FROM LUKACS TO BRECHT: THE MOMENT OF PRACTICE IN CRITICAL THEORY
By E. San Juan, Jr.
Emeritus professor of Comparative Literature University of Connecticut, Storrs, Ct.
In the wake of the post-structuralist transvaluation of texts as the ceaseless play of differance, of the unchoreographable dance of signifiers, which one may interpret as a historically specific reaction in the Western milieu to dogmatist leftism in its various manifestations--economistic, sectarian, mechanical, empiricist, etc.--I would like to reaffirm once more the occluded yet irrepressible matrix of art in the Marxist concept of praxis and political struggle. Enunciated by Marx in Theses on Feuerbach and The Eighteenth Brumaire in particular, this inscription of the aesthetic in transformative action I would call the "Leninist moment," the hegemonic or ethico-political crux in Marxist critical theory.
In The Aesthetic Dimension, Herbert Marcuse attempts to posit and validate the crucial divorce between aesthetics and politics in late monopoly capitalism by suggesting that Lenin, and the Bolshevik revolutionary tradition originating from Marxism-Leninism, rejected the transcendental and liberating "truth of art" (1978, 56-57). From within a revisionist perspective. the Polish aesthetician Stefan Morawski distorts Lenin's dialectical conception of art by defining it as narrowly concerned with "the popularization of culture," and guilty of "Utilitarianism" (1974, 261). Even for the sophisticated British critic Terry Eagleton, Lenin's "epistemological theory of reflection" generates more problems than it solves. In sum, the putative reflection theory ascribed to Lenin and orthodox Marxists has become the favorite whipping horse of bourgeois theoreticians ranging from academic Marxologists like Peter Demetz (1967) to liberal commentators like Edmund Wilson (1948) and George Steiner (1967).
With the renaissance of Marxist critical theory in the late Sixties, especially the recovery of certain fundamental insights into the constitution of the subject by ideology facilitated by Althusser's "structuralist readings," it seems appropriate to re-situate the necessary task of Marxist critical theory on artistic production within a revolutionary dialectical strategy of cultural politics. This strategy would not simply be a deconstructive scholastic reading of texts to disclose their metaphysical fallacies or rhetorical virtues, a practice inspired by leftist followers of Derrida and Foucault. It would also not be a revival of a utopian or prophetic strain in Marxism as an alternative to bureaucratic conservatism or social-democratic opportunism, an approach exemplified by Maynard Solomon's instructive anthology Marxism and Art (1973). What this strategy hopes to encourage is the active intervention of the critic or theoretician in the social practices of everyday life.
In Lenin's critical practice of deciphering texts, particularly in his appraisal of Tolstoy's works, we can discern the model of an interrogatory hermeneutic praxis. Lenin focuses on the organic yet mediated linkage between knowledge and action, cognition and organized will--a new radical conception of textuality and signifying practice which would be elaborated later on by Christopher Caudwell, deepened by Antonio Gramsci, and actualized by the Lehrstucke of Bertolt Brecht.
As Pierre Macherey has pointed out in his A Theory of Literary Production (1966), Lenin demonstrated the internal contradictions in Tolstoy's writings between the critical-realistic protest embodied in the texts and the
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quietist reactionary doctrines thematized by the allegorizing tendencies in narrative. He pointed out how these contradictions spring from the ideological position of the artist himself and the inherent limitations of such a position. While defining the limits of his ideology through narrative form, Tolstoy's art distances itself from its intrinsic ideology by foregrounding the principle of conflict. Such distancing or decentering opens up the space for critical intervention, an opening seized by Lenin. This can be illustrated by Lenin's remark in "Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution"(1908): "But the contradictions in Tolstoy's views and doctrines are not accidental; they express the contradictory conditions of Russian life in the last third of the nineteenth century. The patriarchal countryside, only recently emancipated from serfdom, was literally given over to the capitalist and the tax collector to be fleeced and plundered..."(1967, 30). Tolstoy's views, Lenin urged, should be appraised from the standpoint of democratic protest against advancing capitalism, a protest embodied in non-violent religious language permeating the consciousness of Russian peasants and landlords "at the time the bourgeois revolution was approaching mankind." Further, "Tolstoy is original, because the sum total of his views, taken as a whole, happens to express the specific features of our revolution as a peasant bourgeois revolution" (1967, 30; also 48-62).
Tolstoy's landlord/patriarchal ideology, characterized by a sharp awareness of conjunctural class conflict and a specific resolution proposed for this conflict, finds itself objectified and interrogated by the structure of his texts which metamorphoses illusions (enabled by ideology) into visible objects and practices. In this process, the ideology is internally displaced or redoubled, thereby exposing its limits and inadequacies (for example, the social framework of beliefs informing the protagonists in Anna Karenina). For these limits, silences or absences to reveal their presence, a dialectical reading is required. In Lenin's reading, we see the analysis of the historical contradictions in Tolstoy's class position vis-a-vis the 1905 bourgeois democratic revolution manifest as the preaching of Christian quietism, an ethico-political position which hides the complex totality of the material contradictions. In the same breath, the intrinsic lack in the text expresses the historical deficiency or insufficiency of the historical situation, namely, the ambiguous role of the peasantry in the emerging socialist revolution. One can perceive this problematic of Tolstoy's ideology being interrogated and demystified (its false claims to totality and naturalness exposed) in a narrative like "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" where the existential anguish suffered by Ivan exceeds the social corruption afflicting his petty bourgeois stratum. At the same time, his predicament erases the subjectivities of women and the servant Gerasim--not erases but rather neutralizes them in conformity with the pietist or moralizing closure of the text.
