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Jan 1, 2008
To explore the traditions of Marxist aesthetics, this entry comprises two essays:
  • Historical and Conceptual Overview
  • Marxism and Materialism
The first essay discusses the historical and theoretical roots of Marxism and its aesthetics. The second essay focuses on Marxism's commitment to materialism, especially in connection with contemporary aesthetics. For related discussion, see Cultural Studies; Gramsci; Hegel; Historicism, article on Historicism and Philosophy; Ideology; Jameson; Merleau-Ponty; Raphael; Russian Aesthetics, article on Socialist Realism; Sartre; Schapiro; and Williams. Historical and Conceptual Overview Reiterating Marxism's general concern with the relation between theory and practice, Marxist aesthetics has emphasized issues in art criticism and history (and recently, in cultural studies), as well as the systematic questions of aesthetic theory. These efforts have sometimes originated or ensued in explicit political programs; they have also led to disagreements about which positions count as “authentically” Marxist as well as skepticism among other philosophers and critics who question the status of Marxist theory in general. But for a tradition that claims figures as important for twentieth-century thought as György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor W. Adorno, and Mikhail Bakhtin, such issues and even the differences among its most notable “members” are less significant for assessing the impact of Marxist aesthetics than is their common focus on art as a distinctive and powerful representation of class relations, historical tendencies, and social formations. Art, like all other human activities, originates and takes its varied forms in relation to the historical situation and material needs of those who make it and their audience; this same basis would then be reflected in the method and direction of Marxist inquiry in aesthetics.

That Karl Marx himself wrote little explicitly about aesthetics is misleading as a measure of its importance for him. Aside from his own literary interests (including his unrealized plan for a book on Honoré de Balzac after completing Capital), his systematic thinking discloses significant aesthetic influences at its source. Having proposed to turn G. W. F. Hegel “right side up” with the displacement of idealism by materialism, Marx nonetheless retains the formal—and unifying—aesthetic configuration of the Hegelian dialectic in characterizing the movement of history; moreover, the “true beginning” of history that he predicted for the end of class conflict anticipates in that image of the future an intensification of sense experience that recalls the original emphasis of the term aesthetics in its use at the beginning of the modern tradition by Alexander C. Baumgarten. (“The forming of the five senses,” Marx writes, “is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.”) In these and other references to the patterns of historical development, the influence is evident of Marx's close reading of Hegel's own Philosophy of Fine Art (1835) and of the Aesthetics (1846) by Hegel's follower, F. T. Vischer.

In substantive terms, the analysis of history for Marx and then Marxism centers on the relation between the material “base” of economic existence and a “superstructure” of cultural institutions, including that of art. The exact terms of this relation remain a disputed question for Marxism; it is also one on which the central concept of representation in art bears directly. Marx himself anticipates and rejects the “vulgar” Marxist view according to which the material conditions of a society mechanically imprint themselves on and thus determine the character of its cultural superstructure. The inadequacy of that account is evident for Marx in respect to Greek art and William Shakespeare's writings, both of which in his judgment transcended the ideological context in which they appeared. Indeed, art may not only reflect more than its own context, it also has the capacity to act on (or even against) that source; the relationship is thus more complex than would be an apologia or even only a literally accurate description of the prevailing social hierarchy. Thus, too, the specific representation in the individual work of art need not—ought not—be tendentious; so Friedrich Engels emphasizes, “The more fully concealed the author's views, the better for the work of art.”

The Marxist concept of representation in art as at once rooted in history and aesthetically self-conscious also anticipates the Marxist position on other traditional aesthetic issues. In respect to art's cognitive status, Marxism consistently rejects the varieties of formalism, distancing itself from the many variations on a Kantian abstract or “free” (and noncognitive) beauty, and rather emphasizing (in Lukács's version) a representation of the “typical” in human experience, that is, of what, in a particular context, would be necessary and universal. What art communicates, then, is knowledge mediated by history—thus, historically expressive—and heightened in its sensible affect: at once abstract and concrete. (This combination resembles, although still with differences, the “universal” character of art claimed in Aristotle's Poetics.)

