The Politics of Realism: Lukács and Reflection Theory (original) (raw)
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‘Realism, Totality, and the Militant Citoyen: Or, What Does Lukács Have to do with Contemporary Art?
ReNew Marxist Art History: Essays for Andrew Hemingway, eds F. Schwartz, B. Haran, W. Carter (London, Art/Books, 2013), pp 478-493, ISBN 978-1-908970-11-4, 2013
UCD M.A. Thesis, 2019
This M.A. Thesis suggests a re-reading of Georg Lukács' early philosophy (1908-1923), that centers on the issue of representation, taken as the form--in a Kantian sense--of both the artwork, and of meaning production generally. Unlike Kant, however, Lukács understands form, from its origins the "mimesis" of Classical Greek poetics, as an intersubjective process and as historically contingent. Accordingly, he traces the evolution of representation from Classical Greece to modern times, along the axes of embodiment, erotics, temporality, and production/reproduction. Part I of the thesis gives an exposition of Lukács' modernism, and considers some of the tensions it creates between the ethical and aesthetic, both informed by and critical of the contributions of Georg Markus, Dennis Crow, and Frederic Jameson. Lukács' aesthetics, I argue, lays the groundwork for his Marxist "turn" in History and Class Consciousness (1923), whose critique of capitalism and the commodity form hinges on the relation between aesthetic production and history. This is not a new, "Marxist" insight for Lukács which would reduce the relation of art to history (and perhaps modernism itself) to class ideologies, but is rather an "existential" subtheme found in his early critical essays on Expressionism, as well as in the writings of his Hungarian collaborator, Lajos Fulep. Accordingly, Part II of the thesis fleshes out the aesthetic role of history in History and Class Consciousness, reading the ethical and aesthetic deficiencies of reification through Lukacs' writings in Soul and Form and Theory of the Novel, and in terms of his modernist aesthetics.
A System of the Arts and the Theory of the Novel. On the Aesthetics of György Lukács
As if it all had been there from the very beginning, as a logos spermatikos, a germ awaiting to spring and grow into an organic totality. As if all of Lukács's convictions and predilections had been already there from the early 1910s, waiting for a world to inhabit, an existence and reality, i.e. an ontological concreteness, to acquire. Lukács's great conversion to Marxism at the end of the 1910s brought about a turn only in his political, and not in his aesthetics views: the ideological revolution in Lukács's intellectual carrier merely yielded to what had been already prevalent in his thought. In his aesthetics, only his enemies continued to multiply in time: impressionism, naturalism, avant-gardism, taylorism, expressionism, documentarism, irrationalism, existentialism -almost every ism, including what he thought to be inauthentic forms of realism. There is no totality without exclusion. Lukács did not openly subscribe to this thesis, but demonstrated it in his thought by a paradox that he was so fond of: the greater totality grows the more exclusion it entails. No matter if conversion aims at a religious or a communist utopia, the Kingdom of Heaven and the Paradise on Earth have at least one thing in common: both set up a closed world, an immanent totality which necessarily excludes something, even if it is nothing more than the present, this very world here and now, the world which this totality still and inevitably continues to mirror.
The Possibility of Art: Ethics, History, and the Modern Subject in the Early Lukacs
UCD Philosophy M.A. Thesis, 2019
This M.A. Thesis suggests a re-reading of Georg Lukács' early philosophy (1908-1923), that centers on the issue of representation, taken as the form--in a Kantian sense--of both the artwork, and of meaning production generally. Unlike Kant, however, Lukács understands form, from its origins the "mimesis" of Classical Greek poetics, as an intersubjective process and as historically contingent. Accordingly, he traces the evolution of representation from Classical Greece to modern times, along the axes of embodiment, erotics, temporality, and production/reproduction. Part I of the thesis gives an exposition of Lukács' modernism, and considers some of the tensions it creates between the ethical and aesthetic, both informed by and critical of the contributions of Georg Markus, Dennis Crow, and Frederic Jameson. Lukács' aesthetics, I argue, lays the groundwork for his Marxist "turn" in History and Class Consciousness (1923), whose critique of capitalism and the commodity form hinges on the relation between aesthetic production and history. This is not a new, "Marxist" insight for Lukács which would reduce the relation of art to history (and perhaps modernism itself) to class ideologies, but is rather an "existential" subtheme found in his early critical essays on Expressionism, as well as in the writings of his Hungarian collaborator, Lajos Fulep. Accordingly, Part II of the thesis fleshes out the aesthetic role of history in History and Class Consciousness, reading the ethical and aesthetic deficiencies of reification through Lukacs' writings in Soul and Form and Theory of the Novel, and in terms of his modernist aesthetics.
