{"id":2056,"date":"1997-08-13T23:11:59","date_gmt":"1997-08-13T15:11:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sex.ncu.edu.tw\/jo_article\/?p=2056"},"modified":"2019-01-13T13:34:04","modified_gmt":"2019-01-13T05:34:04","slug":"the-locus-of-truthideology-in-the-german-debate-a-reappraisal-of-lukacs-benjamin-brecht-and-adorno","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sex.ncu.edu.tw\/jo_article\/1997\/08\/the-locus-of-truthideology-in-the-german-debate-a-reappraisal-of-lukacs-benjamin-brecht-and-adorno\/","title":{"rendered":"The Locus of Truth\/Ideology in the German Debate:\u00a0A Reappraisal of Lukacs, Benjamin, Brecht, and Adorno"},"content":{"rendered":"

\uff08\u9019\u7bc7\u7814\u7a76\u751f\u6642\u4ee3\u7684\u8ab2\u7a0b\u8ad6\u6587\u5f8c\u4f86\u767c\u8868\u65bc<\/strong>Journal of Humanities East\/West<\/em><\/strong>\u00a011 (1993): 125-146.<\/strong>\uff09<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In the wake of the proletarian defeat in Central Europe during the years 1918-23 and the Fascist victories thereafter\u2013both taking place under conditions presumably favorable for Marxist causes\u2013thinkers on the left initiated a serious investigation into cultural matters and questions of consciousness in an effort to understand the stabilizing features of capitalism (Lunn 5).\u00a0 In such an atmosphere of political frustration and powerlessness, emerging technological advances\u2013especially in the visual arts such as photography and film-making\u2013brought on immense implications as well as new challenges to existing concepts of artistic presentation, provoking quite different responses among the left.\u00a0 On the one hand, the fashionable preoccupation with the juxtaposition of disparate images and disjunctive moments and other technical matters was seen by some, such as Georg Lukacs and Theodor Adorno, as consuming the energies of the artistic world while distancing artistic productions from the reception of the general public.\u00a0 Thus, in an effort to situate the new techniques so as to contain their application in the domain of the arts, such leftist critics resorted to what are now classified as \u201cideological analyses\u201d to demonstrate and thus expose the possible impact of such techniques upon the reading public.\u00a0 On the other hand, these breakthroughs in the arts were also seen by others on the left, such as Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, as holding out new inspirations and suggesting new strategies for their cause, who in turn wrote to extol how powerfully the new techniques and new artistic works might serve as forms of political resistance.<\/p>\n

It is then widely accepted that the German debate in the 1930s over art and ideology had as its focus the (ideological) effects of certain elements of modern culture (art especially) which might hinder or further the cause of a proletarian revolution.[1]<\/a>\u00a0 Yet, knowledge of the more than apparent dissension among the left during the 1930s encouraged many later commentators to characterize the debate as nothing more than a partisan-based war of labels frequently waged among contending factions on the left, with the participants merely dishing out favorable or unfavorable labels according to factional policy or sectarian interests.\u00a0 As a result, the political dimension of the German debate tends to gather most of the attention of the latecomers (e.g. Ridless).<\/p>\n

Along with this valorization of the political dimension of the debate, another historical development also operated to shape later perception and evaluation of the participants.\u00a0 This has to do with the increasing problematization of the reflection theory of art, which is taken to be the focal point of the debate.\u00a0 The debate participants are then frequently evaluated by the distance they are said to have maintained from that reflectionist model.\u00a0 Such a line of reasoning, upon the ensuing dominance of the Frankfurt School in the West (overwhelmingly friendly toward the avant-garde and the modern) as well as the corresponding decline of orthodox Marxist views in most countries in the wake of Stalin\u2019s rule, usually leave Georg Lukacs in ill favor because of his unwavering promotion of a seemingly rather rigid reflectionist model of art and his negative writings upon expressionism and modernism (e.g., Lunn).\u00a0 Many unfriendly commentators have attacked Lukacs for his alleged \u201cStalinism,\u201d \u201cliterary terrorism,\u201d and \u201cliterary dictatorship,\u201d thus further diminishing his status in historical accounts of the debate (cf. Jameson, \u201cReflections in Conclusion\u201d 202-3).<\/p>\n

By thus (willingly or unwittingly) over-politicizing and stigmatizing the debate, many commentators have slighted one important aspect that is heart and soul of the debate, an aspect that has become all the more relevant since the 1980s\u2013the epistemological assumptions that informed and provided justification for the participants\u2019s interest-laden positions.\u00a0 To be more specific, the debate articulated serious concerns over the central issues of truth\u2013of our perception or beliefs about truth, and of the consequences of ways of presenting such beliefs in cultural artifacts\u2013all of which are topics presently debated in scholarly circles.\u00a0 In the following pages, I hope to examine the thoughts of the participants in terms of their epistemological coloring so as to demonstrate that the German debate may be losing its relevance less because the participants were too political for the taste of the present but more because their presuppositions are no longer seen as viable for the current, predominantly skeptical generation.\u00a0 Yet, even in this respect, the debate participants are not so easily pigeonholed.<\/p>\n

As our present generation has been discussing the question of truth mostly in relation to the concept of ideology, I shall begin my discussion with an analysis of the ways in which truth\/ideology was conceived in the German debate.<\/p>\n

The term \u201cideology,\u201d embodied in Lukacs\u2019 discussion of reification and Adorno\u2019s critique of the culture industry, was central to their contemplations of the specific nature of a society thoroughly saturated by the capitalistic mode of production.\u00a0 Their concern was that the commodity structure, as an ideology, had penetrated all aspects of the society to such an extent that people viewed it only as natural that the structuring principle in capitalist production should also be the structuring principle of human life and human thought (Lukacs,\u00a0History<\/em>\u00a085; Horkheimer & Adorno 127).[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

Such a general framework certainly does not do justice to the complexities surrounding truth and ideology in the debate.\u00a0 To begin with, contrary to the popular perception that he flatly equates ideology with \u201cfalse consciousness\u201d (e.g. Eagleton, Criticism\u00a0<\/em>69; McDonough 33), Lukacs holds a rather neutral notion of ideology as it relates to literary style.[3]<\/a>\u00a0 When he observes that some critics are overly concerned with stylistic and technical matters to the extent that they pay little attention to other underlying or determining principles of artistic creation, Lukacs stresses that a writer\u2019s stylistic or technical choices are not isolated occurrences, but derive from and are expressive of the writer\u2019s outlook on his world. \u00a0This worldview, termed a writer\u2019s ideology, has everything to do with the writer\u2019s artistic style:<\/p>\n

