Marxism and Modernism, Eugene Lunn

Introduction

This book is a research of the historical sources and the multiple contours of
political-aesthetic encounter of Marxism and modernism. We will focus on the works of their
main contributors: Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno.
Marxism contains penetrating, indispensable, historically defined criticisms of the
economy, capitalist society and culture, and a powerful method of dialectical analysis. This is
a dogmatic faith in historical inevitability, an exclusive focus on the sources
capitalists of modern oppression and a trend towards a theory of copy of consciousness as
a reflection of social processes called objectives.
The modernist culture contains some ingredients that can help in overcoming
these problems such as an intense worry about the mediation of the 'content' by the
the exploration of the fragmented and alienated experience of individuals in the modern
urban societies. Modernist art has its own deficiencies, deficiencies that a
culturally sensitive Marxism could clarify in its historical terms and critique fruitfully;
like the aristocratic cult of hermetic art, a human condition that is ahistorical and timeless, and a
form of rebellion closely tied to culture that facilitates the absorption of art as fashion.
Each of the four figures studied here developed different historical frameworks.
broad for the analysis of modern art and culture, among a series of debates among themselves.
Through these confrontations, a serious and flexible Marxist aesthetic began to emerge for the
20th century. The four authors only arrived at Marxism after being refined critics or
practitioners of modern arts.
It will focus on the period from 1920 to 1950 and from 1928 to 1940 to analyze each debate through the
contrast of biographies and historical experiences and in the various approaches of Marxism and the
modernism articulated in each author.

First Part: The Traditions

I. The art and society in the thought of Karl Marx

Marx viewed reality as a field of relationships that encompassed the totality of the
human experience; however, he never developed a systematic aesthetic; any description of
his opinions on art and culture is a reconstruction of fragmentary and scattered passages.
Art is like a part of human work, it is not a mere copy or a reflection of the so-called
external reality, according to Marx, but its impregnation with human purposes. In the process of
Through work, human beings develop the world of nature and their own capabilities. Inside
From a given natural and social environment, humans 'produce' ideas, consciousness, language, and art, by
just like the instrumentally necessary goods; ideas that act upon nature and at the same time
they change their own nature.
Art never loses its connection with technical refinement, the useful skills in
that underpins human culture. For Marx, art serves purposes that are not merely mimetic or
Utility. There is always in art an element of deliberation in the creation of attraction.
Formal is an exercise of a human capacity for playful material activity.
Art had a fundamental human use for Marx. If modern capitalism is
deprived of "enjoying this work as a game of his own mental and physical faculties," the
art also has within its purposes its ability to resist the crude notions of the
utility. He also did not dismiss the value of the agitation of art within his political struggles.
He emphasized the humanizing, trans-historical, and fundamental value of art, commenting
about the importance of ancient Greek culture as a model for all subsequent eras
in some senses. The classical component of his thought took shape within a framework
historical and dialectical where cultural deterioration comes into tension with the same forces
productive that can generate human advancement. By placing their aesthetic observations within
a counterpoint of deterioration and progress; Marx avoided any induction into classical rest or worship of
the eternal truths: the humanist and classical motivations of his thought became
a new sting for action.
Under capitalist conditions for Marx, art becomes a form of labor.
alienated through its reduction to the quality of a commodity in the marketplace. Its
creation has ceased to be a process in which the artist develops the self and humanizes nature to
become a means of mere physical existence. In the 19th century there was a certain democratization of
the clientele, but this was joined by an increasing degree of homogenized marketing in the
the production of art and literature itself. As was the case with all alienated work, the worker
he had been alienated from the product of his work.
The fetishism of commodities replaces one of the forms of mythification.
spiritualizing (the arts evoked above the material reality). In a commodity the
the social character of men's work appears to them as an objective character stamped on the
product of that work. Marx vaguely suggested the full implications for the arts in the theory
of the fetishism of commodities.
Marx did not conceive of art as something entirely reduced to exchange values that only
it would reflect the widespread alienation. Art could diagnose the social conditions and
alienating economics and aiming beyond. All art has the capacity to create a need for
aesthetic enjoyment and education that capitalist society cannot satisfy. No matter how low it falls
the influence of the market, art is produced and consumed in relative autonomy and is not identical to the
factory work is not a pure commodity. In Balzac's novels, Marx saw the truest portrait and
historically rich in French society from 1815 to 1848.
There is a utopian value in art in Marx's works for the state beyond the
classist society being prepared by historical developments in the present. Marx expected
also an aesthetic improvement of the work process itself, a vital aspect of overcoming
from alienation, so that work includes a free play of physical and mental faculties. With
the democratized control of the means of production could give rise to the 'utopian' component of
art as an enrichment of all human activities.
Both Marx and Engels held the poet's mental independence in high regard.
innovations in language and the liberation from a simplistic didacticism. They also showed an interest
intense due to the emergence of a genuine cultural life of the working class. Although
they despised all art that, in its refined aestheticism, was aimed at a very restricted circle,
focused their attention on the value that the best art emerging from has for all of humanity
upper classes, past and present.
They did not consider most of art and literature simply as a matter of
classist perspective or ideology: much of the most interesting art sharpens our perception of
the ironies, complexities, and contradictions of historical pressure on cultural activity. In the
the dialectic of art and history is not simply a "synchronous" relationship of cultural activity
with a contemporary society, but a 'diachronic' debt to historical developments
previous ones, including those that have occurred within the discipline, genre or branch of art of a
private work.
Thus, if art cannot be reduced to class ideology, how will it relate to the
historical development? Marxist cultural theory has often been simplified into a crude
extension of the called notion of 'base-superstructure.' This is not a distinction between matter and
spirit, but rather among conscious human activity, aimed at creation and awareness
human that provides reasons, rationalizations, and modes of legitimation. Art can be part of
not only of the base or the superstructure, but of both.
 Both Marx and Engels use Balzac and Shakespeare as models of 'realism'. In
In praise of an authentic realism, Marx and Engels developed themes quite common in the
European aesthetics of the mid-19th century, especially regarding English novels,
French and Russian. They marked four essential criteria of realism: typicality, individuality,
organic construction of the plot, the presentation of humans as subjects and objects of the
history.
It is important to note that the various needs of art were far from being exhausted.
following the criteria of literary realism: realism is just one of the types of literature and the
art favored by both authors.
The social perspective of Marx can be situated within some main currents of
German and French thought in the century 1750-1850. Their opinions on art and society
They reformed and interconnected a great diversity of sometimes opposing traditions. It was in
debt to the aesthetics and social philosophy of Germany from the period of 1770-1815: Herder, Kant, Goethe,
Schiller, Fichte, Hegel. Instead of confronting the external world as an objectified field for the
scientific calculation and instrumental technological use, these thinkers conceived the outside world
as the plane in which humans express and realize their moral and aesthetic potentialities,
internal spirituals. Within this great expressionist movement there were divisions: the romantics,
idealist philosophers; both emphasized the need for organic temporal development, self-expression
and the moral autonomy in their uprisings against the French Enlightenment. The notions of alienation
of the self in front of social and political activity and of the 'commodification' of the modern world
artificial in a frozen, rigid, and distant mechanism, were already well developed within
of the German humanist, idealist, and romantic thought of those decades. Within this context
from social theory and social history is where the philosophical divergence between the
French objectivist materialism and the German idealist emphasis on the role of the reflective subject.
In 1840, Marx was seeking in France and England a guide for the empirical reconstruction of the world.
political and in their hopes for potential progress through science and industry, but as
German philosopher rejected what he considered the passive implications of materialism
mechanical and insisted on a Hegelian dialectic of the active mind and objective reality.
Hegel's dialectical logic helped articulate the contradictory experience of hope.
and the discouragement that Marx experienced towards modernizing capitalism. His double response towards
the capitalist modernization developed through a "German-French" synthesis. It intertwined
both currents in their observations on art and society.