On related grounds, the distinction between form and content in the ontology of art and thus in the individual artwork becomes problematic. Hegel's reaction against that distinction's own formalist bias—as in his claim that “every definite content determines a form suitable to it”—is extended in its Marxist revision also against the opposite position in which form is no more than an epiphenomenon of content (so Lukács, for example, insists that form itself has a content). Thus, too, Marxist stylistics rejects the often subjectivist practice of connoisseurship in fine art and the antihistorical disposition of the Russian Formalists or the American New Criticism in literary criticism and theory. Objections to historicist interpretation, like that of the “intentional fallacy,” succeed only in making a fetish of the work of art; they must themselves fail because, analyzed apart from their social and human origins, the “formal” features of art are vacuous, of no interest either within or outside aesthetics.

The problem raised first by Plato of the relation between ethical and aesthetic judgment evokes in Marxist aesthetics a response that, like Plato' s, stresses the connection between the two. Contrary to the “art for art's sake” doctrine, the social origins and consequences of the artwork are intrinsically related to it as art, with the aesthetic experience thus also involving a moral point of view: no “benefit of clergy” (in George Orwell's phrase) insulates either the creative or the critical process. Such links between artistic and other objects lead Marxist aesthetics to oppose positions that emphasize the disembodiment of aesthetic experience—as claimed, for example, in the Kantian view of aesthetic disengagement from all utilitarian interests that has dominated modern aesthetics. The Marxist objection to the Kantian view suggests a conception of art as materially “interested” rather than “disinterested,” thus also linking up with the possibility they insist on more generally that aspects of the social superstructure can act on elements of the material “base” as well as the other way around. To this extent, it seems that despite the Marxists’ own (occasional) disclaimers, art would be actively, even if subtly tendentious; that art as it thus acted might be claimed to have history on its side would not alter the fact of this role. Even in this anti- “aestheticist” reaction, however, Marxist aesthetics attempts to avoid both the extremes of reductionism, on one side, and appeals to transcendent or ahistorical values, on the other, by combining a cognitive (and historically grounded) version of artistic representation with the intensification through art of the concrete affect. The “aesthetic” would then reflect a conjunction of thought and feeling that—so the claim goes—is objective or “realistic” without being emotively or morally neutral.

The composite view thus summarized leaves open such central issues as the relation between art and ideology (specifically, of how art can be at once inside and outside ideology). But then, no summary could provide a comprehensive (or perhaps even a consistent) statement of the sort that Marx and Engels themselves never ventured. Their emphasis on historical, social, and economic issues rather than on others like those of aesthetics anticipates also the order of priority in most of their successors. Even the most politically engaged of twentieth-century Marxists, however, attach importance to art and at times to aesthetics, as is evident, for example, in writings by Leon Trotsky and Georgy Plekhanov. Analyses by V.I. Lenin and Mao Zedong found art significant, at least instrumentally, as a means of communication and persuasion. The emergence in the Soviet Union and then elsewhere of Socialist Realism—officially “adopted” as an artistic standard at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers—remains more notable for the political and moral extremes to which it contributed than for the art it fostered or for its bearing on problems of aesthetics.

On the other hand, initiatives suggested by Marx and Engels in their social theory continue to influence thinkers who find in that framework a basis for addressing issues of aesthetics in relation to specific arts as well as to art as such. (Like most aesthetic theories, Marxist aesthetics has closer affinities to one art—in its case, literature—than to others; that emphasis is undoubtedly due to the cognitive emphasis in the Marxist view of representation.) Among the important early or mid-twentieth-century writers on Marxist aesthetics, one group in particular—the “Frankfurt School,” which included Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Loewenthal, and Herbert Marcuse (peripherally, also Walter Benjamin, and in his early work, Jürgen Habermas)—has had a continuing impact on aesthetics and social theory more generally. Influenced by them but in the end independently, a later generation of writers on aesthetics also associate their work with Marxism, although again without being bound by any but the most general orthodoxy. These include Terry Eagleton and John Berger in England; Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, and Pierre Bourdieu in France; Robert Weimann in Germany; and Fredric Jameson and Richard Ohmann in the United States.

