Resuscitating Georg Lukács: Form, Metaphysics and the Idea of a New Realism

ABSTRACT

It is admittedly difficult to imagine that there is something one can learn from the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács in a postmetaphysical and nominalistic age. At the centre of this essay is the following question: How to resuscitate a metaphysical thinker in postmetaphysical times? The essay shows that Lukács can play a crucial role in the attempt to theorise what Fredric Jameson has termed a ‘new realism’. Elucidating the Lukácsian understanding of the dialectics of form and totality, it is argued that precisely because of his redemptive notion of form and his metaphysical framework, Lukács might eventually turn out to be useful for the endeavour to artistically represent and conceptually grasp our present.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank two anonymous readers for numerous interesting and very helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ulf Schulenberg is Visiting Professor of American Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander University at Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He is the author of Zwischen Realismus und Avantgarde: Drei Paradigmen für die Aporien des Entweder-Oder (2000), Lovers and Knowers: Moments of the American Cultural Left (2007), and Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture (2015), as well as the co-editor of Americanization–Globalization–Education (2003) and American Rock Journalism (forthcoming). His current book project discusses the relationship between pragmatism and Marxism.

Notes

1 However, two important volumes have recently prepared the ground for a renaissance of Lukács: Bewes and Hall (2011) and Thompson (2011). In addition, see Plass (2015).

2 In this context it is interesting to see that Lukács is not even mentioned in Hardt and Negri’s Empire trilogy: Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth. Arguing from a Gramscian standpoint, Mouffe and Laclau make clear that Lukács’s ‘class-reductionist perspective which identified the revolutionary subject with the working class’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 68) makes him useless for their post-Marxist theory of leftist politics.

3 My discussion will not focus on the debate over Jameson’s notorious article ‘Third-World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (1986) since this would lead too far from my argument. In this context, see Radhakrishnan (1989); and Ahmad (1992). In addition, see Lazarus (2004).

4 For a stimulating reading of Soul and Form, see Terezakis (2010).

5 For a discussion of Lukács’s Die Theorie des Romans, and his development as a theorist, see Scheible (1988). In addition, see Goldmann (1974).

6 Richard Rorty’s version of pragmatism teaches one that instead of succumbing to the temptations of ‘a vision of vertical ascent toward something greater than the merely human’, one should strive to contribute to the development of ‘a vision of horizontal progress toward a planetwide cooperative commonwealth’ (Rorty 2011: 17). In order to achieve what Rorty terms ‘a poetici[s]ed culture’, one needs ‘metaphors of width rather than of height or depth’ (Rorty 1999: 82). What this boils down to is that we neither need firm and immutable foundations for our thinking nor the desire for the authority of something that transcends the merely human. It is crucial to realise the importance of this switch from metaphors of vertical ascent or depth to metaphors of horizontal progress for a pragmatist and antifoundationalist story of progress and emancipation. In a postmetaphysical culture, as Rorty repeatedly made clear, we will have taken the step from finding to making. For a detailed discussion of this Rortyan idea of a poeticised and postmetaphysical culture, see Schulenberg (2015).

7 For an illuminating reading of History and Class Consciousness, see the chapter ‘Georg Lukács and the Origins of the Western Marxist Paradigm’ in Jay (1984). In addition, see ‘Part Two: Lukács and Brecht’ in Lunn (1982).

8 Form is of course one of the central categories of Adorno’s aesthetic theory. His radical rejection of a Lukácsian reflection theory becomes obvious in the following quotation from his late Aesthetic Theory: ‘Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it’ (1997: 8). As regards the Adornian concept of form, the following two sentences summarize his position very well: ‘The concept of form marks out art’s sharp antithesis to an empirical world in which art’s right to exist is uncertain. Art has precisely the same chance of survival as does form, no better’ (1997: 141). For interesting readings of Adorno’s conception of aesthetic form, see Bürger (1992) and Hohendahl (1995). In this context, see also the chapters ‘The Dispute over Modernism’ and ‘Notes on Literature’ in Rose (2014 [1978]).

9 For another interesting discussion of the Lukácsian understanding of form, see Terezakis (2011). In addition, see Hohendahl (2011).