What determines the style of a given work of art? . . . It is the view of the world, the ideology or weltanschauung<\/em>\u00a0underlying a writer\u2019s work that counts. \u00a0And it is the writer\u2019s attempt to reproduce this view of the world which constitutes his \u2018intention\u2019 and is the formative principle underlying that style of a given piece of writing. (Lukacs, \u201cThe Ideology of Modernism\u201d 19)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More specifically, Lukacs holds that \u201c[a] writer\u2019s ideology is merely a synthesis of the totality of his experience on a certain level of abstraction\u201d (\u201cNarrate or Describe?\u201d 143).\u00a0 Ideology is simply how the writer perceives and conceives of the world; it is the mediation through which he cognizes the objective reality out there.\u00a0 In fact, the observation and description in a novel are \u201cmere substitutes for a conception of order in life\u201d (\u201cNarrate or Describe?\u201d 143).<\/p>\n

As a writer\u2019s \u201cintention\/perspective,\u201d ideology not only determines the stylistic dimension of a literary work, it is what makes the work possible in the first place.\u00a0 As Lukacs puts it, \u201cthe writer himself must possess a firmly established and vital ideology; he must see the world in its contradictory dynamics to be able to choose a hero in whose life the major opposing forces converge.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, the truth of the world\u2013i.e. its contradictory dynamics\u2013which is supposed to constitute a writer\u2019s ideology turns out to be what enables a writer to write.\u00a0 Lukacs cites the example of Flaubert who wrote to George Sand, complaining about not being able to write because he \u201clack[s] a firm, comprehensive outlook on life.\u201d\u00a0 With this example in mind, Lukacs concludes, \u201cwithout ideology there is no composition\u201d (\u201cNarrate or Describe\u201d 142).<\/p>\n

Such a general view of ideology might be interpreted as being rather individualistic; after all, Lukacs does claim that the sum of a writer\u2019s own personal life experiences makes up his ideology (worldview).\u00a0 It is exactly such an interpretation that forms the basis for Brecht\u2019s criticism of the bourgeois novel that Lukacs so admires:<\/p>\n

Today the bourgeois novel still depicts \u2018a world.\u2019\u00a0 It does so in a purely idealistic way from within a given\u00a0Weltanschauung<\/em>: the more or less private, but in any case personal outlook of its \u2018creator\u2019. . . in other words, we find out something about the author and nothing about the world. (Brecht 48)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While Lukacs does seem to put emphasis on the subjective, individual side of ideology, there is still room for a collective dimension to his notion of ideology.\u00a0 In fact, as Lukacs immediately goes on to say in the same article, \u201cWhen a writer is isolated from the vital struggles of life and from varied experiences generally, all ideological questions in his work become abstractions\u201d (\u201cNarrate or Describe?\u201d 143).\u00a0 Such a position conceives of the world as an arena in which social groups are seen as constantly entangled in vital struggles with one another.\u00a0 In order for a writer to write well, to write in a way that provides concrete meaning for his readers who are likewise agents in such vital struggles, he must not isolate himself from what is going on in the society.\u00a0 He must develop a feel for the world from his involvement in the \u201cvital struggles\u201d of that society.\u00a0 And to push the argument one step further, he must view his own practices as part and parcel of the actual practices of his social group(s) entangled in \u201cvital struggles\u201d with other social groups.\u00a0 In other words, only when a writer sees his own practices as embedded within a \u201cworld in its contradictory dynamics,\u201d can he be a good writer (Lukacs, \u201cNarrate or Describe\u201d 142).<\/p>\n

By transforming a discussion of technical or stylistical choices into an issue that has much to do with the whole scope of social life in which these formalistic choices are to find their roots, Lukacs zeroes in upon the ultimate purpose of doing ideological analyses.\u00a0 That is, artistic creations, as part and parcel of the social practices of writers, could have serious political implications or actual consequences, highlighted and propagated by the writers\u2019 and the works\u2019 social position and influence.\u00a0 In other words, the representations (of reality) in a writer\u2019s work can be read as his statement about the social life in which the writing activity is embedded; and this statement, in many cases, can be seen as constituting his effort to further promote or intervene with the conduct of that social life.\u00a0 Likewise, and maybe more significantly, when a critic\u2013such as Lukacs himself\u2013comments on the ideology of a writer\u2019s creative choices, such discursive activity also constitutes the critic\u2019s effort to promote or intervene.\u00a0 In fact, it is in this spirit of intervention that Lukacs takes the initiative to chastise both the modernist works and the critics who are favorable to them.<\/p>\n

Still, there is good reason why Lukacs is frequently read as simply equating ideology with false consciousness (and more often than not, he himself is responsible for this perception).\u00a0 I believe such a reading of Lukacs results from a conflation of two distinct terms for him\u2013the SOURCE of literary styles (i.e., the ideology\/worldview of an author) in which ideology is used in the neutral sense, and the FUNCTION of literary styles (i.e., the production of true knowledge or false consciousness) in which a certain ideology\/worldview is seen as damaging to the revolutionary cause.\u00a0 I would also like to argue that when the function of literary styles is considered, modernism was chastised by Lukacs not because of its truth status of being \u201cideology\u201d per se (false, illusive consciousness), but more importantly because of its functionalist status in which the presence of the modernist authorial ideology in literary works produced effects that did not measure up to the demands of the cognitive function accredited to literature by Lukacs.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

In other words, it was when the modernist worldview was entrusted with the noble mission of literature to lead the reader to true knowledge of reality that it needed to be investigated and then criticized.\u00a0 Such a belief in the important cognitive function of literature was not uncommon among the participants in the debate.\u00a0 In fact, it explains why Adorno and his friends did not find it troubling when Lukacs characterized the nature of the modernist ideology as \u201cstatic,\u201d \u201capathetic,\u201d \u201cpathologic,\u201d or \u201cpassive\u201d; yet they were deeply troubled by Lukacs\u2019 accusation that the modernist worldview distorted our true knowledge of reality (\u201cReconciliation\u201d 160).<\/p>\n

If the development of modern science (the systemization of knowledge) is accompanied by a gradual marginalization and eventually an exclusion of literature from any claims to knowledge, then the participants of the German debate were operating to assert a contrary belief, a belief in the necessary cognitive function of literature.[5]<\/a>\u00a0 Just as Engels believe that the novels of Balzac reveal the truth about early nineteenth century French society, the 1930s critics also believe literature is a special mediation through which we could get a better understanding of how things really are in the world.<\/p>\n

Such a belief that literature had to do with reason rather than with emotions was put into practice by many modernist writers.\u00a0 Brecht for one iterates that Brechtian epic theater aims not at the emotional engrossment of the audience, but at the mobilization of their powers of reflexive thinking.\u00a0 \u201cThe essential point of the epic theater is perhaps that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator\u2019s reason.\u00a0 Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things\u201d (Brecht 23).\u00a0 In other words, it is through the provocation of epic theater that the audience is motivated to strive for and perhaps eventually achieve a better (truer) understanding of things.\u00a0 Consequently, when Brecht argues for the use of the alienation effect in his theater, his main concern lies with its impact upon the \u201cunderstanding,\u201d rather than the emotion, of the audience.\u00a0 As he sees it, the laws of cause and effect are exposed only with the force of what is startling, what is unexpected by the usual habits of thinking.\u00a0 \u201cWhen something seems \u2018the most obvious thing in the world\u2019 it means that any attempt to\u00a0understand<\/em>\u00a0the world has been given up\u201d (Brecht 71, my underline).\u00a0 That is to say, it is through defamiliarizing what has been cognitively taken for granted that Brecht hopes to heighten the sense of awareness among his audience and thereby fulfill the cognitive function of literature.<\/p>\n