The range of issues and methods considered by the latter authors is, if anything, broader than that of their predecessors; because of changes in the international political landscape, both the external and the internal pressures that constrained earlier Marxist thinkers have diminished. Despite this change, however, neither analytic aesthetics (influenced by recent Anglo-American linguistic philosophy) nor structuralist and poststructuralist aesthetics, which together have dominated recent aesthetic theory, has been responsive to the Marxist criticism of their common antihistorical and antifoundationalist claims. (If anything, the influence has moved in the other direction, with certain ostensibly Marxist writers scaling back the traditional centrality for Marxism of both historical explanation and the essentialist definition of human nature.)

On the other hand, Marxist themes figure in a number of contemporary aesthetic theories and theories of criticism that do not represent themselves as primarily Marxist. (Whether these would gain from being more explicitly or consistently Marxist is a matter of dispute within the accounts themselves.) Thus, “reader-response” or “reception” theory and the more general versions of hermeneutics, both of which cite the process of reading and the reader's historical situation as determinants of literary meaning, have evident precedents in Marxist analysis (this, without any more basic commitment to materialism and sometimes in direct opposition to it). A complement to this appears in the “New Historicism,” which again typically brackets the issue of materialism at the level of ontology, focusing rather on the contextual implications of the origins and consequences of art and criticizing the indifference to such historical factors in poststructuralism. The attentiveness by certain art historians to aspects of the production of fine art—like the development of technology and the roles of patrons or sponsors—carries further the analyses of social structure anticipated in earlier Marxist writers on the visual arts like Arnold Hauser and Max Raphael. (This work links up with other recent writing on “intellectual property” as related to aesthetic issues such as the ownership—and then the identity—of art.) Feminist aesthetics, examining the social causality of art's origins and the relation between the historical status of women artists and the supposed “nature” of art, has also looked (sometimes overtly, sometimes tacitly) to Marxist grounds. Various writers have drawn on “speech act” theory as a key to aesthetic issues of meaning—and again, the conception of art as an individual or institutional means of action has been an important and basic (and, if anything, more fully developed) theme of Marxist analysis. (By contrast, the influential “institutional” and related “artworld” theories of George Dickie and Arthur Danto, respectively, have relatively little to say about the status of institutions as such.)