II. Modernism in a Comparative Perspective

Modernism in the arts does not represent a unified vision nor an aesthetic practice.
uniform. However, it has some unifying aspects common to all its currents (here
considered symbolism, cubism, expressionism, naturalism, constructivism, and surrealism.
1 Self-awareness or aesthetic self-reflection.
2 Simultaneity, juxtaposition or montage
3 Paradox, ambiguity, and uncertainty
4 Dehumanization and fading of the subject or individual personality
integrated
As general aspects of the cultural and political life of Europe in which it arises
Modernism must consider the decline of religious faith, the revolt against positivism in the
natural science and social thought; the increasing importance of photography as reproduction
of the natural world, and empirical social research; the political and intellectual crisis of liberalism
they attacked the notions of human rationality and secular progress (it had concluded the
heroic and confident struggle against aristocratic absolutism, class radicalism mid-1789
by 1870 it had faded; the elites perpetuated their power under the banners of nationalism and
imperialism, new mass movements were emerging, etc.)
All the main criteria of modernism were influenced in their origins by this.
crisis of liberal thought. The conception of nature as an effective counterbalance to the
the modern urban and industrial society was a belief that could no longer be upheld; it was beginning to
consider art and science as entities in their own right, as self-reflective constructs
instead of expressions of representations of the external or internal reality.
The modernists often belonged to groups, circles, or self-proclaimed avant-gardes.
defensive and belligerent. The 19th century also marks the decline of the patronage system.
the sales conditions of an arts market, active, competitive, that drives the
originality and innovation.
Literary and artistic modernism first developed in Paris during the Second
Empire and the first decades of the Third Republic in the form of Impressionist painting and
symbolist poetry.
Impressionism was a transitional movement that aimed at a surpassing of the
mimetic theory, arising from a positivist and naturalist attitude. The explicitness and clarity of the
the break with tradition is greater in symbolism. For the symbolists, poetic language
it should detach itself as much as possible from its discursive functions of reference or
representation. They insisted on the metaphorical, not mimetic function of words. Nature does not
it is already experienced as a reality but rather an immense repository of analogies, correspondences and
signs, a stimulant for the psychological and musically resonant use of language. Art is
based on thought, not on nature; therefore, it is an artifact. They built bridges
metaphorical connections between ancient and modern myths to find some anchor as artists;
situated in the modern city: they tried to experience the urban excess of stimuli,
confusions and transience and the depths of their own consciousnesses. They cultivated a pleasure
perverse for seeing themselves as a race in melancholic decline, transmitters of the myth
generalized decay at the end of the 19th century; cultivating an aesthetic of death, using its
formal technique in a way that reinforced a feeling of social helplessness. The symbolist work
It was also an inspired and socially necessary attack on the stale and devalued language of the
politics and trade and its consequent limitation of experience: they sought to define the
meaning of the called reality to poetically transform with its art the way in which
we think and imagine the world around us, but they perceived it with fatalism.
they opposed the view of art as a romantic self-expression. It is an impersonal poetry that
consider your own personality as an object, focused on the mysteries of language that
they work as a release of personal pains while the creative process is ongoing
march.
Cubism culminated the Impressionist and Symbolist aesthetics, but it did so with an active sense.
of the human construction of nature and society. They used colors for purposes
architectural, not poetic or emotional. It brings modern art closer to modern science: the
juxtaposition and the dynamic collision of different angles and moments in space and time
they suggest the relative abandonment of the notion of fixed and absolute truths. An object does not have a
absolute form, but many, as many as there are planes in the realm of perception. The Cubists
they attacked the notion of art as something that leads a hermetic, independent existence, isolated from
visible external world. Art is not a window to the external world but an aspect of the
reality itself. They showed a more hopeful attitude towards the social meaning of society
they were more rational, analytical, and constructive in their artistic work and in their attitudes
social issues. After 1911, cubist themes were often taken from artificial constructions of the
modern city: led the artistic acceptance of cheap objects. It was the one that recorded with
greater clarity in the technical innovations of cinematic editing. They sought to abandon the
artist as a genius isolated from modern industrial society to cultivate his own
personality. The cubist beginnings (1907-1914) coincided with a new socialist militancy in
Europe. Its followers from 1917, including constructivists, dadaists, and surrealists, developed
radical political implications with cubist procedures. In these movements, the aesthetics
Modernism arose from a crisis of liberal politics and intellectual assumptions.
 The Marxist modernism of the 1920s in the Soviet Union produced a whole series of
models for modern leftist art that ultimately derive from cubism. Many
visual artists joined the victorious communists in the hope of a culture and society
new, released, based on the industrialism that had acquired a lyrical power. Futurism
Italian and French cubism had made their impact felt in Russian painting and poetry before the
First World War. In experimental theater, cinematography, typography, and architecture of
In those years, called constructivist, the machine became the model of creation itself.
artistic. In theater and in cinema, constructivism found its fullest realization: the work does not
it was not a finished product but an incomplete creation of both actors and audience alike.
Meyerhold; Eisenstein. Modernist Marxism was also evident in Germany in the years
twenty: Dadaist montage. Less Marxist but committed to the development of an art
Equalitarian was the work of the famous Bauhaus architectural school in 1919.
The main post-cubist French movement of the period was surrealism. It represented
an alternative option to cubist aesthetics, they tried to free their own life from fantasy, although
they showed certain cubist uses of the imagination. They tried to subject logic to dreams in their
automatic writing and its free association, but in its art and its literature this material was presented
as pictorial juxtapositions of radically dissociated images. They represented the
internal and external experiences, simultaneously and mutually contradictory, with a detail
naturalist and extreme. The setup often aimed to help remake the social world according to the
model of the dream life. They struggled with great difficulties to balance and connect the
performance in the face of the unconscious and psychic automatism with the social revolution. They were seen
frustrated by the mechanical materialism and dictatorial behavior of official communism. The
what surrealists and constructivists shared was the continuation and development of aesthetics
French modernism: a rejection not only of realistic mimesis but also of self-expression
romantic, a concentration on the functions of objectification and depersonalization of language, the
image and sound.
Expressionism 1905-1920 provided the German-speaking world for the first time with its
own modernist art. Expressionist writers often tried to overcome through their
working on feelings of self-loathing, guilt, and lack of worth. They felt incapable of
to function in the social world; their creations show a common determination to subordinate the
shape and nature to the emotional and visionary experience. They formed cut sentences,
contracted, inverted: their purposes were ethical, spiritual, or political, the communication of
intense pains to help build a community of mourners. In expressionism
Violent denunciations and prayers of love and brotherhood often coexist. In the best work
Expressionist vigor resides in the denial of resolution, harmony, or easy comfort.
expressionist dream is a nightmare like the outside world, the symbolist interest is not present or
surrealist for the real dreams. If the contemplation of the self provides no comfort because it already
we are not sure what it is or where the self is, the cult of language no longer offers
no pleasure or power to combat the desolation of the human spirit. Vision of the city
devilish technology. Representation of the collective mass as a protest against the supposed loss
of individual identity in modern society, showing the subordination of the person to
social role in a spirit of deep pessimistic disillusionment. In many expressionist works,
it contrasts the intellectuals, capable of autonomous choice and affirmative will, with the masses
robotized. They sought a spiritually transformed community of one class or another. A
In the early 1920s, the movement died within the historical situation of the Republic of
Weimar and the frustration of radical socialist hopes; and it was absorbed and took directions
conservative within the German film industry.
The Marxist response to modernism. An exclusive concentration on certain directions.
The thinking of Marx often generates an erroneously aesthetic perspective among Marxists.
prescriptive, utilitarian and realistic. Marx perceived a great diversity of possible uses of art and it
it was considered as part of the productive human mediation of the objective world, not merely as its
reflection or its mimetic representation. But Marx's theories of alienation and reification.
they provide powerful suggestions for the favorable historical interpretation of the end of subjectivity in
the modernist arts. A crucial issue might be the need for a work of art to be
completed and finished with an author who can address the social issues that the work
suggests (Luckacs' perspective) or if (Benjamin and Adorno) the critic could find a truth
unintentional and fragmentary historical in avant-garde art and request the artist to create
unfinished works that raise vigorous questions for the audience's consideration (Brecht).
Certain important aspects of modernist culture may contain new formal strategies
for resistance to social paralysis and objectified consciousness, and for overcoming such evils
through distancing techniques, metaphorical attacks on linear time, the combat against language
routine, etc. With such a conception, Marx's dialectical approach could be developed in a context
of the 20th century, becoming the best art of its time as a product of the
merchandising and as a promise of de-alienation.
Modernists and Marxists were deeply divided in the three decades leading up to
the First World War. It is important to keep in mind the aristocratic Bohemian influence of the
avant-garde culture of those years that prevented general interest in an alliance with a movement
mass proletariat. The German Social Democratic Party in light of its intense distrust of
thinking world of independent intellectuals, anticipating socialist realism, desired a
clearly positive literature, not negative. Plejanov maintained that art represented the class or the
stratum whose tastes it expresses; considering cultural history as a reflection of the history of its
classes and their struggle. Mehring attacked the pessimistic perspective of recent naturalist literature;
preferring the classics of the decadent modernists.
The Marxists of the Second International could not face the modernist currents.
that arose around them. It would not be until the 1920s that a Marxist culture based on
the modernist procedures. It was the modernists who turned towards Marxism and
not the other way around. But the various Marxist efforts to use modernist aesthetics resulted in
ephemeral: the Nazis after 1933 ended all varieties of the cultural experiment; and
Socialist realism with Stalin did the same in the Soviet Union.
All the formal methods associated with Western modernism were attacked by
"decadent" or "formalists" and authors such as Shakespeare, Balzac, and Stendhal were maintained as
models of past realism; maintaining while these had to be negative and
Critics of their bourgeois era had to occur the opposite with Soviet writings. Having the
advantage of living in a classless society these should be affirmative and positive. Realism
socialist and other conservative aspects of the official Soviet cultural and social policy after
1930 represents the final deterioration of a critical method of social analysis such as Marxism for
to become an easy, mechanistic ideology that supported a bureaucratic establishment
powerful, ruthless with all deviation.