While the symptomatic diagnosis which Macherey (1978, 105-135) recommends tends to privilege the text as a displacing mechanism that reveals the incongruities and dissonances marking the limits of ideological incorporation, I would like to stress here that Lenin's own critical practice operates within and outside the text- bound, purely hermeneutical method. By situating Tolstoy's texts at the conjuncture of class alignments (Gramsci's relation of historic forces) and focusing on the problematic role of the peasantry in the revolutionary process as a whole, Lenin anatomizes the contingencies of literary form itself. In other words, the text is articulated by multiple determinations, not just by the purely linguistic or rhetorical. In effect Lenin decentered the organic formal unity of texts, elucidating their "political unconscious" (Jameson, 1981) in the conflicted historical totality subsuming them.
This argument concerning the textual production of meaning, the discursive process of signification as a dialectical transaction in which ideology is cognized as a social practice, not a transcribed "false consciousness," is not Lenin's innovation--his intervention takes the form of articulating a conjunctural theory of revolutionary strategy and tactics outlined in What is to be done? It is actually Marx's, specifically in his critique of religion where the notion of what Lukacs later on calls "reification" as derived from commodity-fetishism is first formulated (Lukacs 1971, 83-222). In general, religion as an "inverted world-consciousness" provides the heuristic model for the unity-in-conflict of the real and the illusory. Marx associates praxis with discourse in The German Ideology and in his critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:
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”Religion is, in fact, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet gained himself or has lost himself again....It is the fantastic realization of the human being because the human being has attained no true reality....The wretchedness of religion is at once an expression of and a protest against real wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is a demand for their true happiness. The call to abandon illusions about their conditions is the call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. Thus, the critique of religion is the critique in embryo of the vale of tears of which religion is the halo...(1970, 131).
Here Marx grasps the superstructure (religion) not as epiphenomena but as an integral element of an all pervasive social practice. In conceptualizing the contradictory relation between intellectual objectification and social reality, Marx laid the groundwork for the active, dynamic and creative intervention of transformative agents. Such agency, relative to varying historical sites, can be instanced by Lenin's bolshevik party, Gramsci's "organic intellectuals" functioning in the ideological apparatuses of civil society. Or it can assume the guise of Brecht's avant-garde epic gesture aimed at destroying the habit of organic idealist thinking and its roots in the Kantian fetishism of categories.
Before pursuing the development and ramification of this Leninist moment of cultural politics in the Brecht- Lukacs debate over socialist realism and its implications, it would be instructive to summarize here Christopher Caudwell's argument in Illusion and Reality (1937) that poetry, art in general, is a specific mode of production of "historically necessary forms of social consciousness," in short, of literature as politically defined signifying practice.
Caudwell's controlling insight that the concept of bourgeois freedom is premised on the ignorance of social relations--an instance of the working of commodity-fetishism--stems from his thesis of the dialectical unity of subject and object. This thesis is an epistemological axiom implied in Marx's concept of the subject as sensuous- practical activity, "theory as the outcome of practice on the object" (1978, 143; also 113-114, 117-118). Marxist theory is oriented toward "concrete living," toward the realization of freedom (development or fulfillment of man's species-being) by society, collective or associated producers, mastering and directing the forces of nature. Engels conceived of freedom as lived in the appreciation of the necessary inscription of humans in nature and society. Caudwell, however, construes the notion of species-being in a rather narrow economistic sense. Because of the reduction of all experience to the dualistic opposition between man and nature, instinct and environment, affect and cognition, Caudwell equates art and emotion, thus annulling the distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic effects, as Mulhern has persuasively argued (1974, 57). Caudwell is therefore unable to construct a theory of art free from psychology or immediate pragmatic exigencies.
What is original and relevant for us in this context is Caudwell's articulation of the aesthetic function, his view that art is not just a mere transcription of subjectivity (as in formalist idealism) nor a representation of objective reality (as in mimetic naturalism) but a production of a "mock world" where the "I," the transindividual subject of culturally determinate discourse (not the self-present "I" of phenomenology)--the "I" as a socially constituted ego of the "common affective world"--actualizes itself in comprehending and transforming the real world. "Poetry is...the sweat of man's struggle with Nature" conducted in history: "the phantasy of poetry is a social image" (1937, 130, 194; see also Duparc and Margolies 1986, 27).
For Caudwell, individual consciousness always appears as a social product. Since the dream or phantasy in art unfolds itself as the mobilizing of collective energies in which human thought and will (the genotype) act on the objective world, subject and object are posited as interacting dialectically. Poetry functions through the "conditioning of instinctive responses by the relations of society....Because it must use the collective world of language, it focuses all the emotional life of society in one giant 'I' which is common to all" (1937, 72).
