Marxism and art

Marxism cannot definitively judge, let alone prescribe, and also cannot tie down art to its
(supposed) context of production. But Marxism can raise consciousness of history and historical
potential for social change - in all domains.

Clement Greenberg defined ‘avant-garde’ art as having a “superior consciousness of [the] history
[of art]”, where ‘kitsch’ elides that. But the necessity of such consciousness is a symptom of the
need to overcome capitalism. We may need avant-garde art now, but its criteria didn’t apply
before capitalism and so won’t apply (in the same way) after capitalism.

This is what Howard Phillips shies away from in condemning “transcendence” - even while also
writing that good art should “point beyond” its context (‘Dylan and the dead’, August 13). As
Adorno wrote, art is the attempt to make something without knowing what it is. In other words,
art goes beyond theoretical understanding or analysis through concepts, and so must be
experienced aesthetically. That aesthetic experience can either affirm society as it is or point
beyond it. Often it does both. Art is dialectical - as anything under capitalism.

Certainly one can essay at what makes art good or bad. But the art itself cannot be reduced to
such theoretical essaying. As Walter Benjamin put it, art that doesn’t teach artists teaches no-
one.

Specialisation is necessary: critics are not artists; artists are not politicians. There are important
interrelations among art, criticism and politics, but they are not the same thing. Marx’s Capital
was not a work of economics or even of political economy, but rather a (political) critique of
political economy. Such critique pointing beyond existing social conditions, with consciousness
of potential historical change (ie, beyond the law of the value of labour) could indeed be
attempted in any domain (eg, in the physical sciences), but would remain speculative, provisional
and disputable. The dialectic is unfinished.

The question is whether Marxist theoretical critique helps potential possibilities - both within and
pointing beyond capitalism - become better realised in practice. That effect will always be
indirect or oblique. Critical theory is not prescriptive or programmatic, but it is critical. Good
critical theory can have some - however indirect and weak, but still productive - effect on the
practices of art: on its production and consumption.

But, above all, we need not Marxist art or theory, but Marxist politics. Without that there is only
pseudo-theory (pseudo-critique), pseudo-art (ie, kitsch: art without historical consciousness), and
pseudo-politics.

The problem with Stalinism, in art as in all other domains, was not in its authoritarianism, but in
its opportunist adaptation to the status quo (which required authoritarian enforcement), at the
expense of more radical possibilities for changing society.

Chris Cutrone | Weekly Worker 1072 (September 3, 2015)

Phantasmagoria
Rex Dunn (‘No to “Marxist art”’, September 17) replies to my letter on ‘Marxism and art’
(September 3) to invoke Adorno, but only partially and critically. And undialectically.

I think it is a mistake to try to adjudicate Marxism on the basis of postmodernist categories, such
as ‘essentialism’ versus ‘anti-essentialism’ and ‘structuralism’ or ‘post-structuralism’. Marxism
is none of these. They are too beholden to the new left’s concerns, and neglect the older, deeper
history. Such antinomies of postmodernism are nonetheless potentially related to what Marx
called the “phantasmagoria” of capitalism, in which cause and effect and means and ends
become confused and reversed.

As Adorno wrote to Benjamin about capitalism, “The fetish character of the commodity is not a
fact of consciousness; rather it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness
... perfection of the commodity character in a Hegelian self-consciousness inaugurates the
explosion of its phantasmagoria.”

While this may seem terribly abstract, it does say something about art and capitalism, as well as
the struggle for socialism. Socialism is a symptom of capitalism, as is modern art. It is
capitalism’s unrealised potential, necessarily distorted as it is constrained. But to regard that
potential properly means returning to the bourgeois-emancipatory character of art in the modern
world. It will appear ‘inhuman’.

While humans may have always made art, they did not always make art as an ‘end in itself’. Like
production for its own sake, art for art’s sake is a bourgeois value, but one perverted by
capitalism. Its ideal remains - as Dunn himself acknowledges with his vision of a socialist Homo
aestheticus.

So this is why it becomes necessary to follow modern art, as Adorno did, in an “immanently
dialectical” method of “critique”. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory seems general and unsatisfactory
because it remains a meta-theoretical statement that should have been unnecessary from the
standpoint of his concrete critical essays on art and literature. Yet it was still necessary for him
(to try) to write. Why?