Besides practitioners such as Brecht, critics such as Adorno also emphasized the cognitive function of art.\u00a0 For Adorno, since the valorization of exchange value in commodity fetishism has permeated the whole society with a kind of \u201cidentity-thinking\u201d that equates incommensurable things with one another, thus erasing all contradictions or differences (Eagleton,\u00a0Ideology<\/em>\u00a0125; also cf. Horkheimer & Adorno 120-29), the only way to fight this unifying and homogenizing tendency in capitalist society is to emphasize antinomy and discrepancy through art\u2019s insistence to follow its own formal laws (Horkheimer & Adorno 131).\u00a0 It is worth noting here that in privileging art as a form of resistance, Adorno has his eyes mainly on art\u2019s capability of becoming \u201ctrue and conscious knowledge.\u201d\u00a0 He believes that only by virtue of the \u201caesthetic distance\u201d that art is said to maintain from objective reality can the work of art \u201cbecome both work of art and\u00a0valid consciousness<\/em>\u201d (\u201cReconciliation\u201d 160, my underline).\u00a0 Such a cognitive thrust fits in nicely with the concerns of the other participants in the debate.<\/p>\n

What is more, because of the resisting efforts initiated by the artist, even the objects treated by art attain, by extension, a certain degree of resistance against being sucked into the world of commodity.\u00a0 This is Adorno\u2019s idealism in its purest form:<\/p>\n

Art and reality can only converge if art crystallizes out its own formal laws, not by passively accepting objects as they come.\u00a0 In art knowledge is aesthetically mediated through and through . . . . In the form of an image the object is absorbed into the subject instead of following the bidding of the alienated world and persisting obdurately in a state of reification.\u00a0 The contradiction between the object reconciled in the subject . . . and the actual unreconciled object in the outside world, confers on the work of art a vantage-point from which it can criticize actuality.\u00a0\u00a0Art is the negative knowledge of the actual world<\/em>.\u00a0 (\u201cReconciliation\u201d 160, my underline)\u00a0 In such a picture of a thoroughly commodified society, art is privileged as the last fortress of resistance against the alienating tendencies of commodity fetishism.\u00a0 Art is the last citadel of clear-headed perception.\u00a0 Art\u2019s refusal to give in\u2013or to identify\u2013is its most important mission.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As to the question of how literature or art comes to be empowered with this cognitive function, how literature could possibly reveal the truth about the world, we find only an indirect answer in Lukacs, an answer that is best understood in terms of an Aristotelian conception of part-whole relationship.<\/p>\n

As an integral part of the social whole, literature, according to Lukacs, must necessarily manifest the essence, the truth, of that whole.\u00a0 It must display the immanent tendencies of immediate reality.\u00a0 What then is this essence, this truth of the social reality?\u00a0 In Lukacs\u2019s conception, the truth about social reality is its \u201ctotality,\u201d i.e., a unified historical process to which every manifestation, every action of human life, including art, science, recreation, family life, etc., is only an integral part.\u00a0 This truth, however, is no longer accessible except through a complicated process of mediation, \u201cby means of which the merely immediate reality becomes . . . the authentically objective reality\u201d (History<\/em>\u00a0150).<\/p>\n

By \u201cobjective\u201d Lukacs means the true significance of immediate reality in its organic and dynamic relation to other parts of that reality.\u00a0 In other words, in our immediate experience objects and relations may seem to be autonomous and operating according to laws inherent to themselves (History<\/em>\u00a087); yet, we must overcome the immediacy of experience and raise it to a level of \u201cconsciousness\u201d through the operation of specific categories of mediation, such as literature and science.\u00a0 Then we can integrate individual objects and social phenomena into a system of relations in which the objects and phenomena will become comprehensible and meaningful as parts of an immanent and organic whole.\u00a0 After all, \u201cthe developing tendencies of history constitute a higher reality than the empirical \u2018facts\u2019<\/em>\u201d and it is to this higher reality that we should try to approximate in cognition (Lukacs,\u00a0History<\/em>\u00a0181).\u00a0 Herein lies Lukacs\u2019 representationalist foundation.<\/p>\n

Knowledge of totality, of the truth of social reality, would have been accessible if it were not for the universality of what Lukacs conceives as the biggest fault with capitalism: commodity fetishism.\u00a0 In other words, it is because of the delusive operations of the commodity form that human labor and its fruits are seen as something isolated and independent of the subject, governed by laws invisible to man.\u00a0 As a result, the seeming relations between commodities are reified and have thus displaced the real, definite, social relations between people (History<\/em> 86).\u00a0 The rationalization that accompanies the commodity mode of thinking further breaks with \u201cthe organic, irrational and qualitatively determined unity of the product\u201d (History<\/em>\u00a088), leaving the subject with no other choice but to conform to the laws that are said to govern the reified object.\u00a0 Thus, Lukacs proposes his solution: \u201conly portrayal of the overall process can dissolve the fetishism of the economic and social forms of capitalist society, so that these appear as what they actually are, i.e. (class) relations between people\u201d (\u201cReportage or Portrayal?\u201d 53).<\/p>\n

Literary mediation is then de-fetishization.\u00a0 And as a specifically designated category of mediation, art has a grave task to perform: it has to recreate that vision of totality which has been lost in commodity fetishism.\u00a0 As Lukacs puts it, \u201cThe goal for all great art is to provide a picture of reality in which the contradiction between appearance and reality, the particular and the general, the immediate and the conceptual, etc., is so resolved that the two converge into a spontaneous integrity in the direct impression of the work of art and provide a sense of an inseparable integrity\u201d (\u201cArt and Objective Truth\u201d 34).\u00a0 In other words, as \u201ca created totality,\u201d as \u201cthe visionary reality of the world made to our measure\u201d in our alienated existence (Lukacs,\u00a0Theory of the Novel<\/em>\u00a037), art\u2019s highest priority is to re-present (\u201creflect\u201d) the essence\u2013the totality\u2013of the social reality, an essence that is now divorced from the immediate cognition of human beings.<\/p>\n

Adorno\u2019s answer to the same question of how literature\/art could possibly tell us the truth about the world is a lot simpler: it just does.\u00a0 I have mentioned before that, like Lukacs, Adorno does not hold a negative view toward \u201cideology\u201d (see note #3).\u00a0 In fact, to him, ideology is \u201cnecessary illusion,\u201d \u201ca shape of truth, no matter how distorted,\u201d and as necessary illusion, ideology, while false, is also part of the truth (Aesthetic Theory<\/em>\u00a0331).\u00a0 That is why Adorno finds it no problem to claim that art contains both ideology and truth.\u00a0 Because of this faith in the partial truthfulness of ideology, Adorno agrees with Lukacs when the latter criticizes the modernist technique as unduly creating visions of worldlessness and solitariness; yet Adorno would assert that the picture of man in all his worldlessness and solitariness has some truth to it, too.\u00a0 And only the modernist text in its choice of content and form can embody the irreconcilable contradictions of capitalist society by displaying the gulf \u201cbetween the overwhelming and unassimilable [sic] world of things, on the one hand, and a human experience impotently striving to gain a firm hold on it, on the other\u201d (\u201cReconciliation\u201d 163).<\/p>\n

