Reviews for Aesthetics and politics

The average rating for Aesthetics and politics based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-06-18 00:00:00 Derrick Eason Like many of the reviewers on here, I have always found this book extremely useful in how it establishes the terms of debates around Marxist aesthetics for key European critics. This reading, however, I did something different from how I've approached the book in the past. Eschewing the lovely Germans and their feistiness, I opted instead to read Jameson's introductory notes as one continuous essay. This helped to foreground a few very important distinctions that often get missed, particularly by the contemporary reader. First, it's important to remember that this book came out in 1977, at a moment of tremendous transition from the radicalism of the post '68 generation and the postmodernism of the '80s. Jameson, as we know, would play a key role in theorizing that transition. In many respects, his notes in this volume set the stage for exactly that project. With that in mind, it's useful to not lose site of the still-smoldering urgency of the revolutionary milieu that began in the early 1960s and continued up until Reagan's election in 1980. The point was not that all art needed to engage the politics or that it needed to be Marxist. The point, at least for Jameson, was what is the role of art (and therefore, aesthetics) in the revolutionary milieu. Hence, the central figures in that debate would be Brecht and Lukacs -- both of whom participated directly in the internationalist movement of Europe and had a direct stake in the debate about Marxist aesthetics. To emphasize this point, Jameson reminds us that Adorno occupied a profoundly different position in the years of the Cold War. Although nominally a Marxist, Adorno's place in a kind of Social Democratic Western Marxism had long abandoned any interest in or sympathy for the revolutionary milieu of either Brecht or Lukacs. A fact made all the more pointed when Jameson reminds us of how Adorno's own material conditions as an academic drew direct support from liberal anti-communist institutions, like the CIA. For the revolutionary milieu, whose echoes could still be heard in 1977, the need for a radical aesthetics drove many to the debates between Brecht and Lukacs. In terms of the former, Brecht's essays on aesthetics had just been collected and published for the first time in 1967 on the eve of "the events." And Lukacz would make a tremendous impact on radical intellectuals through the publication of his HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS (1968, tr. 1971). For the contemporary reader, think about it this way; the whole of radical cinema (e.g. Godard and Third Cinema) and even certain artistic practices embraced Brecht's ideas as the key to formulating a radical artistic praxis. Conversely, radicals like Guy Debord and the Situationists adopted Lukacs's analysis of reification as the very basis of a critique of spectacle culture. Hence, the Brecht / Lukacs debate was, in fact, a lens through which artists and intellectuals like Jameson made sense of their present historical moment. For that reason, in terms of a revolutionary aesthetics, the high-low culture debates of the 1950s and early '60s (in which Adorno figured prominently) seemed increasingly old hat and irrelevant. It's also useful to keep in mind some of the historical blindnesses that inform Jameson's own analysis. As he readily admits, his own framework as a critic is clearly the West. Consequently, it is excruciating to read the extent to which that framework limits his own analysis. While one might appreciate the criticism that Brecht never theorized a general aesthetics beyond a justification for his own practice, it's hard to take seriously Jameson's claim that the political failure of Godard signals the failure of Brechtian aesthetics in general. I can only hope that sometime after 1977 Jameson encountered the Third Cinema movement which not only realized Brecht's ideas but dramatically surpassed them through a process of realist engagement just of the sort Jameson advocates. In fact, a useful follow up to AESTHETICS AND POLITICS would be a rigorous study of how the Lukacs / Brecht debate shaped the post-colonial and anti-imperialist practices of African and Latin American creators. In those contexts, the stakes of on-going revolutionary struggle approach the binary of Realism and Modernism not as opposing sides in a grand contest, but two terms in need to be dialecticized. This is, exactly what we find in much of Third Cinema. Finally, one last note that really stood out for me by reading straight through Jameson's comments. In reviewing the different positions between Brecht and his critics in Adorno and Lukacs, Jameson makes the salient point that it is the former who has a far more clear idea of the role of aesthetics within politics. While the critics expect for the art object to fully demonstrate a radical aesthetics, Brecht is more modest. It is, after all, in the theater, with an audience and in relationship to a larger political context that the radicalism of any art object becomes apparent. But of course, accepting this fact means that the critic must not only consider the object in itself but also its context in time and place. But doing so escapes the traditional purview of aesthetics and begins too much to sound like sociology. Thus, the art critic has to invent the object in order to identify its failures in realizing a radical aesthetic. This is a lesson that critics to this day seem not to be able to learn. And, as a result, artists adopt the lie that the work of art must be political in itself if it is to pass for radical. Their own participation in politics, and the politics of the object in its social reception and activation, these considerations all too often fall from view. Jameson, of course, is not beyond entering into the same mistake. The insistence that a revolutionary aesthetic must engage the Realism versus Modernist abstraction debate, fails to raise the more pressing and, for artists, more practical consideration; how do these terms shape an aesthetics of reception?