Adorno’s concrete essays have apparently sometimes given the mistaken impression that he was
a partisan for some art over others. Dialectical critique was mistaken for polemic. That’s why
Adorno also sometimes appears to equivocate: the dialectic is lost.

That is the problem with the apparent oppositions of postmodernism that actually share
something in common that is unacknowledged: that the antinomies of society in capitalism point
beyond themselves. So does art.

Socialism will not mean returning to pre-bourgeois ‘art’, but fulfilling the freedom of art,
announced, but betrayed and mocked, by bourgeois society in capitalism. That will mean going
beyond art in capitalism, but in ways neither Aristotle nor Adorno nor Kant nor Hegel nor Marx
himself - nor we ourselves - would quite recognise.
Adorno, like Trotsky, whose Literature and Revolution (1924) and other writings on art and
culture were profoundly inspirational for him, did not prescribe what a true - free - ‘human
culture’ would be, but recognised the need to struggle in, through and beyond capitalism -
beyond art - on the basis of capitalism, to make it possible.

Chris Cutrone | Weekly Worker 1075 (September 24, 2015)

Obfuscations
Chris Cutrone’s reply to my recent article, ‘No to “Marxist” art’ (September 17) confirms my
point re the obfuscations of post-war ‘philosophy’. But his letter (September 24) is helpful, in the
sense that it highlights two important differences.

Firstly, Cutrone shows a misunderstanding of essentialism and, arguably, Marxism itself.

Therefore he gets things the wrong way round! I do not “adjudicate Marxism on the basis of
postmodernist categories, such as ‘essentialism versus anti-essentialism’, and ‘structuralism’, or
‘post-structuralism’”. On the contrary, I “adjudicate” the latter on the basis of Marxist categories,
which are rooted in Marx’s essentialism.

This is how Marx approaches all phenomena. Of course, for him this centres on the development
of the value form. But he could easily have applied this approach to art and culture (if he had
time left over). This is where Adorno comes in; but over time, he loses sight of the whole - ie,
base/superstructure - and ends up concentrating on the latter.

Essentialism is concerned with three basic aspects:

1. Essence, or the idea of entity - a thing’s essence consists of the characteristics which make it a
particular kind of thing, which is capable of discovery, and the observation of its laws of
behaviour.

2. Teleology - this is not a theory of a guiding intelligence; rather it is a theory of how “the real
nature (essence) of a whole entity is to be identified; how its development from immature to
mature and declining forms is to be explained in a law-like fashion”.

3. Telos - the form or condition “towards which an entity develops by its nature, unless its
development is interrupted (either by external accident or… a nature which contains a
constitutive contradiction” (my emphasis - see glossary to Scott Meikle’s book, Essentialism in
the thought of Karl Marx).

Cf Hillel Ticktin’s approach to the value form and his related concept of decline and transition:
under capitalism, the value form was able to realise its potential as a universal form over the
whole of society. But now the value form - sans the social revolution - is being compelled to
change into something else, although this is not good news for humans. It comes at the expense
of humanity’s telos to realise its potential as a species being; as Homo aestheticus. Given the fact
that machines can deal with the necessities of life, such as making available food, clothing,
shelter, education and leisure for all on an equitable basis, albeit in harmony with the rest of
nature, life itself and our relations with our kind should become an end in itself; not a stultifying
means to an end, as it is at present.

Atomism, on the other hand, which underpins structuralism/poststructuralism, vehemently denies

“the very mention of essences”; since these are related to the concept of teology/telos; including
the idea of accident and necessity. “Whereas it is only against a thing’s essence that we can chart
its accidents, it is only from a thing’s essence or nature that the necessities in its line of genesis,
development and decay arise … Althusser [was] a pretty thorough accidentalist himself …”
(Meikle, p 8).

To return to Adorno re art and culture, his theory of the rise of ‘the vulgar in art’, along with the
rise of the culture industry during the post-war period - albeit under the American hegemon (for
whom the door was opened by Stalinism: ie, from the moment it abandoned the necessity of the
world revolution) - is consistent with Marx’s theory of the inevitable decline of art: ie, as long as
capitalism continues to exist. (In this regard, in terms of defining the nature of the present epoch,
there is a correspondence here between Ticktin and Adorno. Whereas the latter refers to late
capitalism as the period of “administered capitalism”, the former refers to capitalist decline and
transition, both in terms of the law of value, as well as a crisis of human culture.) What divides
them is rational pessimism versus rational optimism!