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Consequently, "poetry is public...for consciousness is a social construction" (1937, 244). Mulhern summarizes Caudwell's poetics of collective dream in a succinct way: "Poetry is the psychological agent in a general historical movement: by harmonizing instinct and environment, it facilitates the struggle of man against Nature" (1974, 47).
In the concluding chapter of Illusion and Reality, Caudwell translates the ethical and practical implications of his poetics as a call for petty bourgeois artists to "take the difficult creative road--that of refashioning the categories and technique of art so that it expresses the new world coming into being and is part of its realization" (1937, 289). This new world is socialist society where the poet, conscious of internal as well as external necessity (causality), becomes a figure for the fulfilled will and freedom of each individual in society. The radicalization of the petty bourgeois artist, for Caudwell, occurs through proletarian cultural hegemony, a synthesis of the progressive elements in bourgeois art and a transitional, evolving revolutionary art. Examples today would range from the poetry workshops of Ernesto Cardenal in Nicaragua to the grassroots theater in the Philippines, from the feminist testimonios from El Salvador and South Africa to the resistance writing by Palestinian underground militants.
Caudwell's analysis confronts directly the naturalizing and mystifying effect of bourgeois ideology, its positing of a unified autonomous ego. He tries to decenter the ego through positioning it within the dialectical interaction of the collective and nature, a praxis mediated by historical sedimentation and changing human desire. What Caudwell does not clearly spell out is the praxis of change on the level of art's content, a content somewhat unrelated to technique: "A revolution of content [in poetry], as opposed to a mere movement of technique, now begins, corresponding in the social sphere to a change in productive relations as opposed to a mere improvement in productive forces" (1937, 127).
Caudwell rejects the modernist resolution of the crisis in art's function--"the tragedy of the will of Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's "I" living in a world wholly of personal phantasy"--because this is merely symptomatic of an escape from "content" and "social form" into the unconscious, privatized sphere of dream. In its systematic upholding of individual freedom as a transcendence of necessity (reversing Engels), surrealism fetishizes technique and thus privileges the bourgeois notion of freedom which conditions it. This is also Caudwell's criticism of George Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence and H. G. Wells (1971. 1-95). In his schematic history of bourgeois English poetry, Caudwell notes that in the final capitalist crisis (beginning in 1930), "the question of form now tends to take a second place until the problem of social relations has been solved poetically" (1937, 138, 297; see Margolies 1969, 101-119). How exactly the problem is solved in poetic art, Caudwell does not explain.
It remained for Brecht, in his decisive contestation with Lukacs in the Thirties over the methodology for achieving the goal of socialist realism, to elucidate not so much the objective moment--the historicity of phenomena, commodities as frozen or "dead" labor; life as "human sensuous activity" or praxis--as the subject moment or pole of the dialectic. In the context of a historical materialism challenged by fascist violence, Brecht theorized the mental and perceptual categories through which, in the art-work and in the audience, the social totality is mediated and the opportunity for action drawn. In the meantime, the mode of nineteenth-century realism valorized by Plekhanov, Mehring and early Marxist critics prevented the exploration of other alternatives to register the subtle mutations of middle-class consciousness in the post-World War I era.
How can a revolutionary practice of writing combat the lure of bourgeois ideology and what Lukacs calls "reification" if it employs the mode of classic expressive realism? The tendency of such realism is precisely to conceal the historical specificity of the production of meaning and the reality-effect of prevailing codes of representation. Realism generates the notion of a subject as a given presence without history, self-identical, free and homogeneous: the bourgeois illusion Caudwell tried to exorcise. If subjectivity is a discursive construct, as Caudwell may be read to imply, and the forms of discourse vary relative to specific formations and class positions, then the key to producing politically effective art lies in a critical/creative practice where the signifying
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process is foregrounded and interrogated. Is the code of realism itself an immutable formal criterion? Or are the means of unfolding social totality and enabling access to it a matter of conventions determined by concrete historical conjunctures--the convergence of ideological, political and economic instances to which Althusser called attention? Is there just one realist style or form? Or is realism the epistemological and cognitive perspective within which a variety of forms (semiotic styles, signifying practices) can operate?
While it is obligatory to contextualize the famous Brecht-Lukacs debate in order to account for Lukacs' privileging of the "intensive totality" of critical realism (evinced in Thomas Mann) and Aristotelian catharsis (Lukacs 1970, 25-88), and for Brecht's dialectical conceptualizing of realism, it would be instructive to rehearse the nodal theoretical points in this exchange. At the outset, I would express my partiality for Brecht's arguments in the light of my commitment to Third World anti-imperialist struggles where aesthetic problems and cultural tasks are overdetermined by strategic political needs. On the other hand, my work on Lukacs (San Juan 1973) testifies to his enduring value as a heuristic guide to renewing the immense creative potential of Marxism in a time when the old paradigms and formulas can no longer elucidate postmodern reality.