Second Part. Luckacs and Brecht

III. A debate on realism and modernism

During the thirties, the playwright Bertold Brecht and the literary and political critic Georg
Luckacs developed independent Marxist perspectives on art and cultural life.
modern thinkers that differed in fundamental ways. Both were intellectual exiles from fascism
and allies of the communist movement.
At the base of Lukacs's work was a traditional ethical and aesthetic humanism.
produced by patrician and idealistic blows, and deeply committed to the continuity of the
classical European culture. Brecht sought to apply the notions of scientific experimentation and the
economic production in search of a modernist aesthetic in tune with the technical 20th century
collectivist. Although both men were based on Marx's work, they used components
characteristically different from the great synthesis of the master.
Seeing the two positions as antithetical and mutually exclusive is a mistake. Although their
contrasts illuminate the rich variety of a possible Marxist aesthetic of the 20th century, both Luckacs
like Brecht were within the Leninist orbit and were wrong in their criticisms of the
Stalinism as a political and social system, which obviously affected its conceptions of
art. Despite all its distancing from Stalinist harshness, its dispute remained within
the parameters of cultural discussion and communist political activism. On the other hand, it is
It is significant that although Brecht defended the socialist uses of certain techniques
Modernist aesthetics shared Lukács' antipathy towards much of the modernist work.
Luckacs in 1930 developed a controversial theory of modern European literature, based on
a distinction between realism and naturalism. It defined realism as a literary mode in which
the lives of individual characters were traced as part of a narrative that placed them within
from the complete historical dynamics of their society, revealing the essential and significant in the
historically conditioned transformation of individual character. Highlighted the description of the
full individuality and historical typicality. The best realistic novels presented reality
general history as a process revealed in concrete, individual experience, mediated by
groups, institutions, and private classes. Luckacs emphasized specialization as the
central category of art, which in their opinion was a particularity mediated in the classical sense of
a symbol what is generally meant, as well as the person or the living and unique object that is
the signifier. Presenting humans as objects and creative subjects of history: in the voice
the narrator resided the cognitive ability to reveal the construction of economic life and
social through human interaction. Realism depends on the possibility of access to the
forces of change at a given moment in history. That was what had been lacking for Lukacs in
the literary movements from naturalist novels. The writer in naturalism becomes
as a mere observer of scenes; it presents immediate empirical reality as an objectified fact,
abstracted from individual and historical change. Events are presented as a context or framework.
The world appears as alien because it is not perceived as changing through human action.
deliberate, while the reader is reduced to the condition of an observer.
For Lukacs, naturalism had become the prototype of all literature.
modernist. In all modernist movements, reality is perceived in its factual immediacy.
divorced from the mediations that connect experience with the objective reality of society;
deploying an immediacy of fetishes. The modernists lose touch with experience.
social of the great masses. Lukacs insisted on a necessary popularity of all valid art,
requiring not the break with traditions as modernism does, but the evolution from the
cultural humanist continuum of the past. Modernism reflects the situation in society
advanced capitalism but does not indicate its deeper sources and the historical forces that tend to
overcome them. Bourgeois realism achieved this at the moment when the bourgeoisie was still a
progressive force with a rationalist perspective and confident in the future. We should start from that
moment and build from there instead of from the result of widespread distrust
burger of history.
Lucaks' main attack focused on expressionism in literature; accusing them of
develop a kind of romantic anti-capitalism that only falsified the world proclaiming a
knowledge based on inner experience. The basic drive of his work only helped the
reactionary forces that created a mystique of will and chaos while obscuring the
class issues and the rational dominance of historical change. In some way, Lucaks reduced the
works of art as mere reflections of class ideology and did little to clarify the social environment
existing in Germany.
Lucaks objected in 1932 to the attempts to create a modernist proletarian literature.
during the Weimar Republic and cited Brecht's works and dramatic theory as the most
developed from these trends. I saw in Brecht an extreme example of the rejection of culture
popular, their figures only represented abstract functions of the class struggle when they spoke
in a loose argumentative setup with purely provocative dialogues. It was a substitution
from realism to bias.
In his unpublished responses in 1938-39, Brecht emphasized the necessity of the experiment.
artistic in all socialist movements and deplored the attempts of Lukacs and others to tie up
hand to artists and writers. He argued that acts of liberation were thus repressed by imposing rules on them.
restrictive. The attack against modernism revealed a fear of the lack of piety towards high
tradition and authority, as well as their open, contingent attitudes and procedures
experimental. Brecht opposed the prohibitive narrowness of the conception of realism that he had.
Lukacs, as he excluded the realistic potentials of modern art. For Brecht, realism is not
a matter of form, since there are many ways to suppress the truth and many ways to
to state it. One could experiment with new means to reveal a changing social reality
constantly. The techniques to use is a practical matter to solve in individual cases. The
literary forms have variable social functions over time, and what was once revealing
it may not be so now. It highlighted the existing disparities between the social content of the work of
Balzac and the collectivist realities of the 20th century. Showing how a montage is created.
Images will also reveal the process of the artificial reconstruction of the entire social structure.
Since the historical world is shared with modernists, it is necessary to take greater advantage
ease of modernist literary techniques for one's own purposes. Literary forms like others
productive forces, separable from their uses so that they can be transformed to serve to
more progressive purposes. He argued that working-class audiences can support and understand
the innovations as long as they help to reveal the real mechanisms of society. The popularity
It should not be limited to accessibility and immediate communication. The development of possibilities
expressive of the working-class culture requires an educational process in both directions, a
mutual exchange. There is not only the fact of being popular, but also the process of becoming
popular.
According to Lukacs, all great art presents a social totality where it transcends the
merely apparent contradiction between immediate experience and historical development. Through
from the reception of this totality, the reader vicariously experiences the reintegration of a world
fragmented, dehumanized. Lucaks argued that such an experience of the reintegrated totality
would help prepare its recipients morally for active progressive participation in the
world. Brecht insisted that a response to contemporary dehumanization that treats
men and women as rounded personalities would only be a solution on paper. A
harmoniously structured reconciliation of contradictions facilitated a sense of
cathartic realization within the auditorium and made political action appear unnecessary. Lucaks
focused on the contemplative novelistic form, read in private, Brecht directed his attention towards the
public drama and activator.

