aesthetics
Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed t ...
based on, or derived from, the theories of
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
. It involves a
dialectical
Dialectic ( grc-gre, διαλεκτική, ''dialektikḗ''; related to dialogue; german: Dialektik), also known as the dialectical method, is a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing t ...
and
materialist
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds matter to be the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materiali ...
, or
dialectical materialist
Dialectical materialism is a philosophy of science, history, and nature developed in Europe and based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxist dialectics, as a materialist philosophy, emphasizes the importance of real-world co ...
, approach to the application of
Marxism
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
to the cultural sphere, specifically areas related to taste such as art, beauty, and so forth. Marxists believe that economic and social conditions, and especially the class relations that derive from them, affect every aspect of an individual's life, from religious beliefs to legal systems to cultural frameworks. From one classic Marxist point of view, the role of art is not only to represent such conditions truthfully, but also to seek to improve them (social/socialist realism); however, this is a contentious interpretation of the limited but significant writing by Marx and Engels on art and especially on aesthetics. For instance,
Nikolay Chernyshevsky
Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky ( – ) was a Russian literary and social critic, journalist, novelist, democrat, and socialist philosopher, often identified as a utopian socialist and leading theoretician of Russian nihilism. He was ...
, who greatly influenced the art of the early
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
, followed the secular humanism of
Ludwig Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (; 28 July 1804 – 13 September 1872) was a German anthropologist and philosopher, best known for his book '' The Essence of Christianity'', which provided a critique of Christianity that strongly influenced gene ...
more than he followed Marx.
Marxist aesthetics overlaps with the Marxist theory of art. It is particularly concerned with art practice, with the prescribing of artistic standards that are deemed socially beneficial. This materialist and socialist orientation may be seen to invoke the traditional aims of scientific inquiry and the scientific method.
Some notable Marxist aestheticians of varying tendencies include
Anatoly Lunacharsky
Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (russian: Анато́лий Васи́льевич Лунача́рский) (born Anatoly Aleksandrovich Antonov, – 26 December 1933) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and the first Bolshevik Soviet People ...
,
Andrei Zhdanov
Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov ( rus, Андре́й Алекса́ндрович Жда́нов, p=ɐnˈdrej ɐlʲɪˈksandrəvʲɪtɕ ˈʐdanəf, links=yes; – 31 August 1948) was a Soviet politician and cultural ideologist. After World War ...
,
Mikhail Lifshitz
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Lifshitz (russian: Михаи́л Алекса́ндрович Ли́фшиц; 23 July 1905 in Melitopol (Taurida Governorate, now Zaporizhzhia Oblast of Ukraine) – 20 September 1983 in Moscow) was a Soviet Marxian litera ...
,
William Morris
William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was a British textile designer, poet, artist, novelist, architectural conservationist, printer, translator and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement. He w ...
Bertolt Brecht
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a p ...
,
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse (; ; July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a German-American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt University ...
,
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.
An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish ...
,
Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Francesco Gramsci ( , , ; 22 January 1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, linguist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a fo ...
,
Georg Lukács
Georg may refer to:
* ''Georg'' (film), 1997
* Georg (musical), Estonian musical
* Georg (given name)
* Georg (surname)
* , a Kriegsmarine coastal tanker
See also
* George (disambiguation)
{{disambiguation ...
,
Terry Eagleton
Terence Francis Eagleton (born 22 February 1943) is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.
Eagleton has published over forty books, ...
,
Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson (born April 14, 1934) is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jam ...
,
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser (, ; ; 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.
Althusser ...
,
Jacques Rancière
Jacques Rancière (; born 10 June 1940) is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII: Vincennes—Saint-Denis. After co-authoring ...
Pierre Macherey
Pierre Macherey (; born 17 February 1938, Belfort) is a French Marxist philosopher and literary critic at the University of Lille Nord de France. A former student of Louis Althusser and collaborator on the influential volume ''Reading Capital'' ...
,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty. (; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest an ...
and
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contrib ...
.
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western pop ...
must also be mentioned here.
Not all of these figures are solely concerned with aesthetics: in many cases, Marxist aesthetics forms only an important branch of their work, depending on how one defines the term. For example, a Marxist aesthetic may be latent in Brecht's work, but he formulated his own distinct theory of art and its social purpose.