While Lukacs uses the\u00a0monologue interieur<\/em>\u00a0to demonstrate the solipsism of modernist styles, Adorno uses the same example to demonstrate its usefulness as a form of resistance:<\/p>\n

The\u00a0monologue interieur<\/em>, the worldlessness of modern art which makes Lukacs so indignant, is both the truth and the appearance of a free-floating subjectivity\u2013it is truth, because in the universal atomistic state of the world, alienation rules over men, turning them into mere shadows of themselves . . . The free-floating subject is appearance, however, inasmuch as, objectively, the social totality has precedence over the individual . . . The great works of modernist literature shatter this appearance of subjectivity by setting the individual in his frailty into context, and by grasping that totality in him of which the individual is but a moment and of which he must needs remain ignorant. (\u201cReconciliation\u201d 161)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, Adorno accepts Lukacs\u2019 critique but thinks the aesthetic distance that the modernist technique creates between the literary text and reality will still be a moment of knowledge.\u00a0 The distance or difference will automatically help the reader see reality for what it is.<\/p>\n

Because of the presence of this non-hostile attitude toward what may be ideological, Adorno\u2019s writings invoke different readings from his commentators.\u00a0 Let us take his discussion of jazz as an example.\u00a0 Martin Jay presents Adorno as seeing jazz as artificial and deluding, merely a strengthening of alienation, and altogether \u201ca capitulation before the powers of the status quo\u201d (The Dialectical\u00a0<\/em>188).\u00a0 Jazz does little more than holding out false images of a return to nature or of sexual liberation, leaving the listener only in \u201cmasochistic passivity\u201d (Jay,\u00a0The Dialectical<\/em> 186-88).\u00a0 Another just as important critic, Susan Buck-Morss, on the other hand, reads a possibility of negation in Adorno\u2019s treatment of jazz.\u00a0 For the combination of contradicting forces in jazz\u2013\u201cthe salon-music individualism on the one hand and the military-march collectivism on the other\u201d\u2013unintentionally displays a social contradiction (Buck-Morss 265).\u00a0 Buck-Morss thus believes that by pointing out this inherent contradiction as displayed in jazz, Adorno recognizes jazz as one of the sites of resistance.\u00a0 In other words, if only the listeners could listen to jazz with a critical attitude, a non-identifying attitude, then they would recognize the social contradiction and would have a chance to reflect on how to deal with it.<\/p>\n

What remains unexplained here in Buck-Morss as well as in Adorno is the familiar question of what guarantees such presentations of contradiction to be read or listened to \u201cas such\u201d by the readers\/listeners, whoever they might be.\u00a0 Without any consideration for the possible heterogeneity among people who are consuming these literary or musical works, or the dynamics and conditions of reading\/viewing\/listening, Adorno\u2019s faith can only be built upon an essentialist notion of art, which claims that the contradictions are inherent and objectively present in artistic works.\u00a0 It is also built upon an essentialist notion of audience, which treats all of the readers\/listeners as having the same concerns, interests, and purposes so that the effect of art upon them would be uniform too.\u00a0 In another respect, when Adorno emphasizes distantiation, negation, or difference, he is thinking only of how the artistic creations can maintain their identity and resist the homogenizing tendencies of capitalism.\u00a0 As to the question of how the resistance in art can be translated into the resistance on the human front, again Adorno has only his faith in a universal, non-instrumentalist rationality to fall back on.<\/p>\n

Such an implicit essentialism in Adorno is strengthened by his diagnosis of society under the \u201cuniversal imposition\u201d of the commodity form (Horkheimer & Adorno 128).\u00a0 For Adorno, \u201cThe culture industry as a whole has molded men as a type\u00a0unfailingly reproduced in every product<\/em>\u201d (127, italics mine).\u00a0 The saturation is so thorough that \u201cThe might of industrial society is lodged in men\u2019s minds\u201d (127).\u00a0 There is simply no way to avoid the uniformity and identity through which the whole world is filtered: \u201cculture now impresses the same stamp on everything\u201d (Horkheimer & Adorno 120).\u00a0 Consequently, there is only the feeble possibility of passive resistance put up by art.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

While faith in the cognitive function of art leaves Adorno in a kind of essentialism that focuses on the art work as the latter distances itself from alienated reality, Lukacs, on the other hand, is more interested in the effect of that art.\u00a0 After all, if literature is to be entrusted with the cognitive function to manifest the truth of social reality, to give us that sense of an integrated whole again, to resist the co-opting tendencies of a commodified world, then Lukacs holds that it must do the job and do it correctly.\u00a0 \u201cIf literature is a particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected, then it becomes of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as ittruly<\/u>\u00a0is, and not merely to confine itself to reproducing whatever manifests itself immediately and on the surface\u201d (\u201cRealism in the Balance\u201d 33, my underline).\u00a0 Lukacs is willing to grant that the modernist presentation of the world in literary works is\u00a0not untrue<\/u>\u00a0to the way things are, yet it is to be taken only as the most immediate, the most limited, the most superficial aspect of things.\u00a0 On the basis of adherence to the way things \u201ctruly\u201d are\u2013the dynamic, integrated totality of things\u2013knowing the social whole becomes a sort of cognitive and even moral imperative.\u00a0 By the standard of this imperative, the modernist ideology, though not untrue, is judged as highly undesirable: for it depicts human events as \u201cstatic\u201d; it emphasizes the \u201cunalterability\u201d of historical reality; it condemns man to a life of solitariness and denies him any possibility of meaningful relationships; it reduces life to \u201ca sequence of unrelated experiential fragments\u201d; it results in \u201ca condition of apathy, punctuated by manic fits\u201d; and finally, it leads to \u201cthe destruction of literature itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is significant that Lukacs\u2019 criticism of modernist ideology may have stemmed from his concern over the cognitive function of literature, yet none of the negative labels he used carried any cognitive meaning.\u00a0 Words such as \u201cfalse,\u201d \u201cillusive,\u201d or \u201cwrong\u201d were nowhere to be found.\u00a0 Instead, what we get is a string of negative terms that highlight the impossibility of the modernist ideology to work in the contemporary context for the liberation and future development of mankind.\u00a0 This signals that what ultimately bothered Lukacs was not so much whether the modernist presentation is correct or not in relation to the way things \u201creally\u201d are.\u00a0 Such an insulated, purely philosophical question has significance for him only when it is seen to be the flip side of another question: what would be the actual effect of the modernist worldview upon the reader?\u00a0 In short, in Lukacs\u2019 conception, the cognitive function of literature is to be conceived not in terms of the truth status of literature, but in terms of the practical consequences of literature.\u00a0 A correct outlook on reality would lead to correct actions on the reader\u2019s part, which will then work for the progress of history.\u00a0 Conversely, a wrong outlook on reality may lead readers to take the wrong action or not take any action at all, which will surely hinder the progress of history.<\/p>\n