IV The paths of a Marxist aesthetics

Lucaksc grew up in Budapest, in a wealthy Jewish family with ties to the aristocracy.
Hungarian. Its roots were in the patrician wing of the haute bourgeoisie. It rejects the banking future.
desired by his father
Before 1914, Lukacs hoped that the inner fields of art and philosophy would provide
an escape from the social dehumanization observed in advanced bourgeois civilization.
He shared with many intellectuals of his time the trend of 'romantic anticapitalism,' whose
the perspective was tragic.
In 1905, he sank into the study of German idealist philosophy through whose sources
absorbed the idealized image of the ancient Greek polis as a paradigm of ethical wholeness and
politics.
In many of his early works, he used a pessimistic version of the theory of alienation:
a non-socialist critique of the sterilizing and dehumanizing tendencies of the modern world
bourgeois industrial. In his study of modern drama, he argued that personality turns towards
inside as the external environment is experienced as a foreign point of intersection of
large objective forces out of control. In a painfully divided world between the subject and the
object, the individual character seems reduced to the symptoms of personal pathology. It emphasized the
transcendental uprooting in the novelistic form, the loss of a feeling of connection
harmonious, integrated, and intimate of human beings with their world, which had occupied a place
central in classical epic literature.
However, Lucaks was not in any way pleased with an eternally bleak perspective.
pessimistic or tragic. In addition to its utopian aspects, there were some elements of an approach
Marxist sociological and some potential bridges towards a revolutionary Marxist politics in its
initial thinking. He turned to Simmel when he was approaching Marx more closely in his early works.
books. Although he did not embrace a socialist option, there were certain components in his early writings.
democratic vaguely collectivist and revolutionary, those who formed a counterpoint to their
Patrician perspectives. Lukacs' position on political and cultural issues
Initially represented a totalistic denial of reconciliation with existing realities.
Within the context of his communist conviction after 1917, he would find several
means to reconcile the patrician and revolutionary democratic aspects of their perspective.
He spent the early years of the World War desperate about the state of the world; although
he experienced the war at a distance as he was declared unfit for military service. The
Russian revolution in 1917, however, ultimately gave Lukacs a real hope: there was a
a bridge to the future that would rescue Europe from its own decadence. By embracing Marxism,
Lucaks would have to interpret it and vitalize it, with perspectives taken from humanism and idealism.
from his youth; recovering some of the essential directions of Marx's thought. He began
the extensive reevaluation of Marxism required in the West. He maintained that what was needed
It was a reaffirmation of the active creation, by the subject (the proletariat), of the historical world.
as part of a true dialectic of the object and the subject. Lukács reinterpreted Marxism
as a method of analysis based on the dialectic of subject and object and from the perspective of the
concrete totality, the awareness of the historically mediated quality of all particulars by
the whole; which therefore can provide the necessary correction for all the methods concentrated on
the crude immediacies and the objectified laws abstracted from them, the second nature of a
advanced and frozen capitalist society.
Brecht came from a different sector of the bourgeoisie and developed a social perspective.
which contrasted with Lucaks'. The father was a wealthy bourgeois in ascendance; to which the son
reveals by taking examples from his own peasant ancestors. His subsequent insistence on the
practical and humble material needs of survival and their distrust of the
feelings and elevated culture have certain roots in this plebeian alternative to social position
ascendant of the family. His was not the revolt of a patrician aesthete, but that of a
self-proclaimed man of the masses.
Recruited at the front at the age of sixteen as a medical assistant, he came into direct contact with
the results of the war. It was the war and not the stable and prosperous period before that
he introduced Brecht to the world. He appeared to him as something swept away by destruction, and the
The break with tradition was a done deal. His first poems and plays
premarxists reflect their adaptation to the intense social dislocations of the post-war period; offering
a nihilistic portrait of a nature that has lost its sacred character, seeing the natural world
like a hostile environment, indifferent to human suffering and destructive. It also has a
open rejection of the naive dreams of greatness and the tearful self-pity of many
Expressionists. In the early 1920s, he absorbed Cubist and Constructivist influences that
they would have to bear fruit in their own epic drama and its subsequent aesthetics of Marxist production;
responding enthusiastically to the cinematic techniques of Eisenstein.
By the 1930s, Brecht's theater had become an experimental workshop of
self-reflection where human beings and social reality appeared as capable constructions
to be rearmed. He developed cubist and constructivist methods to politically activate his
auditorium, so that he could experience the strangeness of the normal and familiar course of things, and of the same
theater art. He began to develop a conception of the 'aesthetics of production' that forms with
a Marxism filtered through constructivist lenses.
He was at war with any gentle or soft trait he found in himself. His
Fascination with the USA in the 1920s included a considerable enjoyment of chaos and brutality.
and unscrupulous commercial vitality that his works satirized. Brecht emphasized the need for
start over, the imperative to radically transform traditional culture. Upon becoming
Marxists have insisted that a nascent collectivist and proletarian world would have to distance itself from the
bourgeois inheritance of the 19th century: a sharply leftist perspective focused on the struggle for
classes. Around this same time (the 1930s), Lukács had begun to minimize the class struggle to
favor of a proletarian culture with a classical bourgeois humanism, the intellectual basis of its stance
antifascist of the popular front.
Lucaks, with his History and class consciousness, emphasized the central role of a party.
highly disciplined communist who will help to form the true class consciousness of the proletariat,
by contrast to the merely empirical consciousness of an "instinctive spontaneous" movement of the
proletarian class. The work, however, was condemned in Moscow and Lucaks had to retract.
to avoid his expulsion from the party. Over time, Lucaks abandoned active politics and returned to the
theory, maintaining as a general implicit political stance the idea that within a society
predominantly peasant, the working classes depended socially on the farmers
poor and politically of the bourgeoisie and the social democrats. It was then required a
democracy where the bourgeoisie cedes part of its power to the great masses of workers:
a popular front of the liberal bourgeoisie and the workers.
The main difference between Brecht's politics and Lukacs' was centered around the issue
of the class struggle that Lukacs had come to minimize. Brecht did not accept discipline.
The official Bolshevik did not consider 'bourgeois democracy' favorably as a scheme.
necessary. I firmly believed that all workers should unite against Nazism, only this
I would implement a class conflict policy, not Lukacs' 'popular front' with the bourgeoisie.
liberal. He objected to the mere continuation of the inheritance of bourgeois humanism and classical realism,
which I considered linked to the socially individualistic cultural conditions and prior to the
technological revolution, which bourgeois art tried to perpetuate. It proposed a modern culture and
combative and activist, derived from many different traditions but that will manifest the vast
existing differences between classes. Only this would serve the cultural production developed by and
for a proletariat of the 20th century.
Lucaks in 1931 examined the newly discovered economic and philosophical manuscripts of
1844 that helped them interpret Marx's works from the perspective of their youthful debt to
the humanism of Goethe and the idealism of Hegel. Lukacs's insistence on realistic literature
It owes much to the aesthetic humanism of the young Marx and to the classicism of Weimar. In the tradition of
German idealism, Lukács divided the scientific from the artistic as modes of perception. Art
it was anthropomorphic for him, as it always contains images of human personality; on the other hand
Science consciously tries to eliminate the subjective element from the results.
Brecht, on the other hand, seeking the contemporary functions of cultural models,
he considered classical and idealist German culture as an ideological support for the classes
rulers in Germany in the late 20th century. Instead of connecting Marxism with Hegel and
Goethe, Brecht emphasized the debt of critical Marxist rationalism to radical materialists.
from the French Enlightenment like Deridot. Based on him, he asked the actor to let his tears flow from
brain and that art would combine entertainment and education about the nature of a
changing social reality. It focused on the intellectually cognitive and politically
useful art. He conceived of Marxism as a materialist and scientific method capable of undermining the
culture and the idealist ethics that kept in place the 'common people.' He believed that only an approach
critical and scientific of social issues could serve the cause of the poor and oppressed
plebeians. While Lukacs' work is associated with the attack against positivist Marxism and
merely economic, Brecht criticized sentimental humanists who were suspicious of the
useful scientific and economic knowledge. Like Marx, he understood science as a process
research on historical structures is not always revealed in the immediate 'facts'. The
The Brechtian conception of science developed in terms of practice, by Marx, of
a critical, dialectical, and historical method, very different from its later positivist interpretation.
There is a similarity here with the young Lukacs from History and Class Consciousness.
The central essay of this book had been the discussion of objectification, the term used
by Lukacs to denote the phenomenon of the fetishism of commodities in capitalist society
that Marx had described. Lukacs used the theory of reification in his literary studies, when
criticize naturalist and modernist literature for not overcoming the apparent division existing between the
personal action and objective history in modern capitalist society. Brecht also dealt with
to attack contemporary objectification, although the instruments of "detachment" used for such
the purpose required the viewer to complete the process of demystification through action
politics.
Lucaks and Brecht did not see alienation in the same way. For Lucaks, alienation
derived from the capitalist division of labor, where the experience that has is destroyed
individual worker of a unified and autonomous process. Consequently, its concept of
realism demanded a social totality not abstracted from personal, individual experience, but
revealed through the development of inner character and external human interaction
individualized. According to Brecht, on the other hand, such traditional humanist attitudes obscured the
collective realities of modern social production and did not grasp the extent of consciousness
contemporary objectified. Brecht argued that we can no longer expect private daily life
provide access to the general historical dynamics. Understanding the full social entirety requires
a constructivist montage of multiple changing viewpoints. An art show is required
his own reality as an imaginative artifice or a rational construction, in order to penetrate into the
illusory cognitive claims of private experience. Instead of seeking individualities
harmonious typical as concrete historical forces or to provide individualized catharsis; Brecht
it sought to reveal the contemporary dynamics of the collective social structures that are hidden from
normal personal experiences. He avoided individual psychological portrait focusing on
the active social behavior of their character. Avoiding the audience's identification with
individual characters.
Lucaks in the early 1930s separated literary dialectics from political praxis and
I use a copy theory of artistic representation that essentially denied power.
productive of consciousness. Every perception of the external world is nothing more than the reflection of the
consciousness of the world that exists independently of consciousness. According to Lucaks, the work of
art, a reflection of reality, was indeed an illusion of an autonomous historical totality. The
Brecht's works aimed to eradicate the notion of art as an autonomous and privileged illusion.
of the integration of life through the repeated exposure of its own creations as
mutable constructions. In his writings from 1928 to 1940, he criticized the approach that considered art
as a special form of the cognitive reflection of reality. It rejected the use of reductionism and
reified superstructure implicit in the conceptions of art and consciousness as mere
"passive reflections" of a socioeconomic base, and considered literary activity as part of
a 'transformative praxis' similar to other forms of productive consciousness. Art was a
practical element of constructing this reality, a constituent part of productive activity
of the social individual. The ability of art to help change given social relationships
derived from the position of art as part of the productive forces of society. Brecht offered
an alternative to the exclusive focus on the ideological social content of art, the form
narrow in which the aesthetic conceptions of Marx had generally developed since his
death.
 A large part of Brecht's theory and practice is not just modernist, but shows
an imaginative adaptation of specifically Cubist and Constructivist currents by opposition
to the currents derived from symbolism or expressionism. It could not be limited to any
merely metaphorical and poetic transformation of physical and social reality. He suspected
deeply of all art that would only liberate and refresh the senses. He criticized writers who
they focused on personal psychological analyses without considering issues of causality
historical. Brecht's technique, where a distancing representation allows for recognition of
object, but at the same time makes it look strange, was indeed trying to impart a direction
socialist to the aesthetics of Braque; alongside his other great influences, futurism and constructivism
Russians.
He argued that cinema as mass entertainment should not be seen as an inferior form.
of art, if it were functionally reoriented through the work of progressive cultural workers
it could expand the perceptual functions of art through its graphic approach to dynamics
external of social interaction, overcoming the introspective psychology of the ancient narrative art
technician. The artist is also presented here as an intellectual worker in an analogous position.
to that of factory workers. The industrialization of art and artists was inevitable and had
considerable human potentialities. Their conception of the emancipatory potentialities of
a modern reoriented technology was related to her critique of art as closed creation
by an omniscient author who distributes their finished cultural products to an audience. Lukacs does not
he considered, however, that culture should be redefined qualitatively by production
collectivist, self-determining, otherwise the passive, quantitative distribution of literary forms
traditional ones given. Brecht sought to go beyond mere modification of the
distribution to arrive at a conception of culture as a production with intervention of
all.

V. Stalinism, Nazism, and History

The Marxist aesthetics of Brecht and Lukacs developed in the 1930s in contrast
with the great political upheavals of this tumultuous era in Germany and Russia, the two poles of
the concerns of such antifascist communists.
Both Lukacs and Brecht shared a public adherence and a primary orientation.
towards the communist movement and made accommodations with Stalinism. However, doubts
Brecht's criticisms of Stalinism found in his posthumous works were much greater than
the Lucaks'. Brecht's lesson from Denmark as his residence after 1933 contrasts in
this sense with the exile to Moscow of Lukacs after 1932.
Lucaks believed that Soviet society had achieved socialism; its
identifications with Soviet Russia as an enemy of fascism led him to incur in
humiliating retractions that allowed him to remain within the communist walls.
He insisted on the strictest party discipline, continuing Lenin's policy of elevating the
intellectual vanguard. Its rejection of modernist decay afforded some respectability
intellectual to the literary liquidation of the modernist experiment in the so-called socialist realism.
His own argument was consistent with the official theory, although its practitioners could not.
to present in their works the desired social totality by Lukacs.
Brecht refused to break with Soviet Russia despite his growing skepticism towards it.
Stalin's regime. It continued to represent the defense of Europe against fascism. Brecht
he chose the useful, while remaining positively critical. He tried to discipline his personal responses.
as a political actor, the darkest side of the attempted liquidation of the ego and subjectivity that
we have seen in many aspects of his work. His Leninism was so enlightened, democratic, and humane.
how it could be within such a species of authoritarian practice: it emphasized the need for a
critical Marxism, in which the entire party actively participates in contact with the masses
workers. He tried to defend the bureaucracy by emphasizing its necessity for economic expansion
fast, and in the defense of Nazi Germany. He tried to maintain hope in that one
concrete alternative to the capitalism and fascism of the West. He was more deeply critical of the
Stalinism that Lukacs during the 30s: artistic censorship, the deterioration of Marxism, no
they allowed the new humanity of the class-conscious proletariat to form by itself.
While Lucaks avoided any kind of analysis of fascism, Brecht minimized the
importance of traditional military, bureaucratic and aristocratic elites in the victory of
Central European fascism. It contemplated the Nazi movement and regime in the Marxist sense of
a conflict between the capitalist class and the proletarian class. Instead of perceiving the ideological struggle
between romantic irrationalism and a classic humanism modified for the use of the 20th century, the
the conception that aligned Lukacs with the liberal antifascists, Brecht focused on rhetoric
Nazi idealist and his ability to obscure the material problems of the masses, in particular the
from the lower middle classes. An elevated idealist humanism was an unproductive response to such
heroic rhetoric that creates myths, as it only continued the struggle in an abstract realm
cosified that favored the Nazi capacity to hide the real world.
In their responses to Stalinism and Nazism, Brecht and Lukacs revealed conceptions
different from the modern historical process. Lukács advanced in the late twenties and during the thirties.
to a purified Marxism, where history was conceived as a series of stages of progress
inevitable. His description of Nazism as barbaric and decadent deprived the contemporary world
of its contradictions and real terrors, as it presented the heroic Soviet progress in a light
contrasting positive. Lukacs' now deterministic view of history allowed him to contemplate
modern western art as something objectively reactionary.
Brecht did not share such pacified optimism. He feared that Nazism would initiate a new
dark age; managed to live and work in the tension between despair and the
hope, highlighting the contradictory nature of every historical moment. The art and
Brecht's thoughts were directed towards the problems of contemporary industrial society.
advanced, that Lucaks was trying to escape. Lucaks never abandoned his initial repulsion towards the
20th-century culture. Brecht, on the other hand, accepted the urban and technological world as his medium, without
to lament the disappearance of classical culture, but rather to create an art suitable for the new one
time.