In emphasizing the criterion of typicality (of character and situation) whereby the "spontaneous unity of essence and appearance," the particular and the general, crystallizes, Lukacs lapses into a mechanical one- sidedness which hypostatizes the "organic, rounded and closed" form of nineteenth-century critical realism as the permanent model or standard of socialist realism (Lukacs 1980, 45-75). I agree with Werner Mittenzwei in exposing this formalist error in Lukacs. This positive ideal contradicts the principle in materialist dialectics that the contradictory character of essence and appearance, not their relative unity, functions as the determining force within the complex (1973, 225). In this regard, Lenin himself stresses the primacy of contradiction in Philosophical Notebooks: "In the strict sense, dialectics is the investigation of the contradictions in the essence of the things themselves; it is not only the appearances which are ephemeral, mobile, flowing, limited only by certain milestones, but also the essences of things" (Selsam and Martel 1963, 131).
Precisely in focusing on contradiction as the dynamic motivation behind any materialist theory of reflection, Brecht rejects the contemplative and utopian (in the pejorative sense) thrust of Lukacs' cognitive rationalism (see Lovell 1980, 68-76; Jameson 1971, 160-205). Brecht follows Lenin in situating the text (literary form, technique, genre) within the practical exigences of the class struggle. In a totalizing view, he takes "into account the degree of education and the class background of their public as well as the condition of the class conflicts" (Lang and Williams 1972, 227).
While the contemporary poststructuralist critic may discount Brecht's preoccupation with alienation-effect as merely an offshoot of his project of unfolding the causal nexus, "the network of social relationships," constituting any event, Brecht cannot be classified simply as an exponent of "epistemological conventionalism." He certainly does not subscribe to the tenet of the undecidability of meaning premised on the alleged disappearance of the referent. Brecht's aesthetics includes a rhetorical or pragmatic moment within the cognitive: because what is represented in theater is not empirical montage of phenomena but the laws of social motion, to accomplish this task successfully it is necessary to enforce a critical distance, to remove the plausible and familiar elements in life which hide the possibilities for change in the nexus of events and actors (Brecht 1964, 91-99, 179-205). The knowledge induced by this syncopated or stylized realism involves the recipient's perception of such possibilities, a perception indistinguishable from a learning process where pleasure coincides with the critical questioning of reality. This critical response entails a desire to play or experiment and thus transform the given situation according to the dictates of the "collective phantasy," to use Caudwell's evocative phrase (Brecht 1964, 69-76).
It is clear that Brecht's overriding purpose is to mobilize individual energies for collective intervention in changing society, a goal to which the choice of forms or technical means is subordinate. Revealing the historicity of social relations, disclosing forms and ideas as constructs informed by alterity and difference, requires the will to subvert one-dimensional homogenizing thought. It implies the production of meaning through the act of
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demythologizing public consensus and demystifying received norms. Historicizing texts--making visible the dynamics of ideological production in shaping them--demonstrates and confirms the capacity of humans to collectively shape their world and realize man's unique species-being. Brecht's materialism re-inscribes the reader or spectator as potential revolutionary agency in the interstices of a conflicted totality, a society in process of change.
In a well-known polemical essay "The Popular and the Realistic" (circa 1938), Brecht proposed a definition of realism which I think possesses flexibility and lucidity:
“Our conception of realism needs to be broad and political, free from aesthetic restrictions and independent of convention. Realist means: laying bare society's causal network / showing up the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of the dominators / writing from the standpoint of the class which has prepared the broadest solutions for the most pressing problems afflicting human society / emphasizing the dynamics of development / concrete and so as to encourage abstraction (Craig 1975, 424; see also Bloch 1977, 68-85).
While the semantics of realism is chiefly conditioned by class and historic conjuncture, "popular" here may be conceived as an interpellation of a united front or historic bloc somewhat analogous to Gramsci's notion of "national-popular culture" (which I discuss later). In an article dated 12 August 1953, "Cultural Policy and Academy of Arts," Brecht reiterates his demand for art's "broad intelligibility," its harnessing of the progressive elements in a national tradition, and its project of socialist realism as "a deeply human, earth- oriented art which will liberate every human capacity." Polemicizing against dogmatic and bureaucratic pontifications issued by party officials, Brecht summed up his conception of socialist realism with which I am broadly in agreement. Socialist realism embraces two central themes: first, socialist realist works reveal characters and events as contradictory, historical and alterable, laying bare "the dialectical laws of movement of the social mechanism" so that the "mastering of man's fate" is made easier; and second, socialist realist works provoke "pleasure at the possibility of society's mastering man's fate," pleasure confluent with "socialist impulses." Underlying this second proposition is the primacy of a working-class viewpoint that strives "to raise human productivity to an undreamt-of extent by transforming society and abolishing exploitation" (Lang and Williams 1972, 226-227).
