We can always pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, but are our feet in the shoes?

I keep thinking about the opening pages of Aesthetics and Politics and Lukacs’ subsequent response. There’s something fundamentally missing from his response because he fails to fully see what Bloch is saying. Subjects and impulses come up and re-index themselves at seemingly random moments: Lukacs’ response seems to say “and what does it matter if the topic of conversation isn’t grounded in the Realist Tradition?” But just the opposite is true. At the very moment when fascism was on the rise in the thirties, a renewed interest and reemergence of the Expressionists makes the most sense. It was a movement, in so many words and over-simplifications, of a desire to break out of a social reality and a condition that was intolerable for the subjective participant. And yet, this artistic experience is only possible authentic (in the imagistic sense) for that singularity. What Bloch’s use of the Expressionists signals, is that utopian impulses exist in the most oppressive ideological conditions and enterprises. Whether or not Bloch, himself, had this unspecific appreciation for the Expressionists, I highly doubt, since he frequently queued up the need for greater material integration of specific works into his critique. But then I think that this might have only been one way of addressing a critique whose sole purpose was to show Realism on the first valence.

The recurrence of a “utopian” image, or rather, the image that carries the latent desires of utopia within a full veil of ideological and social constraints that it cannot see, is a theme that Adorno’s letters to Benjamin picks up. He says of the collective image, that it was always a commodity fabrication and that the real objective point of reality for the collective is in its systematic subjective alienation (Aesthetics and Politics p.119). And on this point, I was reminded exactly of the Expressionists, for their systematic alienation from the authentic core of their own aesthetic production. Whether or not Expressionist art is conscious of this, is secondary…less than secondary, it seems to be necessary in order to produce a meaningful “Real” conception of the movement. Additionally, Bloch’s instance on the Expressionists’ desire to spontaneously break out of the material confines of capital (surely not a notion that Adorno would encourage) is itself indicative of the mythological implications of the image. But the its true import is of the dialectical nature of The Myth’s exposition throughout history.

For Adorno, the mythological image is that which nullifies the ideological and the utopian elements of its translation/comprehension. In a short of short-hand way, I think that there is even a case to be made for the Kantian-idealist status of art in mythologies, since they can never be anything better than Either/Or, both and neither. As my professor once said, it really is the limit of the Kantian argument (insofar as Practical reason is concerned).

But of course, in the aesthetic realm there is always more than practical reason. There must also be judgement. And in the case of the mythical image’s insistence on its status in the ideological: in fact, it is the greatest key to the ideological. Considering Bloch’s short opening piece, it is theoretically sound that he would choose such a topic for “debate”. This debate launches into the core of the utopian desires in an impossible ideological climate: and whatever the implications of the conversations, they were neither submerged into a quasi-historical narrative on good and bad art, but had everything to do with the modes of historical excavation and interpretation of a given impulse.

Spirit, Actual, Ethic (Aesthetics and Politics): Part One.

I figured that is time for a proper entry. I’ve gotten through the first three bits of this book: “Bloch against Lukacs,” “Lukacs against Bloch,” “Brecht against Lukacs.” There is a fourth part that I’m about halfway through now, and that section is a series of diaristic entries by Benjamin on Brecht. I should comment on the form and organization of these writings, first.

After the Presentation, Bloch’s “Discussing Expressionism” is so slight an entry in the book that it is hard to believe that it opens the door to nearly two hundred pages more of inquiry, analysis, and debate. The entry is only twelve pages, and it denies its ostensible form as a polemic. First, it seems to know that it is a piece about renewed interest, the picking-up of a thread, more than a “for or against” operation. I wonder if picking up such a discussion-thread has to incite a type of debate along its course, to get the momentum of debate going. After all, there are plenty of entries and essays that do discuss a topic, but are libel to be left static and “interpreted” in an endless array of citations, before a genuine discussion is brought about. But I think here, that Bloch ultimately asks for more, even only if in the title of his work, than a polemic. [That's why I like seeing it in this volume, where that request is met...]

Bloch is concerned with the spirit of Expressionism, the ways in which it permeates time and politics of a given instant. I think this is crucial for the beginning of this book. Where Lukacs would like to dismantle the whole project of Expressionism from the start based on its ideological flaws that are awakened in technical difficulties, Bloch highlights the mere insistence of existence. It seems, more than engage in a direct polemical debate with Lukacs, the man and philosopher, Bloch is more interested in dismantling the more material and categorical implications of such a debate. He insists that there is something to be learned and valued from the persisting spirit of the Expressionists, who placed importance on the immediacy of experience. Whether or not these experiences were materially or ideologically sound, has an import of lesser degree.