Third part: Benjamin and Adorno

VI. The avant-garde and the culture industry.

Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin would have to confront alternative configurations.
of Marxism and modernism in the 1930s. Both had an intensely
Modernist. The confrontation of its perspectives will be in the historical meanings that must
to be assigned to the avant-garde art and 'mass' marketed by capitalist society.
The Marxism with which they interpreted avant-garde and popular art was in both cases more
heterodox and idiosyncratic than that of Brecht and Lukács, nurtured by seemingly
incompatible like psychoanalysis for Adorno and Jewish mystical theology and a profound
historical pessimism for Benjamin.
Benjamin (1892-1940) published a now famous essay in 1936 titled 'The Work of Art'
in the era of mechanical reproduction,” strongly influenced by Brechtian themes.
Emphasizing that the historical meaning of art changes with the nature of its technical production.
that dissipates the traces of the aura acquired by art through its historical ritual functions;
Benjamin suggested that the reproductive capacity of photography, prints, and cinema destroyed
the feeling of uniqueness, inaccessibility, and authenticity of the aura art in the cultural tradition,
producing the disappearance of the "aura" in the 20th century. Two circumstances also produce its
current decline: the contemporary masses' desire to bring things closer in a spatial sense
and human, and its equally intense inclination towards overcoming the uniqueness of all.
reality through the acceptance of its reproduction. The social basis of the decline of the aura is the
sense of the universal equality of things. These changes herald the disappearance of the
distance in the production and reception of art and its transformation from an object of veneration
unique to an agent of collective self-emancipation. The vulnerability of the essay resided in its
apparent insistence that all these changes were not so much potential uses as implications
inherent in the new media of communication. What prevented its immediate realization was the
dialectic of the productive modes of capitalism and the extreme contradictions of subversion
nazi.
Adorno (1903-1969) responded to the essay with a clear disagreement with many of its theses.
main. For him, autonomous art through the immanent development of its own laws
formally was self-liquidating its aura; politicizing this art in a Brechtian sense, putting it to
immediate use value service, amounts to destroying this transcendent component and
truly progressive. This did not mean the end of traditional art through the
extrinsic intervention of the technology of machines or of the masses, which was the argument of
Benjamin, but rather his inherent technical development where the characteristics of the aura are
erode from within. This process kept alive the primary function of art as a
denial of a completely instrumentalized world: only when art observes its
Immanence convinces practical reason of its absurdity. If something has a character of aura, it is the
cinema, and in an extreme and suspicious degree. In the radical separation of advanced art from art of
masses, North American cinematography and Schoenberg revealed the stigmas of capitalism of
20th century, because avant-garde art and popular art are 'separate halves of a freedom'
integral, which, however, they cannot reach.” Adorno's approach is an tireless effort
for revealing the progressive characteristics in selected works of hermetic modernism
while explaining what in his opinion were the truly hidden repressive characteristics
behind the democratic facade of popular art.
In his 1936 essay, Uber jazz and in his subsequent critiques on 'popular' culture,
Adorno tried to decipher the ideological significance of art based on structural principles.
internals of its construction and the manner of its reception. For example, the syncopation of jazz lacks
on purpose and is revoked arbitrarily, it is a reflection and a reinforcement of false freedoms of
powerless individuals in advanced capitalist society. They are equally spurious.
the pretensions of the primitive "naturalness" of jazz as a protest against civilization
mechanized and decadent. Adorno's perceptions of mass culture were clouded
due to an ethnocentric provincialism of someone educated in the traditions of high European culture
and incapacitated to see much further - Exiled to the US in 1938, Adorno began a
wave of controversy against the North American cultural environment in which he felt so strange. The
signal of advanced art, (against that of light art dominated by exchange values to serve as a
an easily digestible object under the illusion of an individual taste that denies the evident dependence
passive involved in identifying oneself with what has served us); it is therefore the
ascetic exclusion of all culinary delights that must be consumed immediately due to their
own value.
Much of this analysis continued with Horckheimer: they censured the culture industry.
for their help to the allegedly totalitarian directions of modern capitalist society. They
he underscored the liquidation of the individual with the preordained pseudo-democratic harmonization of
collective set and individual people: a homogenized whole. They were disappearing the
centers of resistance within which works of art endowed with critical spirit could be created;
things that the high culture of the 19th century and the contemporary avant-garde did. Constantly
both authors homologated the North American culture industry in their results with that of the
fascism.
Revealing a certain fascination for the first appearance of the new technologies of the 19th century,
Benjamin fights this impulse by considering novelty as the quintessence of the false.
awareness under capitalism, whose tireless agent is fashion. But there is a collective desire to
overcome the deficiencies of the social order of production, a desire to leave behind a social system
that frustrates the promise of the new by immediately turning it into a sellable commodity. This
desire assumes the form of images of the collective consciousness where the memory of the past more
ancient generates hopes for a utopian future. The ambiguous images of prehistory and the
transfigured present also appears in the lyrical tones of Baudelaire, who conjures the
architectural elements of the topographical formation of Paris, although like all the
Bohemian strata go to the market to find a buyer for their poetic productions.
Benjamin began to analyze such topics by constructing correspondences and metaphorical relationships.
between the poetry of Baudelaire and his political, social, and economic environment. One of his purposes
it was the opposition to the dazzling attractions of aestheticism in the late 19th century, subjecting the
Baudelaire's poetry to materialist analysis. In this way, Benjamin interconnected
mutually the French modernist aesthetic and Marxist materialism in a way that
it modified the meaning of both.
Adorno disagreed with Benjamin's apparent assumption about the direct emergence of
transcendent utopian possibilities within the development of capitalist society, possibilities
frustrated by the current classist relations. If there were some utopian elements, they should
to perceive oneself immanently, within works of art and would exist as moments of negation
critique of capitalist development.
The implicit assertion by Benjamin that the working class, the collective subject
revolutionary could transcend the Marxist notion of the fetishism of goods of this class;
Adorno insisted on a critical negation throughout. By rejecting the notion of consciousness
collective, underscored that it was not invoking any supposedly autonomous bourgeois individual,
abstracted from the real social process. He added, however, that the individual is a dialectical instrument
of transition that must not be eliminated by a myth, can only be replaced, without clarifying how.
Adorno detected Benjamin's marked resistance to intervene theoretically in the
presentation of their materials. Fearing that the Social Research Institute would abandon it in
His financial difficulties, Benjamin had reasons to yield to Adorno's criticisms.
Benjamin held alternative, even contradictory, opinions about the historical process.
modern and the place of art and mass culture within it. After Adorno's criticisms, Benjamin
he composed a very different analysis in a study titled 'On Some Themes in Baudelaire.'
Here, the aura is conceived as a complex of immensely valuable experiences that is being
mining unfortunately in modern society. Adorno received this essay with great
enthusiasm; commenting that the decline of the aura meant the reification of such alienation
objects in front of their creators, the loss of the "human imprint" in them.
Along with this and other works, he was simultaneously writing the most Brechtian of his works, 'The
author as producer,” where the revolutionary optimism materializes more intensely about
of the proletariat and technology. Benjamin radically cultivated an ambivalence that makes of his
I work a blend so explosive, even evading the most refined synthesis efforts.
The Adorno procedure often consisted of the exposure of realities
regressive developments that seem liberating, and Benjamin could occasionally argue so.
contrary, but his work from the thirties contains together, paradoxically and simultaneously, the
two antinomies of an ambivalent stance. One of the limitations of its debate is the fact that
this broader perspective wasn't really present, as Benjamin did not want to make it
explicit.