Whatever strains occur in proposals to link these apparently diverse theories of art or criticism with Marxism, narrower definitions of Marxism are still more likely to misrepresent the status and transmission of the central aesthetic concepts in that tradition. Aesthetic theories that emphasize the roles of intuition, form, and the absence or indeterminacy of meaning—and the sharp distinction between aesthetic and other experience—do not constitute a single position in the history of aesthetics. But those theories are in any event distinguishable as a group from a second one for which the significance of art is social, cognitive, and connected through the transformations of art to the causal grounds of a historical and materialist setting. Marxist aesthetics is not unique in stressing the latter elements, but its emphasis on the social context as integral to the creation and understanding of art—through the role of the material medium, the lived worlds of creators and audiences, the relationship between history outside and inside art—offers valuable points of entry for both analyzing and experiencing art and the aesthetic. For aesthetic theories that acknowledge the importance of such considerations, the Marxist position would be obviously relevant; even for theories that dispute that importance, Marxist aesthetics provides a useful framework for addressing the disagreement itself. Bibliography Alpers, Svetlana . Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market. Chicago, 1988. Althusser, Louis . For Marx. Translated by Ben Brewster . New York, 1969. Arvon, Henri . Marxist Esthetics. Translated by Helen R. Lane . Ithaca, N.Y., 1973. Baxandall, Lee . Marxism and Aesthetics: A Selected Annotated Bibliography. New York, 1968. Baxandall, Lee , and Stefan Morawski , eds. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art. Saint Louis, 1973. Baxandall, Michael . Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven, 1985. Berger, John . About Looking. New York, 1980. Bourdieu, Pierre . Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice . Cambridge, Mass., 1984. Dickie, George . Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Ithaca, N.Y., 1974. Eagleton, Terry . Criticism and Ideology. London, 1976. Eagleton, Terry . The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1990. Frow, John . Marxism and Literary History. Cambridge, Mass., 1986. Gadamer, Hans-Georg . Truth and Method. 2d rev. ed. Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall . New York, 1989. Hauser, Arnold . The Philosophy of Art History. New York, 1959. Iser, Wolfgang . The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore, 1978. Jameson, Fredric . Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, N.J., 1971. Lang, Berel , and Forrest Williams , eds. Marxism and Art: Writings in Aesthetics and Criticism. New York, 1972. Lenin, V. I. Party Organization and Party Literature. In Collected Works, vol. 10. New York, 1975. Lukács, Georg (György). Studies in European Realism. Translated by Edith Bone . New York, 1964. Macherey, Pierre . A Theory of Literary Production. Translated by Geoffrey Wall . London and Boston, 1978. Mao Tse-tung . Five Documents on Literature and Art. Peking, 1967. Marx, Karl . Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Edited by Dirk J. Struik , translated by Martin Milligan . New York, 1964. Nelson, Cary , and Lawrence Grossberg , eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana, Ill., 1988. Nochlin, Linda . Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays. New York, 1988. Plekhanov, Georgy . Art and Social Life. Edited by Andrew Rothstein London, 1953. Raphael, Max . The Demands of Art. Translated by Norbert Guterman . Princeton, N.J., 1968. Solomon, Maynard , ed. Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary. New York, 1973. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty . In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York and London, 1987. Trotsky, Leon . Literature and Revolution. Translated by Rose Strunsky . Reprint, Ann Arbor, 1960. Veeser, H. Aram , ed. The New Historicism. New York and London, 1989. Weimann, Robert . Structure and Society in Literary History. Charlottesville, Va., 1976. Berel Lang Marxism and Materialism The question of a “materialist aesthetics,” as evidenced in the words themselves, implies some foregrounding state of tension or variance with an “idealist aesthetics.” This in turn points to a prior embeddedness of the aesthetic question itself within the larger, governing framework of a theory of knowledge. Thus an idealist aesthetics conceives art, like knowledge, to be autonomous in relation to a (putative) world of material realities, whereas a materialist aesthetics holds art to be inseparable from this world. At this level of generality, one might trace a materialist aesthetics as far back as Aristotle's Poetics and its implicit break from Platonic idealism. Scanning down the checklist of canonical Western philosophy, the aesthetic theories of Enlightenment thinkers such as Denis Diderot or David Hume might also be considered to take up something like a materialist position, although here any distinction between the material and the empirical effectively disappears.

In contemporary practice and parlance, however, the question of a materialist aesthetics is rarely raised, except in reference to historical and dialectical materialism, that is, to Marxism. It is to materialist aesthetics in this currently accepted sense that the following remarks are directed.

The question of the aesthetic for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was superordinately a question of its specific form of truth. Was the truth of art something strictly internal to the aesthetic sphere, or did it, on the contrary, reside in its relationship to an independent, material reality? Reacting, in particular, against the aesthetic doctrines of Friedrich von Schiller, Marx and Engels took the latter position. But in what, then, did this relation to material (i.e., social and historical) reality consist? Clearly, in its imitation, or conscious representation, as Aristotle had long before stipulated.

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.( Marx and Engels , 1973) Insofar, however, as this material object of artistic representation had come to coincide with the alienated and debased relations of bourgeois society, the materialist demand for aesthetic truth implied the demand for aesthetic negativity as well, the demand for a “glimpse” of what lay beyond, or trapped within, the fallen world of the present. Here the Aristotelian aesthetic fell short, in ways that the German idealist tradition—“standing on its head”—had been the first to seek systematically to redress.

