Literature and Politics

The illusory realities of many mass movements of the twentieth century, which became the bloodiest reality and yet are overshadowed by something not completely real, delusional, were born in the moment when action was first called for.—Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis”.

In the early twentieth century, amidst the concerted attempt to hammer out a Marxist aesthetic, the insistence that an artwork harbour political content became a new criterion of its merit. This paper revisits the mid-twentieth century debate in German letters sparked in 1934 by Georg Lukács’ ideological denunciation of expressionism. Lukacs’ censure of expressionism as a distraction from pressing social concerns, indeed as an agent of false consciousness adorning the decadent world of Weimar democracy and Nazi fascism, was met by Bloch, Brecht and Adorno, who each in turn criticised Lukacs’ model of realism as didactic and itself formalist. Adorno’s critique of engagement or commitment (Sartre’s model of a political aesthetic), and of Lukács’ conviction that political and ideological positions could be deduced from the formal properties of the artwork, are key moments in his defence of the modernist artwork and the emancipatory potential released in the experimental praxis of modernists like Kafka and Beckett. But the spectre of Lukácsian realism, far from being laid to rest by Adorno, haunts the corridors of Cultural Studies departments everywhere today. The idea of form as a mask for the artist’s political and ideological commitments was, one suspects, designed from the start to lighten the burden of the critic, all the better to cast those burdens in a more heroic light. However, the truth content of a work can never be laid bare so easily, and is too fluid to fit an activist politics. It is only by fixing one’s sights on the primacy of the object that the secret of the artwork is revealed, for encoded in its form is no agenda for political action, but a mere promise—Stendhal’s promesse de bonheur—that the social distortions produced by current social arrangements will not last. I will finish by hazarding a few remarks about how much we’ve learnt, and how far we’ve come, from this debate.   

Chris Conti teaches literature and communications on a casual basis at University Of Western Sydney. His articles on contemporary literature have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Studies In The Novel, and Literature And Aesthetics.