10 In this context, it is crucial to see how Lukács uses the category of totality in order to elucidate the alleged progress from critical realism (for instance, Stendhal, Balzac and Tolstoy) to socialist realism. It is because of their socialist perspective that the socialist realists are able to portray society more comprehensively and faithfully than the critical realists. In other words, socialist realism can depict the totality of society in its immediacy, and at the same time it can reveal the direction of its future development (choosing among the historical tendencies and potentialities). Using the terminology we have employed above, one can say that in Lukács’s opinion socialist realism’s ‘aspiration to totality’ is stronger than that of critical realism. He avers that ‘socialist realism is certainly committed to the achievement of such totality more strongly than was critical realism’ (Lukács 2006: 100).

11 When Quentin Meillassoux published Après la finitude: Essai sur la necessité de la contingence in 2006, it inspired many philosophers and theorists to criticise the anti-realist trend in continental philosophy. What, they asked, comes after structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction and Deleuzian materialism? When Meillassoux’s book was translated into English and published in 2008, its impact was equally profound. For our purposes, it is crucial to note that Lukács has not played a role in the context of discussions centering on developing a ‘speculative realism’, a ‘new realism,’ or a ‘new materialism’. In other words, the confrontation between the new realists and the Lukácsian oeuvre is still a desideratum. Seeking to theorise a radically new understanding of metaphysics, ontology and potentiality, these new realists, as should be clear from the present essay, might profit from discussing Lukács’s aesthetics and ontology. In this context, see Bryant, Srnicek and Harman (2011). In addition, see Boghossian (2007); and Gabriel (2014).

12 Concerning this ‘ideology of realism’, Jameson summarises the main objection as follows: ‘The objection is thus, clearly, a critique of something like an ideology of realism, and charges that realism, by suggesting that representation is possible, and by encouraging an aesthetic of mimesis or imitation, tends to perpetuate a preconceived notion of some external reality to be imitated, and indeed, to foster a belief in the existence of some such common-sense everyday ordinary shared secular reality in the first place’ (Jameson 1975: 421).

13 As regards Jameson’s understanding of realism, the chapter ‘The Existence of Italy’ in Signatures of the Visible also is important. He points out that any theory of realism ‘must also explicitly designate and account for situations in which realism no longer exists, is no longer historically or formally possible; or on the other hand takes on unexpected new and transgressive forms’ (Jameson 1992: 167).

14 In his elegantly argued essay, ‘Jameson, Totality, and the Poststructuralist Critique’, Steven Best maintains that for ‘Lukács and Jameson alike, narrative is a fundamental expression and realization of the “aspiration to totality” (Lukács), a yearning that Jameson’s later work reconfigures as “cognitive mapping”’ (Best 1989: 343). In this context, see also the chapter ‘Marxism, Totality and the Politics of Difference’ in Homer (1998). In addition, see the chapter on Jameson’s Marxism and Form in Tally (2014).

15 In the present essay, I have concentrated on the dialectics of form and totality in Lukács. However, the dialectics of narrative and totality also is central to his thought, as Jameson has convincingly shown in Marxism and Form and ‘History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project’, in Jameson (2009). Another aspect which the present essay could not discuss in detail is the significance of universals, and of the category of universalism, for the later Lukács. Regarding Lukács’s ontology, Michael J. Thompson points out: ‘Lukács’ ontological theory provides us with a crucial way to find a concrete universal to which our theoretical and ethical categories can find reference, something that should be seen as an important antidote to the dilemmas of contemporary thought . . . In this sense, the search for some kind of universalism which can establish objective ethical categories can be seen as the high-point of critical thought since, if such categories could exist, we would be able to make concrete ethical judgments without any of the dangers of moral relativism’ (Thompson 2011: 229–230). Theorists as varied as Dewey, Derrida and Rorty have argued that the search for this kind of ‘universalism’ and for ‘objective ethical categories’ is damaging to the progress of mankind. In order to further illuminate Lukács’s contemporary significance it would be interesting to discuss the relation between his insistence on form, his attitude toward the idea of universalism in ethics, and his explanation of the significance of the category of ‘Besonderheit’ in aesthetics. In this context, see chapter 12, ‘Die Kategorie der Besonderheit,’ in Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, Vol. 2 (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1981), 180–251.

16 In this context, see the chapter ‘The Historical Novel Today, Or, Is It Still Possible?’ in Jameson (2013).