Such a conflation of cognition and practice was widely practiced by the participants in the 1930s debate.\u00a0 They believe that an accurate cognition is indispensable to the cause of human emancipation, that a correct understanding of objective reality is necessary to and sometimes even equals the transformation of that reality (particularly in the case of\u00a0 proletarian consciousness).\u00a0 The cognitive function of literature becomes then a site for struggle for the 1930s critics exactly because it is taken to be the fountainhead of human action.<\/p>\n

This belief in the inherent and necessary relationship between cognition\/knowledge and action\/practice derives from a string of related presuppositions.\u00a0 To begin with, it presumes the existence of a universal truth\/reality which is knowable and communicable, and which is situated at a transcendental vantage point impervious to the contamination of particularities and contingencies.\u00a0 At the same time it presumes a universal power of reason shared by all, which will recognize and accept that universal truth\/reality when the latter is demonstrated.\u00a0 Furthermore, it presumes that, once rid of ideological mystification, man will always act according to the decrees of universal reason, and if he does, his actions will surely be correct.\u00a0 It is the assumed validity of such a string of presuppositions that immediately confers a sense of urgency on the issue of literature in relation to knowledge.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the links in the knowledge-action model have now fallen into jeopardy.\u00a0 The conception of an unproblematic and universal truth\/reality has been recognized as at best wishful thinking and at worst ideological mystification.\u00a0 The advocacy of the universal power of reason has come to be seen as merely a rationalization for the privileged position that a certain kind of (bourgeois) rationality already occupies.[7]<\/a>\u00a0 Various recent theories of psychoanalysis and genealogies of human reason have further sensitized this generation to the fragility of rational behavior and the plurality of types of reason.\u00a0 Within such contexts, the direct connection between knowledge and action is severely eroded.<\/p>\n

The questionable connection between knowledge and action is only one less noted area in which the reception of the German debate has run into problems.\u00a0 More damaging may be the insistence of Lukacs, Brecht, and the others on the necessary relationship between literature and reality.\u00a0 Yet even there, the debate participants are not so helplessly dogmatic as is widely believed.<\/p>\n

The debate participants are often characterized as sharing a common faith in a reflectionist theory of literature, which in turn is propped up on a representationalist (correspondence) notion of knowledge.\u00a0 I think such a characterization is oversimplified.\u00a0 While the debate participants do seem to adhere to various versions of a reflectionist theory of literature, their subscription to the representationalist notion of truth and knowledge is constantly complicated by a simultaneous belief in a world-constructionist theory of knowledge that denies the existence of a given reality to which all knowledge is to approximate.\u00a0 In other words, the debate participants\u2019 effort to approximate the truth about the world, their urge to \u201cget it right\u201d on the question of knowledge, is often countered by their equally dedicated effort to emphasize the necessary and important role of the human (especially proletarian) initiative in \u201ccreating\u201d history (under given conditions).\u00a0 Still, while they hope to leave room for the participation and practice of a thinking and acting subject, they can not help but feel the need to constrain the possible initiative of that subject by reverting back to an objectivist notion of reality.\u00a0 Let us take a closer look at this ambivalence.<\/p>\n

Lukacs has often been faulted for holding an orthodox reflectionist view of art, and some of his words do present him as such:<\/p>\n

Any apprehension of the external world is nothing more than a reflection in consciousness of the world that exists independently of consciousness.\u00a0 This basic fact of the relationship of consciousness to being also serves, of course, for the artistic reflection of reality. (\u201cArt and Objective Truth\u201d 25)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The wording here is quite close to a representationalist theory of knowledge.\u00a0 The metaphor of the mind (consciousness) as the mirror reflecting the image of the objective world is vividly transposed unto art.\u00a0 It is such parallel depictions that have earned Lukacs the reputation of the great advocate for a reflectionist theory of art.<\/p>\n

Yet, for Lukacs, direct reflections are never all there is to cognizing the world, nor are they so \u201cdirect\u201d after all.\u00a0 While these reflections of the external, objective world upon the consciousness of cognizing subjects make up \u201cthe foundation, the point of departure for all knowledge,\u201d Lukacs does not stop there.\u00a0 He goes on to say: \u201cBut they are only<\/em>\u00a0the point of departure and not all there is to the process of knowing\u201d (\u201cArt and Objective Truth\u201d 26).\u00a0 The italicization is Lukacs\u2019 and it demonstrates his insistence that the issue must not be simplified thus.\u00a0 The dynamics of human perception of reality cannot be fully grasped in a simple imprinting of an image; it needs the continuous application of a dialectical method which resists any tendency to privilege one dimension of the cognizing process over another.\u00a0 As Lukacs writes in the preface to the Hungarian edition of an anthology of the aesthetic writings of Marx and Engels, \u201cThe essence of the dialectical method lies in its encompassing the indivisible unity of the absolute and the relative: absolute truth has its\u00a0relative<\/em>\u00a0elements (depending on place, time and circumstances); relative truth, on the other hand, so far as it is really truth, so far as it reflects reality in a faithful approximation, has an absolute<\/em>\u00a0validity\u201d (\u201cMarx and Engels on Aesthetics\u201d 63).<\/p>\n

The metaphor of art as a reflecting mirror may invite Lukacs\u2019 readers to infer that art passively receives the imprint of reality and faithfully re-presents it.\u00a0 Yet Lukacs\u2019 constant emphasis on the dynamics and dialectics of cognition does not allow such a simple and static view of reflection.\u00a0 He insists that alongside depictions of the existing richness and subtleties of life, the artist must introduce \u201ca new order of things\u201d which structures ordinary life experiences into even richer and stricter forms (\u201cArt and Objective Truth\u201d 39-40).\u00a0 Such a new order of things is never a simple and direct mirror reflection of reality as it appears to us.\u00a0 Lukacs insists that if art achieves any illusion effect at all, it is accomplished with the reader\u2019s realization that the artistic representation \u201cis not reality but simply a special form of reflecting reality\u201d (\u201cArt and Objective Truth\u201d 41).\u00a0 Thus, Lukacs finds the bourgeois epistemology highly inappropriate exactly because it \u201cone-sidedly emphasized one approach to apprehending reality, one mode in the conscious reproduction of reality\u201d (\u201cArt and Objective Truth\u201d 27).\u00a0 To counter such tendencies, Lukacs quotes Lenin:<\/p>\n