What Brecht adds to Caudwell's notion of the genotype (the collective impulse of human desire) and to Lukacs' axiom of typicality is a more thorough dialectical grasp of dissonance or conflict as the driving force behind social processes (see in particular number 45 of "A Short Organon for the Theater"). He also exhibits an unprecedented emphasis on socially shared pleasure which transposes the utopian or prophetic vision that Bloch and Benjamin appreciated in Marx--the "becoming" and "disappearance" of contradictions--into a sensuous, "earthly" performance. Brecht seems to re-articulate in his own language Lenin's hermeneutic discovery of the lacunae and discrepancies in Tolstoy's texts when Brecht foregrounds the pleasure-yielding effect of learning solidarity and struggle, as suggested in the concluding passage of his "Organon":
...our representations must take second place to what is represented, men's life together in society; and the pleasure felt in their perfection must be converted into the higher pleasure felt when the rules emerging from this life in society are treated as imperfect and provisional. In this way the theater leaves its spectators productively disposed even after the spectacle is over. Let us hope that their theatre may allow them to enjoy as entertainment that terrible and never-ending labor which should ensure their maintenance, together with the terror of their unceasing transformation. Let them here produce their own lives in the simplest way, for the simplest way of living is in art (Brecht 1964, 77; see Arvon 1973, 104-112).
The antinomies of form and content, style and theme, the popular and the realistic qualities in art-works, which took center stage in the debate between Lukacs and Brecht in the Thirties, can be traced in the fractured
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and unresolved texts of Marxist cultural politics--from Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (1936) to Mao's influential Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art (1942). Questions about which has primacy--form or content, authorial will or audience reception, political correctness or technical efficacy--can perhaps be clarified by examining next Gramsci's theory of hegemony as a political-ideological strategy founded on a recovery of the authentic Marxist conception of praxis (Gramsci 1957).
Let us recall that in Theses on Feuerbach Marx not only stressed the centrality of "human sensuous activity, practice," which defines the substance of social life; he also pointed out that "the human essence is not an abstraction inherent in each single individual" but is in fact indivisible from "the ensemble of social relations." Further Marx underscored in Thesis X that "the standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or socialized humanity." Contrary to the one-sided culturalist reading of Gramsci's thought which privileges the sphere of ideology outside the political, I submit that the site of hegemony is not just civil society but the totality of social relations where production and the state, economic base and ideological superstructure, constitute an ongoing process of changing power relations: class subordination and dominance (Merrington 1977; Mercer 1978; Mouffe 1979; Sassoon 1980).
We can then define Gramsci's concept of hegemony as a totalizing revolutionary strategy motivated by his emphasis on Marxism as "the philosophy of praxis," "the historicist conception of reality," which Gramsci elaborates in reaction to the Crocean problematic of art as intuition:
If one cannot think of the individual apart from society, and thus if one cannot think of any individual who is not historically conditioned, it is obvious that every individual, including the artist and all his activities, cannot be thought of apart from society, a specific society. Hence the artist does not write or paint--that is, he does not externalize his phantasms--just for his own recollection, to be able to relive the moment of creation. He is an artist only insofar as he externalizes, objectifies and historicizes his phantasms. Every artist-individual, though, is such in a more or less broad and comprehensive way, he is 'historical' or 'social' to a greater or lesser degree (Gramsci 1985, 112).
By contextualizing the individual artist in a historically specific milieu, Gramsci qualifies all aesthetic questions as ultimately political in character insofar as they are inscribed in culture grasped as a lived process of experience, not an abstract or simply functional institution. The English critic Raymond Williams provides us with the most precise description of what in Gramsci involves a whole range of ethico-political activities. For Williams, hegemony should be comprehended as "a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values--constitutive and constituting--which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming" (Williams 1977, 110).
But this process of establishing hegemony is not a spontaneous phenomena. It is mediated by a new category of organic (as opposed to traditional) intellectuals whose command over material and intellectual knowledge endows them with a "directive" power to fashion ideologies which gradually become "common sense" through a complex network of consensus formation. Public and private spheres thus fuse in the project of cultural mediation where critical intervention transpires.
Gramsci's purpose in articulating the prospect of proletarian hegemony inheres in his goal of creating a national-popular culture where the hegemony of the working class is embodied. This culture serves as the key to translating "the philosophy of praxis" into common sense. Conversely such a project also organizes and refines common sense into a scientific world-view. Put in orthodox terms, the hegemonic drive for a national-popular culture will eliminate the division between mental and manual labor, between city and countryside, which Marx envisioned in the Manifesto, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and in the Critique of the Gotha Program.
Two passages indicate how Gramsci seeks to transpose the purely aesthetic problem into a cultural-
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ideological mode of radical transformation:
‘The premiss of the new literature cannot but be historical, political, and popular. It must aim at elaborating that which already is, whether polemically or in some other way does not matter. What does matter, though, is that it sink its roots into the humus of popular culture as it is, with its tastes and tendencies and with its moral and intellectual world, even if it is backward and conventional’ (Gramsci 1985, 102-103).
Concretely "genuine" and "fundamental" humanity can mean only one thing in the artistic field: "historicity," that is, the "national-popular" character of the writer, but in the broad sense of "sociality," which can also be taken in the artistic sense so long as the social group that is being expressed is historically alive and the social connection not of an immediate "practico-political" nature. In other words, it must not be predicatory and moralistic, but historical and ethico-political (Boelhower 1981, 585).
