Marxism and the History of Art by Hemingway Andrew

Author:Hemingway, Andrew.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

FROM CRITIQUE TO CONTRIBUTION

With his work on aesthetic theory, Lefebvre attempted to bring philosophical considerations to bear on the reductive version of dialectical materialism that was common with party officials and subordinate intellectuals in the post-war period. Lefebvre’s Contribution à l’esthétique was written at the same time as the Critique de la vie quotidienne and also in the same period as Mikhail Lifshits’s influential 500-page publication on Marxist aesthetics, Marx–Engels über Kunst und Literatur (1949). Lefebvre developed his most significant contribution to Marxist thinking, the materialist conception of everyday life, at the same time as his more popular writings on art and literature. The Contribution and the Critique should therefore be thought of as related but not analogous texts.

In The Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre outlined not only a critical theory of capitalist society, but also a number of important reflections on the art of the twentieth century which cannot be found in the Contribution. Perhaps most controversial is his polemic against Surrealist practice, which he criticised for repudiating everyday life and humanity itself rather than transforming the world. In a reference to Marx’s critique of Eugène Sue’s novels, Lefebvre stated that the Surrealists ‘promised a new world, but they merely delivered “mysteries of Paris”’.20 He contrasted this with Brecht’s work, which went beyond transparency and attempted a more serious project of clarifying contradictions and struggling against alienation. Lefebvre’s innovation with the Critique was to argue that the everyday was not necessarily known. Although conceptions of the everyday can be found in the work of Nietzsche, Simmel, the Surrealists, Lukács and Heidegger, Lefebvre sought to align the everyday with the notion of alienation rather than the banal or the trivial. The everyday in this sense becomes dialectically bound up with the potential for disalienation, for an opening onto new possibilities. Lefebvre wished to elevate the category of the lived or the concrete to a theoretical level without at the same time overestimating it, as phenomenology had done.21 As early as the mid-1930s, Lefebvre explored the reasons why the working class was not conscious of the mechanisms of its own exploitation. In La Conscience mystifiée (1936), as well Le Matérialisme dialectique (1939), he developed the theme of alienation, which alone could explain capitalist social relations and which drew from Marx’s early philosophical works. In rejecting the Surrealists’ poetic solutions to alienation, Lefebvre attempted to develop some theoretical tools for a new approach to art theory and production.22 While his work on aesthetics coincided with the PCF’s adoption of Zhdanovist reductionism, he nevertheless sought to engage with the debates on Socialist Realism, which he distinguished himself from by using the term ‘new realism’. In the pages below, I focus on a number of key aspects of the Contribution and follow this with some remarks on Lukács. The Critique, nevertheless, remains an important double in the writing of Lefebvre’s aesthetic theory.

Addressing the notion of the specificity of art, Lefebvre cautiously considers art’s connection with knowledge. The theory of knowledge, he argues, is merely logical and abstract if it does not engage with living thought and with the concrete world.

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