The second important difference between Cutrone and myself (at least on the basis of his letter)
is that he has overreacted to the poisonous legacy of Stalinism, whereby, in accordance with the
diktat of ‘official communism’, art had to conform to the needs of the bureaucracy. As a result,
he confuses the defence of artistic freedom with the freedom to critique this or that theory of
what art is: ie, from a Marxist standpoint. For him, this is synonymous with those who set
themselves up to “prescribe what a true - free - human culture would be”. Not so. Therefore, for
fear of being too prescriptive, he seems to elide Marx/Adorno’s distinction between authentic
art/art objects and the culture industry, which is market driven. The situation is not helped by
postmodernism’s penchant for anti-art, as well as the latter’s cynical embrace of the commodity
form.

As a result, Cutrone concludes his letter with a complete misreading of Trotsky’s Literature and
Revolution (1924). (The latter, by the way, offers a major contribution towards the development
of a Marxist theory of art.) Consider what Trotsky actually says in this book. It includes a
merciless attack on the writers of the Lef group, along with the Russian futurists, as a “closed-in
circle of the intelligentsia”, who therefore wanted to deny the working class “the old literature”,
whereas the latter still had to master Pushkin, “to absorb him, and so overcome him”, etc. Thus
on this question, the sectarian writers of Lef were the first authoritarians, even before Stalin.
Although it was not their intention, they also made the latter’s job to destroy artistic freedom
easier, once he had established himself at the head of the bureaucracy.

But Trotsky’s criticism of the former in no way contradicts his later collaboration with André
Breton, which led to the Manifesto: towards a free revolutionary art (1938). Written as a riposte
to Stalinist repression of artistic freedom, it ends with this statement: “The independence of art -
for the revolution. The revolution - for the complete liberation of art.” This is entirely consistent
with “essentialism in the thought of Karl Marx”.

Rex Dunn | Weekly Worker 1076 (October 1, 2015)

Art and freedom
Rex Dunn poses “teleology” against “accident” in support of “essentialism” (‘Obfuscations’,
Letters, October 1). But this neglects that, according to Hegel, Geist, as the “self-moving
substance [essence] that is subject”, is the expression of the unfolding and development of
freedom. Art is certainly geistig activity, but is not itself Geist. Hegel’s telos is not posed as a
future, but rather in the present: the present as a necessary and not accidental result of history.

The telos is not the future in the present, but what Hegel called “the eternally present in the past”.
We cannot judge humanity according to an as yet unrealised potential ought - what could and
should be - but rather we are tasked to find the actuality in what is. Not where is the present
headed, but how does it point beyond itself? This means that what appears as humanity’s
“essence” is an expression of necessity in the present - the necessity of the present. We should
not assume that such necessity will not change, for that would prematurely foreclose possibilities
we cannot see now. We are not serving the future, but are failing the present - and the past.

Schiller wrote of the “play drive” that unites freedom and necessity, in Homo ludens. But even
Schiller didn’t think that art should replace all other human activity. Play may express freedom,
but it is not itself freedom. Beauty is the symbol, not the realisation, of freedom. Our goal is not
a beautiful society, but a free one.

Marx and Adorno, following him, dismissed the idea that work was to become play. Rather,
from “life’s prime need” it was to become “life’s prime want”: that we will work because we
want to do so, out of a sense of social and individual duty, and not capitalist compulsion. Our
task is not to realise human play, but rather to actualise freedom. According to Adorno, art, like
everything else in capitalism, expresses necessity - the necessity of freedom. But it is not itself
freedom. Nor will it become that as some final end. Freedom is not the end of necessity in play,
but the transformation of necessity - giving rise to new necessities. Freedom is not a state of
being, but a process of becoming. More specifically, it is the movement of that process. Human
“essence” is not art, but freedom. There is no reason to believe it will ever end - without an end
to humanity. We do not know freedom’s end, but only its need, its next necessary step. Art in
capitalism points to that, the next stage of history, not its end.

As Adorno put it, in the last line of the concluding chapter of Aesthetic Theory, on ‘Society’,
“...what would art be, as the writing of history, if it shook off the memory of accumulated
suffering?” The history of art, as that of Geist, expresses the history of freedom. We suffer not
from lack of play, but from the task of freedom.

Chris Cutrone | Weekly Worker 1077 (October 8, 2015)