In the first quote, Gramsci grounds the terms "historical, political and popular" in the realm of everyday life, of "common sense" however corrupted or distorted by the prevailing unjust social relations. In the second quote, he equates "historicity" with "national-popular" and "sociality," emphasizing the mimetic or representational task of the artist who "realizes" the immanent direction of the historical process. In this way he avoids the recalcitrant form-content dualism of traditional aesthetics I have alluded to earlier. By means of the category "national-popular" as applied specifically to Italian conditions, Gramsci historicizes the concept of hegemony by liberating it from class essentialism or economistic reductionism. He sutures the theory of hegemony with the long-range project of nation-building peculiar to Italy's condition. Gramsci envisages the task of national liberation against foreign occupiers, or its spiritual counterpart, cosmopolitanism, pursuing the route via the formation of a popular historic bloc of various classes--in another context, the route of the Frente Sandinista in Nicaragua, for example.
From this point it is only a short step to reconceptualizing the dialectical linkage between form and content by their thorough historical grounding in specific conjunctures. The metaphysical problematic of Kant, Hegel and Croce is thereby displaced or re-situated in concrete social predicaments. Gramsci contends for a dialectical interpretation of the polarity: "Can one speak of a priority of content over form? One can in this sense: the work of art is a process and changes of content are also changes of form....Therefore, 'form' and 'content' have a 'historical' meaning besides an 'aesthetic' one. 'Historical' form means a specific language, just as 'content' indicates a specific way of thinking that is not only historical..."(Boelhower 1981, 586). Caudwell's dilemma of how to correlate technique and content is resolved here by Gramsci's translation of abstract terms into specific social practices.
What unfolds in Gramsci's reflection is a materialist contextualization of the content-form duality in a process of discursive production: "historical form signifies a determinate language, while 'content' signifies a determinate way of thinking" (Dombroski 1984, 52). For Gramsci, then, the objectification or historicization of what is imagined (phantasy activity, for Caudwell) not only proceeds in the mind but, more decisively, coincides with the "forming" process (poiesis, in Greek) which necessarily operates with material, sensorily apprehensible media, channels, devices, etc. Not only are forms of thinking already structured by socially determinate values, but forms of expression or representation are also given beforehand, that is, before creative appropriation begins. This is because techniques and other linguistic or formal elements are not pure schemata or empty categories but are in fact constituted by functional, culture-bound semantic values. In short, form is ideological in essence and thus political in its wider implication. For Gramsci, however, content is not the experience but the writer's attitude to it, an attitude which ultimately shapes style: "...'technical' stands for the means by which the moral content, the moral conflict of the novel, the poem, or the drama is made comprehensible in the most immediate and dramatic way possible" (Gramsci 1975, 943).
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While Gramsci's performance of a dialectical reading of texts such as Manzoni's The Betrothed or Canto X of Dante's Inferno can be upheld as a model for a Marxist explication du texte, I would rather focus here on what I call the moment of praxis in which the critic's theoretical intervention is not just hermeneutic but also transformative in effect. In the context of literary theory, Gramsci effects a decisive change by anchoring the activity of the imagination in the intellectual's specific, concrete milieu as well as in the integrally hegemonic function that the knowing mind as creating mind enacts: "An historical act can only be performed by 'collective man,' and this presupposes the attainment of a 'cultural-social' unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, one basis of an equal and common conception of the world, both general and particular, operating in transitory bursts (in emotional ways) or permanently (where the intellectual base is so well rooted, assimilated and experienced that it becomes passion" (Gramsci 1971, 349). Ideologies or world-views as lived experience or "passion," in Gramsci's felicitous phrasing, are the climax of a hegemonic process in which the function of criticism free of "unilateral or fanatical ideological elements" is that of grasping the contradictions in the critic's own position in society. That is to say, the critic committed to a revolutionary vision "not only grasps the contradictions, but posits himself as an element of the contradiction and elevates this element to a principle of knowledge and therefore of action." Praxis--unity of thought and action--results from this reflexive moment. The critic incarnates the historic task of the revolutionary class and activates a principle of transformation. This principle entails the systematizing and refinement of "common sense," the socialization of philosophical and scientific concepts that can move society forward by releasing suppressed human potential: "That the masse could be led to think about a current reality coherently and systematically is a philosophical fact much more important and 'original' than the discovery by a philosophical 'genius' of a new truth that becomes the property of small groups of intellectuals" (Gramsci 1971, 325).