The approach of human reason to the individual thing, obtaining an impression (a concept) of it is no simple, direct, lifeless mirroring but a complicated, dichotomous, zigzag act which by its very nature encompasses the possibility that imagination can soar away from life . . . . (qtd. in \u201cArt and Objective Truth\u201d 28)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here in this passage, Lenin\u2019s fascinating idea of the role of imagination in our cognition of reality illustrates a faith in the constructive role subjects could play in making sense of the world.\u00a0 And such a proclamation provides Lukacs with just the right justification to make room for subjectivity in his own discussion of artistic \u201creflections.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Lukacs\u2019 conception, art always involves the participation of subjectivity.\u00a0 In fact, art is able to penetrate the crust of reality exactly because of the careful work of the artist, which is motivated and informed by none other than his own \u201cpartisanship\u201d:<\/p>\n

This partisanship of objectivity must therefore be found intensified in the work of art\u2013intensified in clarity and distinctness, for the subject matter of a work of art is\u00a0consciously arranged and ordered<\/em>\u00a0by the artist toward this goal, in the sense of this partisanship. (\u201cArt and Objective Truth\u201d 40, italics mine)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, as truthful reflections of reality, art always involves a point of view, a vantage point from which things are organized to make sense.\u00a0 Impartial imitation\u2013since it is lifeless, takes no stand, and provides no call to action\u2013is nothing but \u201cfalse objectivity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Had Lukacs stopped here with his perspectivism, he would have enjoyed a warmer reception in our day and age.\u00a0 Yet, like the other participants in the debate, Lukacs still wants to hang on to the representationalist goal of \u201cgetting it right\u201d when it comes to acquiring knowledge.\u00a0 So even as he recognizes the important role of the subjective vantage point, he still wants to tie it in with an objective entity.\u00a0 Thus Lukacs iterates:<\/p>\n

. . . this partisanship is not introduced into the external world arbitrarily by the individual but is a motive force inherent in reality which is made conscious through the correct dialectical reflection of reality and introduced into practice. (\u201cArt and Objective Truth\u201d 40)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What we are witnessing here is Lukacs\u2019 desperate effort to reconcile subjectivity and objectivity.\u00a0 Subjective imagination can have legitimacy in his theory of knowledge only when it coincides with \u201cthe motive force inherent in reality.\u201d\u00a0 And in tying down the subjective element in cognition, Lukacs partially neutralizes the possible dynamics associated with the power of imagination.\u00a0 In the final analysis, the demand for correspondence establishes the limit against which any subjective constructivism is turned back.<\/p>\n

Such ambivalent attitudes are not uncommon among the debate participants.\u00a0 Walter Benjamin, another participant in the German debate, finds that the mysterious but comforting sense of wholeness that accompanies traditional works of art has been so relentlessly shattered by modern mechanisms of reproduction that the only way to cope with the numbness and mechanization of modern-day living is to generate from the new technology sharper and more concrete physical images in which we come face to face with the way things \u201creally\u201d are (Norris 20; Jameson,\u00a0Marxism and Form<\/em>\u00a075-78).\u00a0 With an undercurrent of nostalgic sadness for the passing of traditions, Benjamin considers the artistic form of film desirable for the modern age because it better represents the reality uncontaminated by mechanization, the reality that lies beyond the limitations of the numbed experience in our dulled modern day existence:<\/p>\n

. . . for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment.\u00a0 And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art. (Benjamin 234)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus when Benjamin compares the revelations provided by the camera and the naked eye, he favors the former because it shows \u201cwhat\u00a0really<\/em> goes on\u201d in the actual movements of, say, a hand reaching for a lighter (237, italics mine).\u00a0 The camera can transcend the limitation of the eye and pierce through the physical crust that veils the real.\u00a0 \u201cHere the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions.\u00a0 The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses\u201d (Benjamin 237).\u00a0 In short, the \u201ctrue reality\u201d that we are unconscious of can be evoked only through the penetrating power of the camera.<\/p>\n

In other words, for Benjamin, while technological advances bring on the numbness that characterizes modern labor, they are somewhat redeemed by the heightened cognition that they can effect.\u00a0 Because of mechanical reproduction, there is for the first time the possibility of shaking loose from the ritualistic confines of auratic art to gain insights into not only how things really are but also how things could be once we move beyond the traditional limits.\u00a0 Therein lies the revolutionary potential of film through which Benjamin tries to transcend the limits of representationalism and venture forward into the unknown and unexpected.\u00a0 For film holds out the promise that it \u201cextends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives\u201d; it also opens up for us \u201can immense and unexpected field of action\u201d (Benjamin 236).<\/p>\n

Ironically, it is also in such descriptions of the unique and inherently liberating power of certain art forms that essentialism catches up with the critics.\u00a0 It is as if the nature of film naturally exposes \u201cthe necessities that rule our lives\u201d and creates the \u201cunexpected field of action\u201d among viewers; the nineteenth century realist novel automatically enlightens its reader to the totality of reality; the use of the alienation effect necessarily wakens the audience to the limitations of their daily experiences; or the modernist or avant-garde artistic creations constitute an automatic attack on dominant capitalistic ideas.\u00a0 As I have mentioned before, such essentialist beliefs claim that, regardless of the context, there is something inherent in certain artistic styles or creations that will automatically and necessarily create a certain set of favorable effects in their readers\/viewers.\u00a0 In such a simple stimulus-response model, little room is left for the operation of thinking and acting subjects, nor is there room for the operation of factors other than universal human reason.\u00a0 Readers and viewers are simply passive receivers or at most passive collaborators in an inevitable process.\u00a0 It is this line of essentialism, sometimes referred to as \u201cformalistic determinism\u201d or \u201ctechnological determinism,\u201d that is encountering great problems in our anti-determinist and anti-essentialist atmosphere.<\/p>\n

In addition to the question of essentialism in the German debate, there is also the question of representationalism.\u00a0 Lukacs\u2019 unrelenting faith in art\u2019s mission to re-present the objectivity of the truth of reality has led many latecomers to rank him as the staunchest modern believer in representationalism.\u00a0 Yet the other so-called more open-minded participants in the debate are not really that different from and sometimes are even more rigid than Lukacs in demanding that artistic representations be checked against \u201cthe way things really are.\u201d\u00a0 The urge to \u201cget it right\u201d is all the more blatant in these participants.<\/p>\n

To take a first example, when expressionism was severely criticized by Lukacs, Ernst Bloch wrote a strong reply.\u00a0 Yet as much as he disagreed with Lukacs\u2019 description of the ultimate truth of reality, Bloch still could not bring himself to part with the basic notion of representation.\u00a0 Thus against Lukacs\u2019s indictment of expressionism, Bloch could only offer this feeble defense:<\/p>\n

But what if Lukacs\u2019s reality\u2013a coherent, infinitely mediated totality\u2013is not so objective after all? . . . What if authentic reality is also discontinuity? (\u201cDiscussing Expressionism\u201d 22)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The \u201cwhat if\u201d is quite telling of Bloch\u2019s sense of insecurity.\u00a0 His faith in the expressionist techniques stands or falls with the verdict on the agreement between the world as presented by those techniques and the real nature of authentic reality, of which not even he is sure.<\/p>\n