VI. Benjamin and Adorno: the development of their thought

Benjamin was born in Berlin in 1892, from a upper middle class background and subjected to the pompous atmosphere,
hypocritical and burdensome of the Guillermina culture. Her father had an antiques business and
Oriental rugs, early experience for Benjamin with the fetishism of artistic commodities.
He soon leaned towards the youth movement of widespread rebellion among the youth of the working class.
media of the time against the patriarchal repression of family and school.
 He absorbed the inheritance of the French symbolist poets and Jewish mysticism. In 1913 he visited
Paris for the first time, which would continue as a central magnet of his critical production,
as a home of French modernist art. In his first important article 'On Language as
such is the language of men" Benjamin developed the symbolist insistence that language is
communicates itself and not the subjective or intersubjective meanings or the mental images of
the objects. The idea that the material density of language constitutes the world that must
apprehending was already a basic premise for Benjamin. Renouncing the direct argument, he resorts to
to the ideas through language to produce their own cross meanings.
In 1915 he meets Gershom Scholem, a modern interpreter of mysticism traditions.
Jewish. And in 1917 he married Dora Kellner, whose father was one of the main pioneers.
Zionists. It was part of a renaissance of Jewish intellectual creativity and religiosity in the
decades after 1900; rebelling against the uprooted middle class and respectability of the
previous generations of liberal assimilationist Jews. He began among others to cultivate
contrary, apocalyptic, and mystical currents within the Jewish tradition, such as Kabbalah, a
a set of medieval mystical teachings that exerted some influence among many Jewish groups
after his expulsion from Spain around the year 1500. Benjamin found in these teachings the
necessary means to reinforce and extend metaphysically the conception of language, which in the
Cabbala is necessarily impersonal and an instrument of God Himself, who was learning from the
symbolist poets. Reinforcing the spatial approach of symbolist correspondences and
cabalistic, such perspectives would have given a strongly anti-evolutionary orientation to the
very outdated Marxism of Benjamin.
Benjamin largely remained within the perspective of the Jewish exile: his life
there would have to be a hope that is endlessly deferred. It is possible that his historical pessimism
was conditioned by an awareness of the dangers for the Jews that he shared with Kafka.
Benjamin's shift towards the political left from anarchism to Marxism
he was frequently affected by his reactions to the World War. Excused from service
military, but the imagery of war was part of his vision of the aestheticized violence of the
advanced bourgeois society.
Benjamin was not a pacifist; he showed nihilist and anarchist attitudes towards society.
bourgeois and toward her parents and her social class. Her eagerness to free the poetic power of objects
while the subjectivity of the liberator was extinguishing, it has to do with the very feeling of
practical helplessness and morbidity that Benjamin felt towards himself. An escape from the burden of the
personality was her fascination with objects. Another was the disdain for the importance of the
temporal continuity, the realm of 'mere realization,' in order to favor sensitivity instead
space that absorbed the French modernists. Death, the symbolic obsession pursued
always to Benjamin and it was a central theme of his meditations on art and politics.
After 1925, with his father's business ruined by inflation, Benjamin adjusted.
to the new financial situation making a living in literary journalism. Benjamín experienced
hunger and material need, which led him to participate in the class war between the
German teaching rooted in free democratic and socialist intellect and to make critiques to
inflation and the reaction of the middle class; highlighting the infrastructural needs in
larger measure than Adorno.
In 1924, he approaches the Marxist work of Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness.
He never joined the Communist party, although for a while he considered that possibility.
as an experiment in political commitment. In 1924, he met and fell in love with a communist.
Latvian Asja Lacis who introduced Benjamin to Brecht and was the cause of the only visit of
Benjamin in Moscow. There he was enthusiastic about certain aspects such as technology and life.
collective, but spoke with a remarkable coldness and detachment about the growing dictatorship
bureaucratic and of the party.
What attracted Benjamin to communism was its character as an opponent of the bourgeoisie.
western; she knew well that she would not be able to form a united front with anyone. Her closeness to
Marxism led him to try to reach a broader audience of mostly bourgeois readers.
educated through their journalistic activity; they never pretended to be a proletarian, nor oriented their work
directly to the working class. In 1926, he moves to Paris where he would remain until
his death in 1940.
The works of Benjamin from the thirties where utopia and catastrophe are contrasted,
they wrote in a personal framework of ongoing economic insecurity and growing despair about
the state of the world. Escaping three months after the fall of France, he committed suicide at the border
Spanish.
Adorno, on the other hand, saw his own childhood as a lost paradise, and this would have to
to serve as an image of a liberated utopian future. His father was a successful merchant in
wines provided economic security without interfering with his son's musical interests and the
philosophy. He did not participate in World War I as he was only eleven years old.
He experienced the crisis of bourgeois society in the early twenties, in terms of
of philosophical problems that he studied at the University of Frankfurt where he received his doctorate in
1924 and meets Horckheimer.
Adorno's concern for a threatened subjectivity contrasted from the beginning
with Benjamin's appreciation for the linguistic suspensions of personal expression by the Symbolists.
He travels to Vienna in 1925, the two years he spends in the Austrian capital are fundamental to his
education as an aesthetic and social thinker. The work of the musician Schoenberg affects Adorno;
holding that its cultural radicalism was based on the concern for tradition
historical that conservatives used to justify their attacks on the modern. By 1929,
Adorno interpreted such resistance to change in Marxist terms, as something that serves the
ideological purposes of class privilege. Adorno held that the Freudian revelation of
Schoenberg about the disintegrating ego and the pressures of the unconscious had required
radically new musical media: the end of false harmonies and the emancipation of
the dissonance. This would provide a formal communication of the urgent expressive material. The roots
Schoenberg was part of the expressionist revolt against the Viennese aestheticism of the late
century. In his work, art becomes a vital means for the expression of truths
emotional aspects of personal anguish.
In the late 1920s, Adorno spent some time in Frankfurt with Horkheimer.
while completing his postdoctoral work, he then moved to Berlin in 1930 where he participated in some
intellectual circles with Kracauer, Brecht, Benjamin, Bloch, etc., approaching the methods of
Martian analysis. He felt deeply influenced by the history and class consciousness of
Lukacs.
Adorno's philosophical position was rooted in the individual rational subject, although
will consider the individual historically and within a mediating social whole. In its critique
cultural, Adorno repeatedly emphasized, since the late 1920s, that the writer or the
an individual musician better serves social purposes by clearing the internal problems of his
aesthetic material, instead of building his work as a contribution to social collectives
currently existing.
It was from such considerations that Adorno would find the political position of
Benjamin in the mid-thirties, dangerously close to that of Brecht and Lukacs. Never
I accept Benjamin's notion of a critical linguistic intervention as the construction of a
radically spatial constellation, torn from historically evolutionary time; already in 1925
he insisted on the temporal Aufhebung, dialectic of cultural tradition. He insisted on a mediation of the
subject and the object. While Benjamin proceeded throughout his career in the method of the
historical criticism through metaphorically poetic and impersonal lines, Adorno interpreted in a way
explicit and systematic its microscopic details with the aid of sociological categories and
philosophical.
The first Marxist studies of Adorno show the mark of a great social development.
from the Weimar Republic: the process of rationalization and monopolization within the industry
German, which developed very quickly after the inflation of 1923.
The perception of the advent of fascism as a continuation of the ironclad system of
managed capitalism, and therefore the vision of North American realities having
frequently in mind the Nazi society, it would also be suggested in their essays from 1932 about the
music. Adorno's development of social thought reflected the North American interactions.
Germans since the stabilized capitalism of the mid-1920s, but also something of their
own imagination strongly dialectical. Armed with the grim vision of disintegration of the
autonomous bourgeois individual, Adorno used the post-liberal technical rationalization of the economy of
Weimar to transfer that lament to the analysis of advanced industrial societies with the
Nazi Germany and the USA.
As in his musical analyses, Adorno sought to demonstrate self-destruction
dialectic of tradition in the late bourgeois philosophies of existentialist thinkers and
phenomenological. Adorno's analysis aimed to reveal the unintentional social truth of the
ideological biases of idealism: the philosophical fallacy of contemplating the world as
entirely self-generated, and the historical fallacy of the assumption of the integrated real experience under
the administrated conditions of the advanced bourgeoisie. Adorno would continue this line of
argumentation in a devastating controversy against the language of existential "authenticity" that
was in fashion. These bourgeois philosophers reduced the object to the subject instead of mediating.
dialectically with one another. By reversing the problem, the orthodox Marxists and the
bourgeois positivists eliminated the role of the active subject in knowledge and in history.
Adorno thus opposed all theories of identity that falsely harmonized the
existing contradictions between the particular and the whole, the individual and the collective, history and the
nature, and the object and the subject, as was increasingly happening in practice in societies
advanced monolithic industrials.
The Frankfurt school, with common characteristics to the work of Adorno from the
thirties, in addition to the historical theory of post-liberal managed capitalism and the emphasis
philosophical in dialectical mediation, the Frankfurt School began to use in the early
the thirties psychoanalytic concepts in social analysis, in response to a growing pessimism
about the revolutionary potential of the working class. These authors hoped that the
Freudian theory would help explain the psychic sources of the instinctive conservatism of the masses.
if it was properly filtered through a revised Martian perspective of industrial society.
Adorno had turned to Freud in his efforts to find a rational conscience in the
functioning of the unconscious, and had framed Freud's research within the diversity of
the generalized irrationalist philosophies in Germany in the 1920s. Adorno emphasized the
Freudian analysis of the masochistic dependence on authority in his articles about jazz and the
mass culture. Psychoanalytic theory provided access to the problems of conformity.
the masses and authoritarianism in advanced societies and psychosocial perspectives on
liquidation of the individual in a world of technical domination.
By the end of the 1930s, Adorno had begun to cite a destruction of subjectivity.
individual as the most disastrous threat to any hope for a different future;
criticizing the apparent identification of Benjamin with the technological and collective aggressors.
He arrived in the U.S. in 1933 to join the Frankfurt School, feeling intensely
alienated from society and American intellectual life. He had felt much more comfortable than
Benjamin in pre-Nazi Germany. In the US, his cultural pessimism and elitism deepened.
leftist. Adorno's comments on American society and its resemblance to the
fascist suggest the strength of the opposition to the instrumentalization of art and thought and to the
commercially induced identities, in Adorno's anti-capitalism, formed in the rich culture
aesthetic of the 'feudal' remnants of Central Europe. It shared the cultural elitism of the
German academics, their distrust of instrumental reason and utilitarian values, positivist
as well as their defensive attitude towards a modern and technological mass society, but not
it compensated for the vulgar "modern" materialism with an equally vulgar idealism that hid
the material injustices and the unhappiness felt behind a curtain of grandiloquent rhetoric.
He emphasized the dialectical investment, historically necessary, of the high culture of the 19th century, in the
best advanced work of the modernists. Adorno did not apologize for the aristocratic sources of
its avant-garde cultural stance, which had filtered through the upper bourgeoisie
aesthetically cultivated from Frankfurt and Vienna. The note of aesthetic disdain was unmistakable.
traditional high-class culture by commodified mass culture.
Adorno was eager to return to Germany at the end of the war, a unique case among the
German-Jewish intellectual exiles. Having a large audience for their works, in the center
from the now-famous Frankfurt School, relocated to its homeland, continued producing works
of critical music sociology and philosophy, marked by a mold of pessimistic melancholy.