A Lukácsian Legacy in the Work of Art as a Pathway to Otherness
As long as we will continue to live in a capitalist society, the thought of Georg Lukács will continue to be fertilizing. It may be integrated, extended, dialectically overcome (i.e., overcome in the maintaining of it), but it cannot be forgotten, being it and its legacy a continuous source of inspiration. In my talk, I would like briefly to: i) show that his thought is interpretable without using possible turns or breaks in it, but as a unique and single line of development, where gradually it takes form a particular vision of the work of art; ii) show how his idea of art (directly or indirectly influencing many authors of the Critical Theory such as, among the others, Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse) is (still) the base of a critique of the capitalist world and culture, that is primarily neither a romantic nor a political critique, but a philosophical one, which aim is indeed describable not as a reaching of an alternative, but of an otherness.
The aesthetic realism of Mikhail Lifshits: art, history and the communist ideal
Studies in East European Thought, 2016
The aesthetics of Mikhail Lifshits may be characterised as a quest for pravda (truth/justice) in art. The article discusses his assessment of the fate of art in the communist revolution and his view on revolution through the prism of classical art. Pondering the metaphysical foundations of his realist aesthetics, Lifshits offered a naturalistic version of the theory of reflection based on the contradistinction of ''big'' and ''small'' being. Keywords: Mikhail Lifshits, Marxism, Aesthetics, Realism, Modernism, Communism, Reflection, The ideal, Ontognoseology
Tertium datur: Lukacs Early Aesthetics and Ethics as Mirrored in "Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen"
Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge, 2020
Considering common compartmentalizations of Lukacs’ work into the early, mature, and late phase, the article explores elements that speak to what critics regard as a ›continuity thesis‹. Against possible assumptions on the prevalence of form in his early work and the dominance of the aesthetics of content in the later phases, the article explores the dialectical relationship of form and content, which comes to represent a leitmotif in Lukacs’ work as a whole. Here, the early specificity of form does not consist of its domination over content but in the inability of the aesthetic to tackle the social problems of a modernity in which art and life part ways.
Lukacs's Soul and Form (Co-editor, with Jack Sanders) Columbia University Press, 2010.
(Attached: Afterword) György Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who shaped mainstream European Communist thought. Soul and Form was his first book, published in 1910, and it established his reputation, treating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the works of Plato, Kierkegaard, Novalis, Sterne, and others. By isolating the formal techniques these thinkers developed, Lukács laid the groundwork for his later work in Marxist aesthetics, a field that introduced the historical and political implications of text. For this centennial edition, John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis add a dialogue entitled "On Poverty of Spirit," which Lukács wrote at the time of Soul and Form, and an introduction by Judith Butler, which compares Lukács's key claims to his later work and subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an afterword, Terezakis continues to trace the Lukácsian system within his writing and other fields. These essays explore problems of alienation and isolation and the curative quality of aesthetic form, which communicates both individuality and a shared human condition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form, the history that form implies, and the historicity that form embodies. Taken together, they showcase the breakdown, in modern times, of an objective aesthetics, and the rise of a new art born from lived experience. TOC: Editors’ Preface: John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis; Introduction: Judith Butler Soul and Form: György Lukács: On the Nature and Form of the Essay Platonism, Poetry and Form The Floundering of Form Against Life On the Romantic Philosophy of Life The Bourgeois Way of Life and Art for Art’s Sake The New Solitude and Its Poetry Longing and Form The Moment and Form Richness, Chaos and Form The Metaphysics of Tragedy Postscript: On the Poverty of Spirit Afterword: The Legacy of Lukács: Katie Terezakis Sources; Index