As a second example, Brecht has been frequently characterized as anti-reflectionist because of his insistence on defamiliarizing the habitual through the alienation effect.\u00a0 Yet the success, or the very possibility, of such defamiliarization procedures hinges upon an already existing familiarity, shared by the actors and audience alike, with the way things \u201creally\u201d are, so that all of them can at every moment of the performance proceed to check the theatrical representations against that pre-existing knowledge.<\/p>\n

. . . the achievement of an A-effect absolutely depends on lightness and naturalness of performance.\u00a0 But when the actor checks the truth of his performance (a necessary operation, which Stanilavsky is much concerned with in his system) he is not just thrown back on his \u2018natural sensibilities,\u2019 but can always be corrected by a comparison with reality (is that how an angry man really speaks? is that how an offended man sits down?) and so from outside, by other people.\u00a0 He acts in such a way that nearly every sentence could be followed by a verdict of the audience and practically every gesture is submitted for the public\u2019s approval. (Brecht 95)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, for Brecht the ultimate decision concerning whether an artistic creation satisfactorily fulfills its cognitive function has to be made through a constant and rigid verification process that involves a positivistic comparison between the world in the performance and the actual world out there.\u00a0 Such a comparison downplays the role of any subjective input on the actor\u2019 part; his \u201cnatural sensibilities\u201d are simply not enough.\u00a0 He needs to constantly check his own acting against \u201cthe reality\u201d and be subject to the same examination by the audience.\u00a0 Such a strong demand for (non-)correspondence, though with an eye to the dynamics of changes in reality, is made with the full force of representationalism:<\/p>\n

In each individual case the picture given of life must be compared . . . with the actual life portrayed . . . If we want a truly popular literature, alive and fighting, completely gripped by reality and completely gripping reality, then we must keep pace with reality\u2019s headlong development. (Brecht 112)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fortunately, Brecht\u2019s representationalism is occasionally tempered by his concern for audience reaction.\u00a0 (After all, it is in the theater that audience feedback is most direct and obvious.)\u00a0 Thus Brecht thinks a realistic theater must be \u201cpopular,\u201d meaning \u201cintelligible to the broad masses, taking over their own forms of expression and enriching them\/adopting and consolidating their standpoint . . .\u201d (108).\u00a0 Furthermore, in meeting the needs and the tastes of the masses, Brecht has gradually become aware of developing complexities in the audience.\u00a0 In a letter to Max Gorelik, Brecht talks about the changes that he sees as taking place in the theater:<\/p>\n

The sharpening of the class struggle has engendered such conflicts of interests in our audience that it is no longer in a position to react to art spontaneously and unanimously. (160)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Notwithstanding some degree of awareness of the developing heterogeneity among members of the audience, Brecht does not go on to contemplate how such heterogeneity in the audience would challenge his own idea of an epic theater that is defined by alienation effects uniformly construed against the background of a known and non-problematic reality.\u00a0 Nor does he reconsider how the verification against reality, which he demands for theatrical performance, is to be conducted with such heterogeneity among the audience.<\/p>\n

Such a lack of accommodation for the possible diversity among audience (or readership) is shared by most of the German debate participants.\u00a0 It reveals their continued faith in the overriding power of an allegedly universal rationality which promises to even out the differences among viewer\u2019s other possible interests, concerns, or emotions.\u00a0 Such a privileging of the cognitive powers implicitly justifies a privileging of the artists, performers, or critics, who are thought to be somehow more perceptive than the faceless masses.\u00a0 It presumes that the audience or readership is always passive in the viewing\/reading process.\u00a0 Thus, if any resistance is be created, it is to be prepared by the artistic creators\u2013through a demonstration of the totality of reality, through alienation effects, or through a negation of the immediacy of things.\u00a0 But it is always the artists or performers or critics who initiate the production of that resistance.\u00a0 Such is the implicit elitism of the 1930s critics.<\/p>\n

Traces of essentialism and representationalism in the German debate have to a certain extent crippled its relevance for the present generation.\u00a0 The entanglement of the parties on the issues surrounding truth and ideology have also left observers hesitant about the possible use of debate arguments.\u00a0 Yet, as we examine their writings in the light of the epistemological assumptions which have captured the attention of the present generation, we find that the map is not as neat as we thought, that there is plenty of room for a reconceptualization as well as a re-appraisal of the participants as well as the issues in the German debate.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Endnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0The interchangeability of literature and art during this period signaled a conception of their inherent commonality as residing in the creative and imaginative aspects of human labor, a conception that puts emphasis on the unique efforts of the artistic or literary minds.\u00a0 Such a conception gradually faded out until a new interchangeability was established between literature and culture in the second half of the 1970s.\u00a0 The new coupling emphasizes the totality of all cultural experiences, treating all aspects of human labor as equally significant and differing only in their varied valorization by the existent cultural hegemony.<\/span><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a>\u00a0The terms in which the 1930s critics discussed the issues may be too humanistic or too general for some commentators who have lived through the boom of anti-Hegelian, anti-humanistic theories of ideology since the \u201960s.\u00a0 For example, Lukacs\u2019 seeming lack of attention to the institutional apparatuses that sustain ideology has certainly attracted a lot of criticism (Larrain 74; McDonough 41).\u00a0 Yet, as we are now entering a different historical phase in which Hegelian and humanistic ideas are coming back in new forms equipped with a new vocabulary and making connections with all the fashionable trends of thought, the 1930s critics have gained both in stature and in circulation (cf. Wexler).\u00a0 And it may be beneficial for us to take another look at the German debate.<\/span><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a>\u00a0Adorno also declined from seeing ideology as antithetical to truth\/reality.\u00a0 \u201cTruth and Ideology do not represent good and bad respectively.\u00a0 Art contains them both\u201d (Adorno,\u00a0Aesthetic Theory <\/em>332).\u00a0 Following Marx, Adorno acknowledges the difference between ideology and truth and sometimes even incorporates ideology into truth: \u201cIdeology is socially necessary illusion, which means that if it is necessary it must be a shape of truth, no matter how distorted\u201d (Aesthetic Theory <\/em>331).\u00a0 In fact, Adorno seems to think that ideology and truth become polarized only when the society falls into the process of becoming increasingly totalitarian.\u00a0 Then ideology is assigned to be the function of certain propagandistic forms of art: \u201cThe more openly society moves towards ever greater totalization, assigning art (along with everything else) its specific function, the more completely it polarizes art into ideology and protest.\u00a0 This polarization is likely to be detrimental to art.\u00a0 Absolute protest hems art in, impinging on its raison d\u2019etre<\/em>, whereas absolute ideology reduces art to a thin, authoritarian copy of reality\u201d (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory\u00a0<\/em>332).<\/span><\/p>\n

[4]<\/a>\u00a0Larrain has also noticed that for Lukacs, \u201cbourgeois class consciousness is false not because it is ideological, but because the bourgeois class position is structurally limited\u201d (73).\u00a0 While Larrain does not explain what these limitations are, I am arguing, based on Lukacs\u2019 discussion of modernism, that the limitations have to do with the absence of connections between knowledge and liberation.<\/span><\/p>\n