VII. A very modified Marxism

Benjamin and Adorno were not "Marxists" in any simple sense of the term. Many
other streams of thought played equally important roles in the work of the
authors; their Marxism was selective, even truncated, far from Soviet communism. They were free
not only from the Party but from the entire experience of politics and the effective movements of the class
worker. The Marxist aesthetics of Benjamin and Adorno benefited from their poetic talents or
musicals and an intimate familiarity with a vast field of modern cultural experience, but
his works often suffer from a lack of historical specificity and communicative direction.
Such characteristics reveal the complete absence of a meaningful relationship with social action.
the problem arose in part due to the historical realities of the time of Hitler and Stalin. The body of
the thinking of both authors was undermined from within by an excessive distancing from their
esotericism in the face of the vital and mundane problems of the non-intellectual population; which weakened
the real progress they achieved over the more rudimentary Marxism of Brecht or Lukacs.
Benjamin did not apply Marxism to art after 1925. He introduced a source in his work.
new metaphors that pointed towards the social world interpreted in Martian theory and thus
it intensified the complex reverberations existing between the antinomies of the sum of ideas.
Thus, Jewish mystical theory poetically related to certain aspects of materialism.
Marx. The absorption of symbolic modernism provided the connective method, in particular the power
evocative, enigmatic, and resonant of the metaphorical statement. Marxism gave Benjamin a certain
social categories for their war against the private and subjective and gave a new meaning to their
modernist aesthetics. According to Benjamin, Marxism continued the approach of its own theories of
language: added a political meaning to the impersonal poetry of the symbolist or surrealist object.
His poetic language of visual images unleashed many meanings not exhausted by the
Marxian thought. The poetic form was not a facade but a part of nature itself.
of its Marxist 'content'. This gave his essays an extremely indirect character and a
enigmatic suggestion that accentuated the experimental characteristics of his commitment.
For Adorno, Benjamin was developing a Marxism in a symbolic form, weakening his
pretensions of scientific explanation.
Benjamin had always felt fascinated by the redemptive and enlightening power that
found trapped in the physical objects of the world. In the way that Benjamin used the
more concrete visual images, he saw himself as a linguistic medium in the service of
power of these objects. This perspective took on an extremely melancholic form as a
meditation on death, which was a central theme of much of Benjamin's work.
The aesthetic glorification of dead commodity objects, reified from their connection
living with the labor process in which they were created, formed part of one of the central focal points
from Benjamin's main Marxist investigation.
He highly utilized the fundamental Marxian analysis of capitalist contradictions.
between the productive forces and the relations of production, applying these categories in some
essays on the new media of communication in capitalist society. Technology was not equal
Benjamin a mere scientific fact and its progress was not necessarily a blessing for the
humanity. He wrote in 1930 that only the proletarian revolution could lead to a use of the
technology as a key to happiness and not a fetish of decay. It suggested a misuse of
the potentialities on the other hand liberate the modern technical capability; however
criticized the notion of linear technological progress and the domination of nature by
the Enlightenment. Here he agreed with Adorno and Horkheimer who saw in fascism the
culmination of the Enlightenment trend to repress nature from the outside and inside.
I contemplated with horror the linear continuum of the historical sequence as a catastrophic event.
heap of garbage, and considered the revolutions and secular enlightenment as a break
time according to the model of messianic interventions of Jewish hope and symbolism.
He described linear time as a meaningless ritual of repetitions and therefore as a
central ingredient of alienated labor. Benjamin wanted to go much further than Marx in the
revision of the liberal notion of linear progress. It did not consider history only as a
dialectical development that combines technical progress and social regression, is what expressed a
the need to stop the very flow of clock time; selectively using Marx to
to develop these theories. This was not a desire to go back in time, but a rescue of the
hopes of previous generations for the current situation, a redemptive action aimed at
against the course of evolution in which such hopes had been destroyed. He was looking for that point
imperceptible where in the immediacy of the long past moment, the future inserts itself so
persuasively that in retrospect we can discover it.
If Adorno also developed a peculiar disposition of the Martian categories, his
sources were neither Jewish nor French, but were found within the inherent development of
Austro-German critical thought and culture.
The keys to Adorno's dialectical approach were "non-identity" and "mediation". Adorno
categorically denied bringing down the reality of any final basis. Neither the subject nor the object, nor the
Neither the concrete particulars, nor nature, nor history should ever be reduced to the totality.
one another; each of them was in a "field of forces" of tension and elements
retained that distinguished one from the other. Adorno always emphasized the mediated relationship between the
object and the subject, the tendency of each pole to reveal, in their internal structures, the influences
constitutive of the other. This was a dialectical procedure that owed more to Hegel than to Marx.
He always rejected the fundamental Martian assertion of the proletariat as the collective agent of
revolutionary change. He soon began to see theory as the only practice that remained.
It also differed when it firmly defended the model of 'totality' for the
understanding of society, where there are endless interactions within the social process
complete, in contrast to the so-called model of "base and superstructure."
Adorno tended to view contemporary society as an uninterrupted network,
lacking medication, of identities between an obedient individual and a repressive social whole, the
working class and the administration and economic and political domination. Contrary to Marx, he perceived
certain affirmative and comforting realities hidden behind the apparent 'liberation,' only the avant
the insulating guard preserved an element of negative resistance and genuine utopian hope, without
to be able to escape from a completely managed reflection.
He highlighted alongside Horkheimer at the end of the 1930s the almost total elimination of a
integrated and autonomous bourgeois subjectivity that had previously been sustained by action more
anarchic nature of economic and social forces. The handling of reification by Adorno
was directly related to his analysis of the individual's condition. He retained some traces of
a perspective of class conflict within a prevailing view of 'centered power and the
contemporary 'dispersed impotence'. In Adorno's theory, the focus of the Martian concept of
fetishism of commodities shifts from the process of capitalist labor to the values of
commercial exchanges in a bureaucratic and communist society of the 20th century. Turned to Freíd and
Nietzsche helps to understand the psychic sources of individual surrender to the apparatus of
"Repression." He connected the Freudian treatment of individual identifications with the group and its
authority with the theory of managerial capitalism. In the totally managed society and
especially in its fascist form, Adorno perceived the virtual cessation of mediations of
individual and society still present in Freudian theory. Nietzsche served for the critique towards
the rationality of the French Enlightenment.
Adorno and Horkheimer dismissing the positive achievements of industrial modernity,
they despised the age of the machine and the collectivist society in a widespread attack against their
objectified forms of life. While industrial work imposed an incessant repetition of
the movements, humans were treated like repeatable atoms, interchangeable objects of
government under a repressive regime of merely formal equality. Behind such arguments
there was a critique of the productivist manipulation of nature. According to both authors,
Barbarism resurfaces in the 20th century in a return of a nature that has been trampled and brutalized.
by a technocratic civilization. The critique of the modern archaic of mass culture formed
part of a broader attack against the mythically repetitive characteristics of society
modern capitalist as he saw it.
Both Benjamin and Adorno interpreted art not with select Martian categories,
but the very meaning of these categories was informed by aesthetic orientations
and their own cultural

