An Aesthetic between Utopia and Reality: The Idea of Realism in Western Marxism Taek-Gwang Lee Department of English Literature School of English The University of Sheffield A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Art at the School of English, The University of Sheffield July 2004 Thou art a scholar, speak to it Horatio. William Shakespeare CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................... iv ABSTRACT ...................................................................................v INTRODUCTION ....................................... 1 ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 1 CHAPTER 1 - The Aesthetic of Reflection: Lukacs .................................. l 0 Introduction ............................................................................... 10 1. Questions for Lukacs' Reflection Theory ............................................. 11 2. Forgetting Lukacs ........................................................................ 33 3. The Meaning of Lukacsean Realism ................................................... 43 4. Lukacs and Western Marxism .......................................................... 52 5. Lukacs and Althusserian Marxism ..................................................... 59 6. Realism as Non-ocularcentric Aesthetic .............................................. 69 CHAPTER 2 - The Paradox of Realism: Benjamin and Adorno .................. 76 Introduction ............................................................................... 76 1. Realism and Dialectical Images ......................................................... 77 2. Benjamin and Romanticism ............................................................ 106 3. The Problem of Romantic Irrealism ................................................... 115 4. Critique of the Culture Industry ........................................................ 121 5. The Paradox of Mimesis ................................................................ 128 6. The Mimetic Moment ................................................................... 142 CHAPTER 3 - Realism and Method: Brecht and Sartre ........................... 150 Introduction ........................ '" .................................................... 150 1. Theatrical Realism ....................................................................... 151 2. Realism as a Method ..................................................................... 159 3. Sartre' s Critique of Brecht .............................................................. 164 4. From Representation to Representative ....................................... " .... " 178 ii CHAPTER 4 - Representation without Realism: The Post-structuralist Critique ........................................................................................ 181 Introduction ............................................................................... 181 1. Against Convention ..................................................................... 185 2. The Reality Effect ........................................ , ............................... 189 3. Foucault's Reformulation of Representation ......................................... 196 4. The Neo-Kantian idea of Representation .............................................. 201 CHAPTER 5 - Realism and Cultural Theory: Jameson ............................ 209 Introduction ............................................................................... 209 1. Form and Style ........................................................................... 212 2. Jameson and Lukacs ..................................................................... 221 3. Jameson and Realism ..................................................................... 229 4. Jameson and Postmodernism ........................................................... 244 5. Cognitive Mapping and Realism Alternative ......................................... 258 CONCLUSION ...............................................................................266 BIBLIOGRAPHy ............................................................................. 272 III ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to acknowledge help in writing this thesis. I am deeply indebted to Sean Homer, my supervisor. His encouragement and criticism have guided me when I faced difficulties in the course of my research. I would like to thank to Robin, Jamie, D. Kim, who have always been patient to discuss quite boring theoretical issues with me. Their hospitality and friendship have been invaluable. I should like to give my gratitude to my wife, Eun-Sook, and my daughter, San-Joo, for their unwavering faith in my competence to finish this thesis. I am also grateful to my mother and my brother who helped me continue the study. Finally, I wish to thank the members of Philosophy and Architecture Reading Group, T. Kang, H. Kim, and Y. Kim. Their fascinating attitudes towards the knowledge of humanities have motivated me to enjoy completing my thesis at the hardest moment. iv ABSTRACT The aim of this thesis is to examine the idea of realism in Western Marxism through the comparative approaches of Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre and Fredric Jameson in relation to non-Marxist theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. The issue of realism suffers from the controversial terminology of realism and reality. This is the reason why realism can be better viewed by Marxist perspectives that are firmly based on the category of the subject-object dialectic. This Marxian principle, thereby pertaining to the reality existing outside of subjectivity, substantiates the issue of realism as a continuing social and aesthetic project. By focusing on the category of real ity in relation to the idea of realism in Western Marxist debates, this study explores the way in which the Marxist theorists understand the relationship between culture and society, and respond to the change of socio-economic conditions in each historical moment. These various discourses revolving around the issue of realism produce a similar agenda to explain the place of the artwork in the realm of culture. Such a similarity arises from their attempt to retain the idea of realism, even when they argue for an aesthetic of anti-realism. In this respect, my thesis questions the distinction between realism and modernism in Western Marxist discourses, and argues that such differentiation had been articulated by a political intention to sever Western Marxism from Stalinism. Their idea of realism is paradoxical in the sense that their formulations of realism aspire to a utopian project. This is the very way in which their idea of realism can be grasped as another facet of their political programme. v INTRODUCTION In this thesis I would like to examine the idea of realism and anti-realism in the development of Western Marxism. This involves an analysis and critique of Marxist theorists such as Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno, Brecht. Sartre and Jameson as well as non-Marxist theorists such as Barthes and Foucault. My contention is that Lukacs is a symbolic figure centred in the Marxian idea of realism and prompts a series of debates revolving around the problem of representation. Descriptions of realism in the field of aesthetic discourse are notoriously slippery. The difficulty describing the whole contour of realism is a consequence of its ambiguity: realism has both an aesthetic and an epistemological dimension all at once. The simplest way to define realism is to describe it as a historical mode of representation mainly belonging to the nineteenth century. However, my initial intention in this study does not reside in a historically oriented approach. This study rather aims at revitalising the category of realism not as 'a form or period that we rightly ifalso repeatedly put behind us' but as 'a continuing social project that (in some form) one might still want to sign onto'. 1 This is the reason why my discussion focuses on the ideas of realism in Western Marxism that produced influential debates about the social function of realism in the field of aesthetic and cultural production. Needless to say, this aim can be achieved through a presentation and a reformulation of Marxist aesthetics. My presupposition is that realism is not so much a specific method or style of a work of art, but the fundamental problem of aesthetic and cultural production in I Bruce Robbins, 'Modernism and Literary Realism: Response', in Realism ilnd Representation: £ssay.l' on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, ed. bv George Levine (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 225. .- general; realism is not only a representational system but also an ongoing epistemological claim to the real. What must be stressed is that the possibility of realism designates not the name of an aesthetic object. but a problem. Realism is an aesthetic striving to push our perception beyond the conventional code system of reality. In this way, realism can be said to be a continuing aesthetic project to realise utopian imaginations towards an alternative social system by changing the category of reality. The Marxian idea of realism is necessarily related to the concept of ideology, in the sense that it always demands the dialectic between the epistemological and the aesthetic: the aesthetic is the living experience that produces criticism of the gi ven