Because Gramsci seeks to think through the complex oscillation of "identity" and "difference" in the thickness of the historical process, especially that gravitating around the Italian conjuncture of an industrialized North and a predominantly rural South, his cultural theorizing takes as its point of departure the Marxist--more precisely, the Leninist--category of unequal and combined development. This complex happening obtains, according to Ernesto Laclau, "when a synchronic articulation occurs between stages which Marxist theory considers as successive (for example, the articulation between democratic tasks and the socialist leadership of those tasks)" (Laclau 1987, 332). Given the fact of a dislocation in the normal development of society where the bourgeoisie fails to exercise its hegemonic mission, it devolves on the working class and its organic intellectuals (in alliance with the peasantry and the middle strata) to carry out the democratic tasks of national unity and development as a crucial flank of an all-encompassing socialist project, hence the national-popular thrust of the historic bloc. Laclau emphasizes the "logic of unevenness and dislocation," that is, the logic of the signifier which "presides over the possibility/impossibility of the constitution of any identity." While Laclau follows this metonymic pattern of ideological constitution of the subject to the point where all categories, being historically contingent, resists totalization in a higher rationality and remain fluid in their negativity and opaqueness, Gramsci, though cognizant of the dislocation, insists on fulfilling the necessary task of constituting or identifying the historical agent (the national-popular will, the historic bloc) that will release potential human energies stifled by repressive social relations. The mediating or catalyzing force in this project is the organic intellectual of the working class. History, for Gramsci, does not move in a linear one-dimensional fashion where base and superstructure always coincide, especially in peripheral or dependent zones of global capitalism. Precisely because Gramsci perceives the diverse, uneven and unstable mentalities that comprise any given social formation, he is compelled to postulate the mediating subject that will attempt totalization and coherence of the social process. I refer here to the hegemonic collective subject--in aesthetics, the revolutionary artist or dialectical critic--in whose action coalesce the economic, political and ideological moments. We confront here the praxis of revolutionary transformation.
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To illustrate the unique relevance of Gramsci's analysis to Third World formations where unequal and combined development obtains (as it did in Russia in 1917, China in 1949, Cuba in 1959 and Nicaragua in 1979), Gramsci differentiates between the sensibilities of the politician and the artist. Here he is able to affirm the relative autonomy of the artistic from the programmatic imperatives of political action:
...the literary man must necessarily have a less precise and definite outlook than the politician. He must be less "sectarian," if one can put it this way, but in a "contradictory" way. For the politician, every "fixed" image is a priori reactionary: he considers the entire movement in its development. The artist, however, must have "fixed" images that are cast into their definite form. The politician imagines man as he is, and at the same time how he should be in order to reach a specific goal. His task is precisely to stir men up, to get them to leave their present life behind in order to become collectively able to reach the proposed goal, that is, to get them to "conform" to the goal. The artist necessarily and realistically depicts "that which is," at a given moment (the personal, the non-conformist, etc.). From the political point of view, therefore, the politician will never be satisfied with the artist and will never be able to be: he will find him always behind the times, always anachronistic and overtaken by the real flow of events. If history is a continuous process of liberation and self- awareness, it is evident that every stage (historical and in this case cultural) will be immediately surmounted and will no longer hold any interest (Gramsci 1985, 110-111).
In discriminating between the political movement and the aesthetic (although it should be stressed that both are fused in the hegemonic strategy of a social bloc), Gramsci rejects the narrow sectarian dogmatism of the French communist Paul Nizan who condemned fellow-travellers like Malraux and others prior to the inauguration of the Comintern's Popular Front in 1932. Gramsci's instinct for the necessarily heterogeneous, diverse, temporally layered fabric of any society, any complex conjuncture, enables him to conceive of multiple strategies in achieving proletarian hegemony:
...moral and intellectual renewal does not develop simultaneously in all of the social strata. On the contrary, it is worth repeating that even today many people are Ptolemaic and not Copernican. There are many "conformisms," many struggles for new "conformisms" and various combination of that which already exists (variously expressed) and that which one is working to bring about (and there are many people who are working in this direction). It is a serious error to adopt a "single" progressive strategy according to which each new gain accumulates and becomes the premiss of further gains. Not only are the strategies multiple, but even in the "most progressive" ones there are retrogressive moments. Furthermore, Nizan does not know how to deal with so-called "popular literature," that is, with the success of serial literature (adventure stories, detective stories, thrillers) among the masses, a success that is assisted by the cinema and the newspapers. And yet, it is this question that represents the major part of the problem of a new literature as the expression of moral and intellectual renewal, for only from the readers of serial literature can one select a sufficient and necessary public for creating the cultural base of the new literature (Gramsci 1985, 101-101).
From this passage, one can perceive what unifies Gramsci's ad hoc cultural reflections in prison, namely, the overriding task of moral and intellectual renewal of the whole society premised on the integration of the most highly developed philosophies (Weltanschauungen) with popular common sense, folklore, and other subaltern or marginal forms of cultural production.