XI. The modernist options

The alternative modernisms of Benjamin and Adorno can be distinguished by focusing on the axis
Paris-Moscow of the first and the Viennese center of the second. It will be necessary to recognize beforehand how much
the two aesthetic thinkers shared. Both considered that the critique of avant-garde art
required the reader to meditate on it and actively compose it again in the process. They refused
you move from the small details of a literary text to a total subordination of the analysis
social particular to the general analysis. Benjamin and Adorno understood that form is the articulation
the final depth of the content's logic, an understanding that allowed them to transcend
the empty debate between formalist and sociological theories of art. They were drawn towards
seemingly hermetic and less representative artistic forms, such as the examples of poetry
or modern music. They affirmed their intervention in this seemingly private and asocial terrain.
since each author assigned the critic as the illuminator of the unsearched social and historical meaning
a crucial role.
The book on German Baroque drama by Benjamin, the culmination of his pre-Marxist studies,
it contained as a hidden agenda a modernist attack on the classical German aesthetic. Instead of the
German classical culture, Benjamin evoked an art of the 17th century that meticulously reordered.
the ephemeral fragments of a broken cosmos, of which the classical was a part, like a ruin.
Benjamin had observed that since Baudelaire, the modern use of symbols tended toward a
new version of the baroque allegory.
For Benjamin, the redeemable past was not a model of harmony but something only redeemable.
in its hidden remains and its fragmented ruins. To stop the disastrous continuous linear and make
a space for a different future, the fleeting moment of fullness that is must be invested
capable, the liberating weight of the metaphorical relationships established between then and now, the
there and here. For the development of this perspective, Benjamin turned to Parisian poetry.
modern and to the technical challenges of new media such as photography and cinema, and to the
Moscow constructivism evident in the Brechtian text. Against a hollow classicism that invaded
Its native country built a defense in a modernist Franco-Russian alliance.
It preserved some important aspects of Symbolist heritage: a theory
self-reflexive and depersonalized language freed from merely representational functions
or of 'subjective' communication; a cultivation of metaphorical, ambiguous, and enigmatic approaches towards
the magical poetic object, an ambivalence towards death and emptiness and a fascination with them,
a concentration on the ephemeral moment and the liberating specialized breaks of time, a
sensitivity connected with the urban metropolis; a denial of the mediation of its materials with
the philosophical or historical theory, to suggest or hint at their social historical meanings instead
through the juxtaposition of objects.
Proust exerted an immense attraction over Benjamin; where it was reflected nowhere.
with greater intensity the metaphorical use of memory and the reminiscence of the symbolists than in
the fruitful work of Proust. Benjamin believed that Proustian memory imparted meanings
new to some fragments of the past through a process of separating such fragments from
its previous contexts and its relocation with subsequent events. In developing its 'hope in the
In the past, Benjamín built an astounding constellation of Proust and Marx.
Benjamin's inclination towards surrealism, which began in the late 1920s, was a
additional aspect of his effort to "politicize" art, to reorient modernism to distance it from the
decadent lassitude of the early symbolists. The acute visual and spatial sensitivity of the
Surrealists resembled much of Benjamin's, just like the intentions paradoxically.
aggressive and explosive in their receptivity to associated images. They found in surrealism
a materialist optic that resisted bourgeois culture more effectively than that of the parties
official Marxists. He saw the work of the surrealists as a middle path between aestheticism
contemplative and the active communist politics with which he had started to engage in the late years
twenty. According to Benjamin, the surrealist efforts to politicize art served as a counterbalance
directly to the aestheticization of politics that he detected in fascist movements. Fascism was the
culmination of art for art. He also censored the reactionary potentials of an aesthetic
expressionist. After his turn towards Marxism, Benjamin sought various means to eradicate his
own decadent fascination aestheticized by death, one of the legacies of her Symbolist past.
The art that he wielded against fascism included his friend Bertold Brecht, who provided him with
a vital synthesis between the French avant-garde and Russian political mass art. Benjamin
He sympathized with Brecht's work, however, he was never his disciple.
Brecht helped Benjamin to formulate his own analysis of the liberating powers of the
modern reproductive means. Benjamín stated that photography brings the conscious viewer back
of his "optical unconscious" and he did it in a way very similar to his description of memory
involuntary in Proust. He distinguished between commercially used photography, sensitive to fashion, and the
that builds the object without romantically reproducing it, freeing it from its anachronistic aura.
more developed forms of the latest class were contained in Brechtian theater, Russian cinema,
and surrealist literature. Later, he included Dadaist photo-montage. He was also interested, apart from
of the new media, in the alteration of newspapers. Such treatments of cinema, photography and
the press represented the utopian side of Benjamin's ambivalent response to decline
of aura and tradition in contemporary society. The other response is given by his studies.
of narrative art in the age of the press; the latter sacrifices the transmissible experience and the
narrative continuity to disparate fragments of information; in the era of the newspaper and the line of
memory and a usable past are in danger of losing their human functions.
Benjamin deliberately refused to resolve his own antithetical feelings of
melancholy for what was happening and her optimistic hope for what the future might hold
technological, even if the catastrophe could be avoided and a socialist society could emerge from the
crisis of the bourgeois world.
Adorno's treatment of the art of the 19th and 20th centuries focused on music.
of temporary development, especially within the Viennese tradition. In the classicism of Haydn,
Mozart and Beethoven, the trend of Western music to capitalize on the passage of time reached a
climax. The Second School of Vienna (Schoenberg) showed in a very musical and historical context
different, the erosion of tradition in a way faithful to the original temporal impulse. By acting this way, the
composers protested against the mythically repetitive social ensemble, without development. According to
Adorno, there was a serious aesthetic experience in musical composition and structural listening
intelligent, and the reflective inner experience of private reading. Adorno argued that the
The visualization of modern mass media promotes the externalization of optical signals.
unmistakable that can be seen at a glance.
The music contained in a highly articulated miniature form the social contradictions.
from the time, by denying the broader society through its inherent structural logic, but not in
total freedom to reflect on the circumstances in which it reacts.. These fissures for Adorno do not
they promise social transcendence, but instead structure the process of an incessant frustration of the
hope. For Adorno, Beethoven was a privileged period of artistic expression and a sign of
the universal revolutionary aspirations of the European bourgeoisie at the point where it seemed
capable of a concrete realization. Instead of reflecting the social structure, these musical works
they expressed a widespread critical attitude, a desire to transcend the current order.
Confronted by a strange source of objective authority, the musical subject, in order to preserve its
integrity, should be expressed through the increasingly formalized, fragmented, and alien character
from music. You must abandon the pretense of being able to generate the world of objects to
starting from oneself. The romantic music that followed Beethoven revealed the beginning of the crisis of the
temporality. The process culminates in the mythical and compulsively recurring themes of Wagner,
and in the post-romantic abandonment of expressive subjectivity in impersonal impressionism and
Debussy's spatialization.
The 20th century was about transforming the lost romantic subjectivity into the act of its
control, for example in the emancipation of the 'ugly' dissonance: expressed through structures
objective musicals, the anguished experience of the individual sensitive subject in a state of
advanced settlement.
Adorno placed Schoenberg and Stravinsky as polar options within the state.
contemporary of art. Schoenberg: music should not be decorative, it must be authentic.
It marked the expressionist intensification of a romantic subjectivity that must now abandon it.
central position of tonality to give an exterior form to the inner torment. The work of
Schoenberg shared the artistic project of the expressionists who sought formal means.
objectives for the exploration of individual suffering and the experience of helplessness
the fragmentation.
Adorno emphasized that the beauty of modern art had to be found in its ugly negatives.
to pacify and console. Art is likewise inadequate for horror and the suffering times:
this is what Adorno had in mind when he wrote that 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is'
a barbarity.
Along with the music of Schoenberg, the work of Franz Kafka showcased the ability to
to endure the worst by turning it into language. Kafka presents the defenseless image of the victim
against an objectified and impenetrable power in an unyieldingly critical way. The abandonment of
challenge against the all-powerful authority condemns a system that undermines all resistance, except the
of alienated art.
Schoenberg and Kafka pushed Expressionism to its ultimate limits, to the point that
that nervous images and their traumas gradually turn, under the pressure of their own logic
internal, towards the new objectivity, the most total order. For Adorno, that self-removed objectivity was
a anguished protest against the repressive social forms of the 20th century, although the music
will reflect, in one of its aspects, the administered world.
Stravinsky's music, rejected by Adorno, shared the abandonment of time.
subjective with other examples of depersonalized art from the twenties: the dream montages of
the surrealists, Brechtian hostility, and the cubist montage of Eisenstein's films, all forms
praised by Benjamin. The majority of the styles with which Adorno compared music
Stravinsky was directly within the 'affirmative' culture industry or could
easily appropriate for such use. Furthermore, each style made its functions even easier.
directly commercial to the advertising.
Although his attitude towards the symbolists varied over time, he became more amiable.
he saw in them only the
impossibility of happiness in today's technified world.
Usually hostile to the French and Russian avant-gardes, I supported the work of the modernists.
Austrians or Germans in the expressionist tradition. Their insistence on a technical self-liquidation.
of the aura within the immanent dialectic of the work of art, and in the necessity of concerns
formal and self-reflective in art and criticism, their rejection of the classical organic totality, the
romantic subjectivity or realistic reflection, and its emphasis on the fragmentary, transitory nature
and relativistic truth: all of these were characteristics of many modernist currents.
The defense of the modern novel was another example of the analysis that had been developed in
relationship with expressionist work. The traditional descriptive narration, in the sense of realism
of the 20th century, was no longer historically appropriate, Adorno maintained. Only the fragmentation of the
personality and the authorial stance that occurs in the novels of Proust, Joyce or Musil, for example,
will adequately reveal the measure of self-alienation, suffering, and powerlessness of the individual
in our time. From this same perspective, he defended the only truly literary figure
prominent figure that emerges, in his opinion after World War II: Samuel Beckett. He considered
his work as a continuation of the incessant revelation, made by Kafka, of the atrophy of the
personality in the contemporary world is objectified; but this fading of identity
was now more advanced. Beckett's negative and dissonant art refuses to comfort itself with
some form of current collective action.
The positions of both thinkers regarding Brecht are clarifying. Adorno insisted
in the absence of a mediated identity between mental work and physical work; identification
almost totally established by Brecht. Adorno estimated that Brecht's works are fundamentally
deficient in both aesthetic and political aspects, due to the effect of a political didacticism
instrumentalizer and a too simplified presentation of reality is effective of the
contemporary world. Even more harmful were Brecht's tendencies to preach to the converted,
distort the real social problems discussed in their epic drama in order to prove a thesis, and
build such dramatic improbabilities. Adorno dismissed all art about which there had been
proclaimed that it was "mass", a populist expression of a folkloric culture. According to Adorno,
All these were creations of the managed merchant economy or of communist politics.
There is no doubt that not everyone can be reduced to such monolithic judgments.
Benjamin explicitly held some of the Brechtian theses regarding technology.
the proletariat and communism. But the understanding that Benjamin had of solidarity
the potential of the alienated bourgeois intellectuals with the workers was more subtle and honest than the
of Brecht, and fought more effectively against some of the weaknesses and unilateralities of the
Adorno's positions. Politicized art must involve certain radical changes to form.
aesthetics, not the imposition of the dictates of any of the parties or any other tendency or
political content, in Benjamin's opinion. Benjamin's argument was based on the idea that
Intellectuals, like the proletarians, do not control their means of production and distribution.
and they must try to transform the apparatus that is used only in provisioning. The intellectual
For Benjamin, the revolutionary appears primarily as a traitor to his class of origin. The
intellectuals lead an increasingly commodified existence when they feel powerless in
relationship with the intellectual means of production that they do not control. Nevertheless, still
He emphasized that today's intellectuals imitate proletarian existence without being connected in the slightest.
minimum to the working class. If intellectuals show a need for involvement
revolutionary this derives from his social isolation. His motivations are different from the most
direct materials that excite the masses. Their task is to assist in the politicization of the
false consciousness of its own class, the literary intellectuality. Benjamín's description implies
What is there, after all, worthy social struggles outside of the aesthetic activities of the
cultural modernists.

CONCLUSION
The diverse aesthetic and cultural ideas of the 4 authors enriched the tradition.
Marxist in these areas and better equipped to evaluate the new developments associated with the
Marxist uprising. The confrontation with modernism fought by our four authors in the
the era of Hitler and Stalin challenged Marxism APRA to finally face the crisis of the
liberal bourgeois society and its values since the 1870s, to whose structures it owed much
classical optimistic Marxism.
Regarding the benefits obtained from the modernism of your research by
aesthetically sensitive Marxists we could consider them primarily in light of their
decline, widely discussed now. Such development makes the authors' criticisms of the
modernism seems more powerful than ever, even though it has the deficiencies of its own
monolithic pessimism. The four authors convincingly argued that modernism should
understand in relation to capitalist economy, society, and culture; and in broader terms
broad, it should have been viewed historically, although many of its practitioners seemed to reject
the mode of historical thinking.
The four authors were not so much Marxists who dealt with art as important.
aesthetic thinkers who utilized their significant cultural experience upon becoming Marxists to
develop their important contributions to a Marxist aesthetic.