Given the background of the truth question, an important current within materialist aesthetics concerns itself primarily with the practice of art as part of the material world of labor and production. If human labor itself has become alienated from the human laborer, how, materialistically speaking, can the art of such an alienated existence be anything but a pale shadow of the truly and fully human creative process it once was (under conditions of primitive communal being), and may yet again become (in a future classless society)? So conceived, art or aesthetic practice counts as a process whereby a human being, unlike an animal that “forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs,” “produce[s] in accordance with the standard of every species and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object.” In its full self-realization, such a “species being” thus “forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty,” according to Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (Marx and Engels, 1973).

Perhaps the most brilliant, if highly idiosyncratic, development of a materialist aesthetics in this sense we owe to the British Marxist Christopher Caudwell, who, in Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture, conceived beauty as arising from “the social ordering of affective elements in social things.” This “social ordering” was itself inseparable from the labor process, which Caudwell characterized as not only a community of action and perception but a “community of desire.” Caudwell's aesthetics appear even more remarkable when one considers that—like William Morris, in some ways his precursor—he wrote with no knowledge at all of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Caudwell had perhaps read Georgy Plekhanov, who, in works such as The Role of the Individual in History and Art and Social Life, had attempted a “materialist” and rigidly determinist explanation for such “aesthetic” phenomena as talent and “art for art's sake.” But where Plekhanov's “materialism” went no further than a “Marxist” sociology of art, Caudwell's (in ways analogous to the otherwise utterly distinct approach of the early aesthetic writings of Herbert Marcuse) not only examined and denounced the crippling effects of class division and alienation on the aesthetic faculty, but traced both this faculty and its “social conditions” to a common source in the most elemental human and social processes.

At bottom, the radical, materialist humanism of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts as well as of work such as Caudwell's treats the question of artistic truth as inseparable from the question of its roots in “species being.” But the former question nevertheless lies at the center of what has been a far more developed and polemical tradition in materialist aesthetics, if only because it bears much more immediately on the social and political criticism of artistic works themselves. The truth of art in relation to its material conditions may itself be of fundamental, material importance to concrete, emancipatory practice. So it is that such a materialist aesthetic, as applied to literature, becomes a demand for realism—“socialist” insofar as “by conscientiously describing the real mutual relations … [it] instills doubt as to the eternal character of the existing order” (Marx and Engels, 1973). V. I. Lenin, in his fragmentary, but brilliantly insightful, writings on Leo Tolstoy, outlined what such a realism meant in the context of the Russian revolutionary experience—a lesson effectively ignored, if apotheosized, in subsequent Soviet doctrines of Socialist Realism. But it is in the aesthetic theory of the Marxist philosopher György Lukács that this strand within orthodox Marxism receives its great and systematic elaboration, leading to a theory of the aesthetic as a special mode of cognition within the total process of reflection, in consciousness, of a preconscious, material realm of being. “The effect of art,” according to Lukács, “results from the fact that the work [of art] by its very nature offers a truer, more complete, more vivid and more dynamic reflection of reality than the receptant otherwise possesses” (Lukács, 1971). Such a materialist aesthetics became linked, in Lukács's thinking, to a defense of the “classics” of literary realism—above all, nineteenth-century European realists on the order of Honoré de Balzac and Tolstoy and twentieth-century Social Realists on the order of Maxim Gorky.