Gramsci's controlling agenda is precisely the articulation of the intellectual's hegemonic vocation. This can be described also, following Debray's formulation, as the historical "implantation" of Marxism in a given national- popular tradition (Debray 1970, 48-52), the "translation" and at the same time transformation of concrete life (common sense) into philosophy (Marxism as the unity of the theory and practice of class struggle). This is the locus of synthesizing form and content, thought and action. Confronting the materiality of ideology and its specific modes of inscription, negotiation and appropriation by social groups, Gramsci is not blind to cultural movements originating from the petty bourgeoisie. Witness his acclaim of Futurism as a decisive rupture in
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bourgeois hegemony generating a revolutionary effect which the socialists of his day refused to acknowledge because of their productivist bias and narrow-minded class reductionism. In this touchstone of Gramsci's poetics which I consider a high point in Marxist critical theorizing, Gramsci distinguishes between the logically plotted seizure of state power and the kaleidoscopic convergence of various lines of transition which defies rational calculation. We discern here the trope of uneven/combined development:
The battlefield for the creation of a new civilization is...absolutely mysterious, absolutely characterized by the unforeseeable and the unexpected. Having passed from capitalist power to workers' power, the factory will continue to produce the same material things that it produces today. But in what way and under what forms will poetry, drama, the novel, music, painting and moral and linguistic works be born? It is not a material factory that produces these works. It cannot be reorganized by a workers' power according to a plan. One cannot establish its rate of production for the satisfaction of immediate needs, to be controlled and determined statistically. Nothing in this field is foreseeable except for this general hypothesis: there will be a proletarian culture (a civilization) totally different from the bourgeois one and in this field too class distinctions will be shattered....What remains to be done? Nothing other than to destroy the present form of civilization. In this field "to destroy" does not mean the same as in the economic field. It does not mean to deprive humanity of the material products that it needs to subsist and to develop. It means to destroy spiritual hierarchies, prejudices, idols and ossified traditions. It means not to be afraid of innovations and audacities, not to be afraid of monsters, not to believe that the world will collapse if a worker makes grammatical mistakes, if a poem limps, if a picture resembles a hoarding or if young men sneer at academic and feeble-minded senility. The Futurists have carried out this task in the field of bourgeois culture....[The Futurists] have grasped sharply and clearly that our age, the age of big industry, of the large proletarian city and of intense and tumultuous life, was in need of new forms of art, philosophy, behavior and language. This sharply revolutionary and absolutely Marxist idea came to them when the Socialists were not even vaguely interested in such a question.... In their field, the field of culture, the Futurists are revolutionaries (Gramsci 1985, 50-51).
Brecht would be in complete sympathy with this essentially historical judgment. After World War I, however, futurism in Italy changed and broke up into different trends; it ceased to play a regenerative role. Gramsci informs Trotsky in a letter circa 1923: "The workers, who had seen in Futurism the elements of a struggle against academic Italian culture, fossilized and remote from the popular masses, had to fight for their freedom with weapons in their hands and had little interest in the old arguments" (Gramsci 1985, 54).
When we examine next Gramsci's assessment of Pirandello as another illustration of a dialectical mode of reading, we observe an analogous focus on the cultural rather than the narrowly artistic dimension of textuality. Given Gramsci's belief that "a national-cultural unity of the Italian people does not yet exist, that 'provincialism' and particularism are still deeply rooted in their customs and in the way they think and act," Gramsci contends that "Pirandello's importance seems to me to be more of an intellectual and moral, i.e. cultural, than an artistic kind. He has tried to introduce into popular culture the "dialectics of modern philosophy, in opposition to the Aristotelian-Catholic way of conceiving the 'objectivity of the real'" (Gramsci 1985, 138, 145).
Viewing Pirandello's plays as organic extensions of the "physical personality of the writer," a personality which amalgamates the Sicilian, the Italian and the European, Gramsci apprehends the artist's self-conscious rendering of this heterogeneous sensibility as the source of "his artistic weakness along with his great 'cultural' significance." The latter inheres in Pirandello's anti-Catholic (as opposed to the humanitarian and positivist bourgeois worldview) conception of the world and its fertile "dialectical conception of objectivity." Gramsci further argues that because Pirandellian ideology is not bookish or tendentious but "linked to lived historico- cultural experiences," it succeeds in deprovincializing and modernizing the Italian public's taste (the petty bourgeois and philistine culture of the late nineteenth century) and combatting both Catholic idealism and
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bourgeois positivism. Gramsci thus estimates any modernist or avantgarde impulse within the parameters of the hegemonic obsession to invent and mobilize a national-popular identity: Pirandello "has done much more than the Futurists towards 'deprovincializing' the 'Italian man' and arousing a modern 'critical' attitude in opposition to the traditional, nineteenth-century 'melodramatic' attitude" (Gramsci 1985, 139).
One conclusion emerges from this brief survey of the nodal stages in the vicissitudes of Marxist critical theorizing on the politics of aesthetics: without the focus on the moment of praxis--the artist's or critic's intervention in the concrete arena of political struggle for hegemony, any reflection on the nature of art and its function will compulsively repeat the metaphysical idealism it seeks to overcome. It is in the arena of political and ideological conflict that consciousness is grasped in its overdetermined trajectory as a complex of material practices functioning in conserving or distintegrating a determinate conjuncture, a lived situation. Without positing this moment of rupture or opening for intervention, we shall reproduce the predicament of the bourgeois intellectual Caudwell and Lukacs (in History and Class Consciousness) acutely diagnosed: the division of mental and manual labor; the antinomy between subject and object, society and individual, nature and history, which revolutionary socialist practice hopes to gradually and eventually resolve, despite setbacks and mistakes in the itinerary of struggle. One way of blocking this compulsion to repeat mechanical or essentializing practices is to compose a totalizing, more or less coherent narrative, a space (cognitive and pragmatic at the same time) where values/meanings compete; where a kind of Marxist self-recognition of its authentic vision may crystallize in the struggle of antagonistic interpretations consonant with the concrete ideological problems ushered by the era of glasnost and the collapse of "actually existing socialism" in Eastern Europe. Such a task commands priority in the agenda of socialist intellectuals everywhere.
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