[5]<\/a>\u00a0It needs to noted here that both the move to deprive literature or the move to empower literature are embedded in a more general belief in the close relationship between knowledge and action, or put in different terms, a general concern with the possible effects of literature.<\/span><\/p>\n

[6]<\/a>\u00a0Lukacs, on the other hand, provides a description of reification that avoids this sense of absoluteness.\u00a0 To be more precise, Lukacs leaves plenty of room for history\u2019s contingencies, which may provide the exact crack through which resistance may break through.\u00a0 Thus, Lukacs insists, life may seem to be firmly held together by impenetrable natural laws; \u201cyet it can experience a sudden dislocation because the bonds uniting its various elements and partial systems are\u00a0a chance affair\u00a0<\/em>even at their most normal\u201d (History<\/em>\u00a0101, italics mine).\u00a0 Instead of paying exclusive attention to the all-encompassing rationalization that Adorno sees as devouring the modern world, Lukacs would like to examine \u201cthe relative irrationality of the total process\u201d (History<\/em>\u00a0102).\u00a0 Likewise, he has faith in art because \u201cform is therefore able to demolish the \u2018contingent\u2019 relation of the parts to the whole and to resolve the merely apparent opposition between chance and necessity\u201d (History<\/em>\u00a0136).\u00a0 Such an attention to the contingencies of domination has become a key issue in the 1980s, especially in the work of neo-Gramscians such as Stuart Hall, Ernst Laclau, and Chantel Mouffe.\u00a0 Yet, because of the thickness of historical sedimentation, Lukacs is rarely cited as one of the precursors.<\/span><\/p>\n

[7]<\/a>\u00a0While both Lukacs and Adorno have learned from Max Weber\u2019s concept of \u201crationalization\u201d and are aware of the privileging of instrumental reason in the capitalist mode of production, they still cherish a persistent belief in, respectively, the possibility of overcoming reification or of negating the cooptation of the culture industry through the activation of another, non-instrumentalist, yet likewise\u00a0universal <\/u>form of rationality.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Adorno, Theodor.\u00a0\u00a0Aesthetic Theory<\/em>.\u00a0 Trans. C. Lenhardt.\u00a0 London: RKP, 1984.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014.\u00a0 \u201cReconciliation Under Duress.\u201d\u00a0 Bloch et al. 151-76.<\/span><\/p>\n

Arato, Andrew and Eike Gebhardt, eds.\u00a0\u00a0The Essential Frankfurt School Reader<\/em>.\u00a0 New York: Continuum, 1982.<\/span><\/p>\n

Benjamin, Walter.\u00a0\u00a0Illuminations<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Hannah Arendt.\u00a0 Trans. Harry Zohn.\u00a0 New York: Schocken, 1969.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bloch, Ernst.\u00a0 \u201cDiscussing Expressionism.\u201d\u00a0 Bloch et al. 16-27.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bloch, Ernst, George Luk\uee3es, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, & Theodor Adorno.\u00a0\u00a0Aesthetics and Politics<\/em>.\u00a0 Trans. & Ed. Ronald Taylor.\u00a0 London: Verso, 1977.<\/span><\/p>\n

Brecht, Bertolt.\u00a0\u00a0Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. and Trans. John Willett.\u00a0 New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.<\/span><\/p>\n

Buck-Morss, Susan.\u00a0\u00a0The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute<\/em>.\u00a0 New York: Free P, 1977.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eagleton, Terry.\u00a0 \u201c\u2018Aesthetics and Politics.’\u201d\u00a0\u00a0New Left Review<\/em>\u00a0107 (1978): 21-34.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014.\u00a0\u00a0Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory<\/em>.\u00a0 London: Verso, 1984.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014.\u00a0\u00a0Ideology: An Introduction<\/em>.\u00a0 London: Verso, 1991.<\/span><\/p>\n

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno.\u00a0\u00a0Dialectic of Enlightenment<\/em>.\u00a0 Trans. John Cumming.\u00a0 New York: Continuum, 1972.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jameson, Fredric.\u00a0\u00a0Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature<\/em>.\u00a0 Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014.\u00a0 \u201cReflections in Conclusion.\u201d\u00a0 Bloch et al. 196-213.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jay, Martin.\u00a0\u00a0Adorno<\/em>.\u00a0 Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014.\u00a0\u00a0The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950<\/em>.\u00a0 Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1973.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kiralyfalvi, Bela.\u00a0\u00a0The Aesthetics of Gyorgy Luk<\/em>ac<\/em>s<\/em>.\u00a0 Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.<\/span><\/p>\n

Larrain, Jorge.\u00a0\u00a0Marxism and Ideology.<\/em>\u00a0 London: Macmillan, 1983.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lukacs, Georg.\u00a0 \u201cArt and Objective Truth.\u201d\u00a0 Lukacs, Writer and Critic<\/em>\u00a025-60.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014.\u00a0\u00a0Essays on Realism<\/em>.\u00a0 Trans. by David Fernbach.\u00a0 Cambridge: MIT P, 1980.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014.\u00a0\u00a0History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics<\/em>.\u00a0 Trans. Rodney Livingstone.\u00a0 Cambridge: MIT P, 1971.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014.\u00a0 \u201cThe Ideology of Modernism.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Realism in our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle.\u00a0 Trans. John & Necke Mander.\u00a0 New York: Harper & Row, 1964.\u00a0 17-46.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014.\u00a0 \u201cMarx and Engels on Aesthetics.\u201d\u00a0 Lukacs,\u00a0Writer and Critic<\/em>\u00a061-88.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014.\u00a0 \u201cNarrate or Describe?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Lukacs,\u00a0Writer and Critic <\/em>110-148.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014.\u00a0 \u201cRealism in the Balance.\u201d\u00a0 Bloch et al. 28-59.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014.\u00a0\u00a0The Theory of the Novel:A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of the Great Epic Literature<\/em>.\u00a0 Trans. Anna Bostock.\u00a0 Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014.\u00a0\u00a0Writer and Critic and Other Essays.<\/em>\u00a0 Ed. & Trans. Arthur D. Kahn.\u00a0 New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1970.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lunn, Eugene.\u00a0\u00a0Marxism & Modernism: An Historical Study of Luk<\/em>ac<\/em>s, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno<\/em>.\u00a0 Berkeley: U of California P, 1982.<\/span><\/p>\n

McDonough, Roisin.\u00a0 \u201cIdeology as False Consciousness: Lukacs.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Working Papers in Cultural Studies<\/em>\u00a010 (1977): 33-44.<\/span><\/p>\n

Norris, Christopher.\u00a0 \u201cImage and Parable: Readings of Walter Benjamin.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Philosophy and Literature<\/em>\u00a07.1 (1983): 15-31.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ridless, Robin.\u00a0\u00a0Ideology and Art: Theories of Mass Culture from Walter Benjamin to Umberto Eco<\/em>.\u00a0 American University Studies V, Philosophy 6.\u00a0 New York: Peter Lang, 1984.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wexler, Philip, ed.\u00a0\u00a0Critical Theory Now<\/em>.\u00a0 New York: Falmer P, 1991.<\/span><\/p>\n

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