Under the influence of modernist and avant-garde artistic practice, however, this epistemological approach is displaced by an aesthetic that declares itself “materialist,” not because it claims for art and literature the status of a particular form of reflectively true, or “concrete” consciousness, but rather by virtue of the supposed power of art to intervene directly on the level of the practical and behavioral. Art's claim to the “material” thus implicitly postulates an aesthetic act pure and simple, as distinct from an aesthetic act of consciousness. A truly revolutionary work of art would not simply enter the field of general consciousness as a special instance of knowledge, but would work more directly, and perhaps unconsciously, to challenge, to subvert, or to alter conscious existence itself on the level of praxis. The governing conceptual framework or “problematic” within which a materialist aesthetics is posited and debated thus shifts, in effect, from that of the theory of knowledge to something more akin to a theory of agency in an ethicopolitical sense. In this spirit, aesthetics as otherwise divergent as Surrealism (“an unconscious, immediate action of the internal on the external”; Breton, 1989) and Brechtian epic theater (a theater that, instead of “provid[ing]” the spectator with “sensations … forces him to take decisions”; Brecht, 1964) center on the artistic process of producing an “effect” on the artistic public—a “shock” or an “estrangement”—that will somehow mobilize the receptant into action for social or cultural change. As elaborated by Walter Benjamin, this ethically framed materialist aesthetic requires of the artist that her “work will never be merely work on products but always, at the same time, on the means of production” (Benjamin, 1978). Technique as such, or the “organizing function” of a work of art, will principally determine whether the materialist demands of this aesthetic can be met. “The best political tendency is wrong if it does not demonstrate the attitude with which it is to be followed” (Benjamin). In the wake of the “linguistic turn” introduced by structuralist linguistics and semiotics, this materialism of “effects” and “attitudes” even manages to lodge itself entirely within the scope of language and signification. Witness, for example, Julia Kristeva's characterization of “signifying practice” (a.k.a. “poetic language”) as radically “materialist” by virtue of its capacity to marshal the transgressive power of the “heterogeneous” (i.e., the noncodifiable) against established linguistic codes or sign systems (Kristeva, 1975). In its feminist and psychoanalytic inflection, what was at first a strictly semiotic conception of heterogeneity is then linked to theories of a radical, antipatriarchal agency. In Kristeva's case, the “matter” of signs outside or previous to the “symbolic” order of the sign system is identified with the pre-Oedipal female body as such. The material, aesthetically speaking, merges with the maternal.

Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetic philosophy represents what is probably the most systematic and self-conscious expression of this trend—but is also the announcement of its decline. It is the work of art alone, unbound to either artist or receptant, that embodies what is now perhaps no more than the possibility of an emancipatory agency. Here, however, the cognitive frame reappears, if only in the ironic sense that Adorno views the very process of rational cognition with suspicion, reason itself having been, as he and Max Horkheimer were to claim, “instrumentalized” by totalitarian late capitalism. With Adorno, the radically pre- or even transcognitive attribute of the work of art becomes a site for a paradoxical kind of “knowledge” that is neither consciously rational nor an irrational act of pure intuition. “Total unfreedom” can be recognized, but not represented. But this is still, at least by its own account of itself, a materialist aesthetic, if only because the realm of the “ideal” has fallen. If all ideals have become false, the work of art, by refusing such ideals, becomes itself a novel instance of the material, but one in which the true ideal can “hibernate.” “Art draws its power of resistance from the fact that the realization of materialism would also be the abolition of materialism, that is, of the domination of material interests. Weak as it may be, art anticipates a spirit that would step forth at that point” (Adorno, 1987).

More recently, the trend within materialist approaches to art and literature has been to devolve a species of “materialism” that is, at best, agnostic concerning the pertinence of aesthetics as such to the aims of radical theory and practice. This trend corresponds roughly to what we now often consent to call postmodernism in the arts and literature, as well as to the philosophical ascendancy of poststructuralism. Within “Western” Marxist discourse, its roots undoubtedly lie in Louis Althusser, who, in a kind of unintended parody of classical Marxist aesthetics, argued that art was not directly reducible to ideology insofar as it really did make it possible to “‘see’ … something which alludes to reality” (Althusser, 1971). But this “something” turns out not to be the truth of this reality, but only that of its ideology per se, an ideology “identical with the ‘lived’ experience of human existence itself.” Works of art “make us ‘perceive’ (but not know) in some sense from the inside, by an internal distance, the very ideology in which they are held”). The ultimate effect of Althusser's theoretical intervention, however, has been to pave the way for the elimination of the aesthetic altogether as a materialist category, since, given the purportedly ideological saturation of “lived” experience as such, the theory of the aesthetic as a miraculously transparent wrinkle within ideology is reduced to an effectively theological principle that even Althusser's former disciples have found it difficult to credit.