Review # 2 was written on 2017-09-29 00:00:00 John Chapman This book combines two recently-discovered favourites of mine: literary theory, and Marxist theory. Of course, the two have obvious overlap, but I'd never seen them united and so beautifully woven together until I read this book. The chapters here are mostly essays or letters by the people mentioned on the title page, and you'll get more value out of this book if you've read their longer texts first, but it's not necessary; you can always read them afterwards if you want to better understand the context. My favourite things about this book: the peeks into Benjamin and Brecht's relationship as provided by Benjamin's wonderful diary entries; the absolutely savage but no less cultured way these men attack each other's theories (I wish MY critics addressed me the way Adorno does his friends--it's like getting stabbed with a stunningly elegant knife, which of course still hurts but at least you can admire its beauty); the remarkable ease with which aesthetic concepts are merged with political ones in their arguments. I now want to read everything related to the Frankfurt School that I can get my hands on. On a completely tangential and very personal note, I'm so jealous of the people who were introduced to this kind of stuff in college or, a fortiori, earlier in life, through parents or teachers. The closest I had teacher-wise was a high school IB English HL teacher who pointed us in the direction of the deconstructionists but never went so far as to actually deconstruct, so to speak, their theories for us. (They weren't required knowledge for the IB assessment, so. I remember learning the phrase "death of the author" and leaving it at that.) Parent-wise, mine had completed the unimaginably difficult task of immigrating from the depths of rural China to the West and thus had, understandably, very little interest in Western philosophy or politics. My dad did happen to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of China, but of course that means something very different when that party is actually the ruling party (and really only party) of the country you live in, rather than a fringe movement that appeals mostly to disaffected youth. In any case, I got the impression it was more of a shrewd career move than a sincere political belief. All this to say that I had little exposure to anything remotely approaching critical theory until very recently. About a year ago, I was two years into a presumed life sentence at a tech startup whose premise I had absolutely zero faith in. I was completely unhappy with what I was doing and could no longer see something to look forward to with my career. Everything that I had put so much effort into for the last two years was melting into air, and I was lost, resigned, adrift in an ocean of meaningless customer acquisition targets. It felt like I was at one of those sushi places with a conveyer belt but, like, the kitchen was closed, and I was just sitting there watching the conveyer belt go round and round, hoping against hope that the dish I wanted would turn up but instead seeing the same unappetising options displayed over and over. So I started to rediscover an old passion: books. At first it was merely a refuge from the exigencies of a stultifying 9-5, but I soon realised I was hooked. Two main paths emerged: David Foster Wallace (and literary criticism thereof), and critiques of the current socioeconomic system. The latter path began with the fairly milquetoast mea culpas of mainstream economists wringing their hands over the 2008 crisis, but I have now reached the wonderful heights of critical theory. Surprisingly, at least to me, the two paths intersected quite a bit, in terms of vocabulary used, philosophers mentioned, and ideas explored. Both paths brought me, more or less simultaneously, to Frankfurt School theories, which, so far, seems to me like the apotheosis of both paths. Wow, so this review turned out to be a lot longer than I thought it would. So yeah, my message to anyone who sees this: read more, and don't be afraid of going down rabbit holes. You just might discover a part of yourself you'll want to nourish.