The University of Chicago Press

Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno by
Eugene Lunn
Review by: Terry Eagleton
The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Mar., 1984), pp. 124-125
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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124 Book Reviews
party in the dialogue detects a European sound to the oration, that the defender
of primitivism proceeds to describe what can only be called arbitrary Tahitian
practices, that the whole conversation takes place in a dense fog, and that it
builds to no resounding conclusion. It is far easier to see the Supplement as a
commentary on the indeterminacy of translationthan as an encomium of primitive
life.
One might object that such complex issues are not central to the authors'
intentions: imperialism is, after all, a matter of attitudes, not epistemology. But
in fact their innocence of such problems makes their treatment of imperialism
seem completely gratuituous. It's clear the book is designed to climax with
Captain Cook: here at last, after enduring one "ethnocentric" observer after
another, all burdenedby European "preconceptions", wemeetatruly "objective"
observer who (like the authors, we presume) can appreciate a culture for its own
sake. The trouble is, how do we get from this climax to the conclusion, which
tells us that the British are now ready to take on the world because they are
certain of their superiority over all other people? The only way, as far as I can
see, is by sleight of hand. To make a convincing case about the motives and
attitudes behind imperialism, the authors would probably have to tell us a lot
more than they do about English politics and society; but they would at least
have made the transition from Cook to imperialism easier if they had some
inkling that "objectivity" is not necessarily disinterested and can claim its own
kind of ownership of others' lives even apart from obvious material interests.
HUGH WEST
University of Richmond
Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin,

and Adorno. By Eugene Lunn.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982. Pp. x + 331.
$29.95.
Since Marxism is both a materialism and, epistemologically speaking, a realism,

it is understandableenough to infer from this that it entails realism in the aesthetic
realm too. Understandable, but surely false: there is no logical relation between
philosophical materialism and literary realism, as Georg Lukaicsbelieved, and
the work of Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno was in various
ways devoted to exposing the absurdity of the assumption that belief in the
material determination of consciousness committed you to "rounded" characters,
shapely narrative, and representationalism in art. On the contrary, the complex
of experimental twentieth-century aesthetics we label "modernism" would seem
a far more suitable medium for revolutionary politics. Modernism stresses the
material character of art forms themselves, in contrast to the Marxist Platonism
which would see art as a mere "copy" or immaterialreflection of a world elsewhere.
It deploys multiple, ironic, contradictoryperspectives, dismantles the consolatory
"unities" of bourgeois individualism, exploits the "shock effects" of montage
and fantasy to disrupt routine social consciousness, denies the artifact any meta-
physical absolutism by its skeptical self-reflectiveness, and reveals a bold trust
in technological experiment. Modernist art is also, of course, characteristically
fragmented, alienated, agnostic, and even nihilistic, qualities which evoked the
materialist wrath of Lukaicsand Stalinism; but what experiences, one might ask,
could be more "realistically" faithful to the lives of men and women in monopoly
capitalism?

Book Reviews 125
The most significant debates in the annals of Marxist aesthetics concerned just
these issues; and they took place for the most part in the Europe of the 1930s,
between Lukaics and Brecht on the one hand, and Benjamin and Adorno on the
other. The barbarousirrationalismof fascism, Lukacs considered, could be opposed
only by recourse to the great humanist heritage of bourgeois literary realism, a
traditionof which Marxism was the culmination. "Typical" characters,harmonious
"totalizations", and homogeneous narratives in fiction were to be pitted against
the "decadence" and "subjectivism" of such currents as Expressionism, which
distorted and dismembered the "organically whole" human being. Lukacs's aes-
thetics, as Isaac Deutscher once remarked, were in this sense the literary reflection
of the Popular Front; and what they amounted to for Brecht was an absurd rec-
ommendation that one should "be like Balzac only up-to-date". Altogether more
militant, materialist, practical, and plebian, Brecht recognized that true "realism"
in the Europe of his time would need to exploit every experimental device which
helped to penetrate false consciousness; realism was a question of material effect,
not an academicist matter of formal technique.
Brecht's first great champion Walter Benjamin was a "modernist Marxist" in
a rather more thoroughgoing sense. What his work signifies, indeed, is nothing
less than an extraordinary attempt to think Marxism through again in terms often
bizarrely remote from the Enlightenment of which it was the child-terms which
encompass the Kabbala as much as Kapital, mysticism as much as modes of
production. His partner in this fascinating enterprise, the patrician, pessimistic
Adorno, rejected those Brechtian aspects of Benjamin which reposed faith in the
new artistic technologies of the "culture industry." insisting instead upon -the
revolutionary negativism of all authentic art, the paradoxical subversiveness of
its refusal to have truck with a degraded social existence.
This rich, conflictive history is excellently documented in Eugene Lunn's lucid
study. Unerringly intelligent and judicious, the book provides economical accounts
of the careers and theories of its chosen critics, places them in historical context,
and prefaces them with brief but cogent surveys of Marx's own fragmentary
aesthetics and of artistic modernism. It is not, however, in any sense an original
reflection on the issues at stake: Lunn writes in his acknowledgments of the
book's "pivotal ideas", but these are peculiarly hard to spot. Despite one or two
predictable non-Marxist prejudices -a constant assimilation of Leninism to Sta-
linism, for example, and an astonishing assertion that the Soviet Union views
human beings "simply as makers of material goods" (p. 10)-Marxism and
Modernism offers a splendidly well-researched and amenable study of the most
fertile developments in Marxist aesthetics.
TERRY EAGLETON
Wadham College, Oxford
Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century

Europe. Edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982. Pp. xii+411. $25.00.
Terrorism, Legitimacy, and Power: The Consequences of Political Violence.

Edited by Martha Crenshaw.
Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983. Pp. xii + 162. $17.95.
Historians, take heart! If the difference between the two volumes at hand tells
the story, conferences of historians specializing in political conflict are livelier,


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Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno by

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 21 Dec 2014 16:54:36 PM

Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin,

Since Marxism is both a materialism and, epistemologically speaking, a realism,

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 21 Dec 2014 16:54:36 PM

Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century

Terrorism, Legitimacy, and Power: The Consequences of Political Violence.

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 21 Dec 2014 16:54:36 PM

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