The least one can say is that—post-Althusser—contemporary Western Marxists seem to take less and less interest in aesthetics, unless it is, following Terry Eagleton in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, to reduce the aesthetic question itself to one of bourgeois hegemonic and ideological provenance: “The aesthetic is … no more than a name for the political unconscious: it is simply the way social harmony registers itself on our senses, imprints itself on our sensibilities” (Eagleton, 1990). On the whole, the categories of judgment and critique that once served—qua “materialism”—to distinguish art from what was simply “culture” are set aside. The outwardly dominant ethicopolitical framework of aesthetic vanguardism remains in place, but aesthetic categories have seemingly been rendered irrelevant within it. “Cultural studies” takes the stage. So, for example, in the thinking of John Fiske, “high culture” maintains a “distance between the art object and reader/spectator,” one that “devalues socially and historically specific reading practices in favor of a transcendent appreciation or aesthetic sensibility with claims to universality” (Fiske, p. 154). “Distance” here implies a strict separation of the “aesthetic” and the “socially and historically specific”—of art and the “material.” The “culture of the people,” however, “denies categorical boundaries [distances] between art and life: popular art is part of the every day, not distanced from it.” This sounds unobjectionable enough, until it becomes apparent that every trace of negativity and alienated existence has been summarily erased from this “every day.” With an inadvertent irony, one of the most basic tenets of Marxian, materialist aesthetics is reaffirmed even as it is blithely set aside: welcomed merely for what it is in the everyday popular experience of capitalism, the material abjures all need for the aesthetic.

As a final observation: it is noteworthy how, in the overall tendency within materialist aesthetics to disregard questions of artistic truth in preference for the question of art as direct, material agent, the emphasis placed on dialectics within the process of aesthetic theorization has steadily waned. Thus, for example, the relationship of art to the social totality—central to Lukácsian aesthetics—seems to be all but forgotten by contemporary materialists. (Fredric Jameson, in his guise as a latter-day Adornian, may be one of the few significant exceptions here.) This leads one to speculate whether, for all its cautionary virtues in combating the escapist proclivities of a purely contemplative, aestheticist ideal, the “materialism” of a left-oriented aesthetic avant-garde has not itself progressively succumbed to the reifying and fragmenting pull of late capitalist society and culture.

See also Adorno; Benjamin; Brecht; Ideology; Kristeva; Lukács; and Marcuse. Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann , translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor . Minneapolis, 1997. Althusser, Louis . Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster , pp. 221–227. New York, 1971. Benjamin, Walter . The Author as Producer. In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited by Peter Demetz , translated by Edmund Jephcott , pp. 220–238. New York, 1978. Brecht, Bertolt . Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willett . New York, 1964. Breton, André . The Poet's Function. From Les vases communicants. In Maurice Nadeau , The History of Surrealism, pp. 304–305. New York, 1965; reprint, Cambridge, Mass., 1989. Caudwell, Christopher . Beauty: A Study in Bourgeois Aesthetics. In Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture, 2 vols. in 1, pp. 77–115. New York, 1971. Eagleton, Terry . The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1990. Fiske, John . Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life. In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg et al. New York, 1992. Jameson, Fredric . Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, N.J., 1971. Kristeva, Julia . The System and the Speaking Subject. In The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of Semiotics, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok , pp. 47–55. Lisse, Netherlands, 1975. Larsen, Neil . Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies. Minneapolis, 1990. Lukács, Georg (György) . Art and Objective Truth. In Writer and Critic and Other Essays, translated by Arthur D. Kahn , pp. 25–60. New York, 1971. Lukács, Georg (György) . Ästhetik I: Der Eigenart des Ästhetischen. Neuwied, 1963. Marx, Karl , and Friedrich Engels . Marx and Engels on Literature and Art. Edited by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski . New York, 1973. Solomon, Maynard , ed., Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary. New York, 1973; reprint, Detroit, 1979. See for extensive bibliography. Neil Larsen

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