In a sense, the spirit of creation and of experience, Bloch points out, has the ability to permeate time and space, and therefore is the kernel of the human desire to experience something outside of the ideological and the categorical. He dismisses, correctly, the attack that the Expressionists were in any way tied with the Decadence movement, or any other movement. This is a qualified claim, and precisely the moment where, I think, Bloch goes down the wrong ally-way.  The spirit of Expressionism is to find that which is not totally consumed by ideology, which is not weighed down with systemic organization and categorization. It refutes the possibility of being categorized by being “incomprehensible” to the system outside of the system of primary experience. This is a negative characteristic, and one that undermines the entire project. Because if the only imperative of a system like Expressionism is to “express” there is no objective (or even subjective) referent to the revolutionary aesthetic that is claims to hold so dear. For if the Expressionsts have been unparalleled, yes, it would be in the spirit of ‘a-political’ experience that they themselves might call ‘trans-historical’ experience. And, of course a-political engagement is short-hand for engagement that is consumed in dominant ideology, and trans-historical aesthetic experience might enter into the realm of the eternel, but only once it has leaped from the platform of its particular economic and ideological enjambments. What I’m saying is, art must always know the terms of its own position in context to its present incarnation, or else it is subject to subsumption in another dominant form. Which, is what happened to the Expressionists, who were unable to Express anything more than their experience in capital.

This, leads me to take up the Lukacsian line of critique. He responds to Bloch in “Realism in the Balance.” I think that, first, he shows that the Expressionists are not Realists because they are not real, insofar as they have been cut off from the kernel referent which would allow them to adequately express a true reality or possibility outside of ideology and economy, since they lack the demarcations of those categories in the first place.

Understanding Jameson’s Preface to “Marxism and Form”

The preface begins with a note on the status of the changing historical importance/perspective of history. This note is not the simple kind of “well, not then, but now” approach to writing or thinking about Marxism. In fact, it doesn’t even degrade the European Marxist milieu of the 30s. What it does do is lay out the relationship between history and the context of history, and those two things with this current moment…

But that’s not really all there is to it, either, because if all Jameson really meant to do was “bring it up to speed” with his moment, he would essentially degrade his own moment; he would essentially also degrade (in his words, relegate) history to the barracks of the night-school. (But with the uncertain status of grad-school education, this should be understood as a memory of factoids.) This factoid-like conceptualization is also something that we come in contact with frequently in today’s (anti) liberal arts rhetoric “what does this [english department] mean?” is the essentially vacant (not-wanting-to-be-answered) question in non-Marxist learning traditions…

What Jameson prefaces this book with is an example of the late/post 60s mis-remembrance of history (especially Marxist history) as a linear graph into the “present.” Jameson shows that the present, without some sort of ontological (i.e. form) the whole praxis of Marxism will fall flat in the next moment of the present, like chivalry or faith have through the eyes of 20th century capital. What this starts is something that Jameson argues all along: that Marxism is not one deciphering code among many inter-changeable and comparable with all of the others, but that Marxism can only be viewed as such from within capital’s already-formulated idea that appears to be invisible in factoid-history.

This form is the historical dialectic; the mode of social discernment through the rigorous use of a Marxist approach to history that stops and rests nowhere, not even in the “present.”

And so, Jameson’s book title really denotes that Marxism can only be used as a mode of social and historical understanding without falling into a linear time-trap like the bourgeois mode of analysis, through its form, which is the process of dialectical re-appraisal that never ceases. Jameson proceeds to put this concept into effect with a “relatively modest and straightforward” task of accounting for six of the 20th century’s greatest thinker for their contributions to literary criticism.

Each one of the chapters (so far; I haven’t finished the chapter on Sartre) is more than a Jamesonian re conception of the original thinker’s work, but a historical unfolding and explanation of their work that even their works did not realize fully because they were in some ways blinded by the moment in which they were written. Jameson seems committed to the notion to write historically and not according to ‘his own’ standards for another reason: it seems that so far in the book he has conceded and included the necessity for an eventual re-reading and historical adjustment to his own writing. [At this point, I don't want to do much more than pose this to myself.]

Jameson is also clear to note in the preface that this is not an exercise in philosophy, but a preparation for literary criticism. This is a tricky kind of claim, for if we follow it through his already stated necessity towards the idea of contemplating literature as well as previous Marxist theorists in a properly dialectic way, that demands the intensive task of philosophically rigorous writing.

In order to reach literary criticism, one must first reach through the past, reach through the theorist’s contemporary ideological blockages (not to mention the original author’s, either) and confront the text without snapping one’s hand through the sharded glass window of “present” ideology. That is to say, the project of Jameson’s book may well be understood as a work against the factoid/linear conception of philosophy and writing and time and criticism (i.e. everything) in an attempt to access truth (i.e. to fulfill the otherwise rhetorical void of meaning) which can

a. only occur in the Marxist Historical context that

b. is not a specific application (or a transitory ‘best-of’ application like in bourgeois analysis) but that elevates the otherwise factoid-like content of history into a Marxist [dare I say Utopian?] possibility.