of people to the forms in which it finds expression:‘As labor is increasingly rationalized and mechanized, this subjugation is reinforced by the fact that people’s activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.’
Marx writes that the social relations between individuals ‘assume the phantasmagoric form of relation between things.’ He is referencing the magic lantern spectacle: a confused group of real or imagined images of person and things that change quickly, one following the other as in a dream’.
According to Lukács’ ‘Reification’ essay in History and Class Consciousness, ‘the structure of the commodity relations yield[s] a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them’. As well as Marx’s Capital, Lukács is influenced here by George Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, which highlights how subjective creations assume a life of their own in objective culture. Lukacs, in his 1920 article, ‘The Old Culture and the New Culture’, warns that the relative autonomy of culture, which first blossomed in medieval classicism, and now held out as ‘realism’, was being destroyed as cultural products became commodities. Furthermore, creative work processes and ‘traditional’ skills were under threat from mechanisation and division of labour.
The contradictory, contemplative ‘activity’ is experienced as immediacy; the individual’s experience of reification lacks the mediations which could reveal it in its totality and point the way towards a ‘solution’.
Ernst Bloch, reviewing Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness in 1924 reflects on the defeats of the German workers movement: ‘Every putsch in Germany goes under, while every idea shoots beyond reality, without influence, almost without meaning’. But now, Bloch’s great friend Lukács ‘had liberated thought, brought it into the historical process of becoming, where it is no longer mere observation, but the most deeply informed expression of that very process itself.’
Against the bourgeois’ ‘isolated, quantified concepts of reflections of things, as reified, self-contained systems’ Lukács had restored the notion of totality, writing:
‘we must… discover the practical significance of these different possible relations between the objective economic totality, imputed class consciousness, and the real psychological thoughts of men about their lives’.
Thus far, Lukács and Bloch were in agreement, but Lukács’s book criticises Bloch’s position that the social revolution required a religious as well as an economic dimension. Bloch, for his part argues that Lukács was being over-rationalistic. His thesis needed to be supplemented nothing less than ‘a metaphysics of dream-interpretation, of the conjuring up of the divine.’
The ‘divine’ in this sense does not mean heavenly intervention; it refers to a world-shattering historical event which is unmediated by any existing institution. The peasant uprisings in post-Reformation Germany, for example, weren’t called by any political party.
Both Lukács and Bloch were enamoured with Marx’s letter to Ruge in 1843 on ‘realising the thoughts of the past’:
‘Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.’
Bloch, activated by this reflection on realising the thought of the past, wrote Thomas Müntzer as the Theologian of Revolution (1924). Following Luther’s Protestant Reformation of 1517, the divine heretic Müntzer justified armed rebellion by the down-trodden German peasants with biblical citations, especially Omnia sunt communia. (everything should belong to everyone). Luther, having made his peace with the German nobility, issued his pamphlet, Against the Thieving, Murderous Hordes of Peasants. In 1523 Müntzer’s peasant army was defeated and executed by the nobles.
Bloch, almost sounding like a Kantian reincarnation of Müntzer, writes In Spirit and Utopia that ‘it is necessary to oppose established power with appropriat power like a categorical imperative with a revolver in your fist’. As Bloch explained to Michael Lowy in interview 55 years later:
‘Jesus said long ago: “I have not come to bring peace, but have come to cast fire upon the earth.” Besides, in 1914-18, the fire was already burning.’ The Sermon on the Mount preaches tolerance when I am affected, but when my brother is the victim, I cannot tolerate injustice, persecution, murder. The Sermon on the Mount is not a pacifist tract. Thomas Müntzer wasn’t a pacifist either, and he was a better Christian than Lukács.’
(Metropolis by Fritz Lang)
Were the novels of Walter Scott and Tolstoy ‘better’ than those of Kafka and James Joyce? According to Lukacs they were. Lukács claims that art was opposed to myth; Bloch claims that art was secularized myth. Lukács associated expressionism and modernism generally with all forms of irrationalism in bourgeois culture – especially fascism. Bloch rejected Lukács’ characterisation of the times as a homogeneous and linear road to decadence. Lukács’ idea of art was classical and realist. For him immediate experience had to be related to the totality of social development. Bloch, in contrast, saw new forms of social experience as requiring new forms of artistic expression. In Gillian Rose’s interpretation of Bloch’s critique, ‘Lukács, in short, assumes a closed and integrated totality. He does not see that expressionism has tried to challenge that totality.’
Ironically, it turned out that the Nazis were as opposed to expressionism and all other modernism as the Stalinists. The Nazis, after removing 20,000 works of modern art from state-owned museums, held an exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’ in Berlin, with 650 works, including those of Georg Grosz, Ernst Kirchner, Paul Klee, Otto Dix and Kurt Schwitters.
In paying close attention to the subjective dimensions of political experience Bloch drew on Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian principle, which Bloch regards as cold and rigid reification, and the Dionysian principle, which expresses dreams, fantasies and ideologies.
Rose writes on the differences:
‘Unlike Lukács [Bloch] does not project the ideal society onto the historical future, he stresses instead the moment of decision, that revolution is a qualitative leap, not a gradual or a guided achievement. Existing class consciousness, according to Bloch, is not working towards ideal class consciousness, but already possesses it in art, in fantasies, on ideologies…. different pasts live in the present and may still be realised in it.’
Rose points out that Bloch’s analysis proceeds from the point of view of the artist; whereas Lukács’ concern is about the reception, effect and social function of the artwork. Both of them, however, overlook how the processes which come between production and reception may ‘distort their original significance’. Bloch thinks that art (and politics) ‘can, and should, and must draw on and appeal to the emotional and irrational’. But, Rose comments, ‘what counts as emotional or subjective in a society is produced and reproduced by the social structure’. Lukács is ‘wrong for the same reason, for he saw what is realistic or what is rational as universal, pre-given and fixed’. Both Lukács and Bloch saw bourgeois society as in a process of disintegration; and both were wrong, in that capitalism, especially in the post-World War Two periods, was consolidating itself with new forms of cultural and political domination.
At this point in her narrative, Rose turns to the cultural analysis of the Frankfurt School proper, namely Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.
TO BE CONTINUED