One of the chief concerns of Marxist aesthetics is to unite Marx and Engels’ social and economic theory, or theory of the social ''base'', to the domain of art and culture, the ''superstructure''. These two terms, base and superstructure, became an important dichotomy in ''
The German Ideology
''The German Ideology'' (German: ''Die deutsche Ideologie'', sometimes written as ''A Critique of the German Ideology'') is a set of manuscripts originally written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1846. Marx and Engels ...
'' (1846), which however was not published during their lifetimes. Likewise Marx's early ''
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
The ''Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844'' (german: Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844), also referred to as the ''Paris Manuscripts'' (') or as the ''1844 Manuscripts'', are a series of notes written between Apri ...
'', which, though widely regarded as important for treating the themes of sensuousness and alienation, first appeared only in 1932 (the slated 1846 publication was canceled) and in English only in 1959. The manuscripts were therefore unknown to art theorists during, for instance, the often antagonistic debates on art in the early Soviet Union between the constructivist avant garde and the proponents of
socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of idealized realistic art that was developed in the Soviet Union and was the official style in that country between 1932 and 1988, as well as in other socialist countries after World War II. Socialist realism is ch ...
. The controversy over the unusual design of the original documents adds another twist.
Many theorists touch upon important themes of Marxist aesthetics without strictly being Marxist aestheticians,
Joel Kovel
Joel Stephen Kovel (August 27, 1936 – April 30, 2018) was an American scholar and author known as a founder of eco-socialism. Kovel became a psychoanalyst, but he abandoned psychoanalysis in 1985.
Background
Kovel was born on August 27, 19 ...
, for instance, has extended the concepts of Marxian ecology which deeply implicates aesthetics. He is also a part of the struggle to bridge the space between Marx and
Freud
Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts i ...
, which has Marxist aesthetics as a central concern. Current themes within the field include research on the effect of
mass-produced
Mass production, also known as flow production or continuous production, is the production of substantial amounts of standardized products in a constant flow, including and especially on assembly lines. Together with job production and ba ...
industrial materials on the sensed environment, such as paints and colors.Singh, Iona. (2007) "Color, Facture, Art and Design." ''Capitalism Nature Socialism'' 18.1: 64-80. A strong current within the field involves linguistics and semiotics, and arguments over structuralism and post-structuralism, modernism and post-modernism, as well as feminist theory.
Visual artists, as diverse as
Isaak Brodsky
Isaak Izrailevich Brodsky (russian: Исаак Израилевич Бродский; uk, Іса́к Ізраїльович Бро́дський, – 14 August 1939) was a Soviet painter whose work provided a blueprint for the art movem ...
or
Diego Rivera
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, known as Diego Rivera (; December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957), was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the ...
Lyubov Popova
Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova (russian: Любо́вь Серге́евна Попо́ва; April 24, 1889 – May 25, 1924) was a Russian-Soviet avant-garde artist, painter and designer.
Early life
Popova was born in Ivanovskoe, near Moscow, to t ...
, for example, for whom written theory is secondary, nevertheless may be said to be connected to Marxist aesthetics through their production of art, without necessarily declaring themselves aestheticians or Marxists in writing. Likewise, in this spirit
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is ...
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (russian: Сергей Михайлович Эйзенштейн, p=sʲɪrˈɡʲej mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪtɕ ɪjzʲɪnˈʂtʲejn, 2=Sergey Mikhaylovich Eyzenshteyn; 11 February 1948) was a Soviet film director, scree ...
,
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter, known for his innovative work in film, radio and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential f ...
,
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard ( , ; ; 3 December 193013 September 2022) was a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as Fran ...
,
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...
,
Richard Paul Lohse
Richard Paul Lohse (September 13, 1902 – September 16, 1988) was a Swiss painter and graphic artist and one of the main representatives of the concrete and constructive art movements.
Lohse was born in Zürich in 1902. His wish to study in Pa ...
, for example. Such a view could apply to many visual and other artists in many fields, even those who have no apparent and/or voiced connection to Marxist politics or even those ostensibly opposed; in this respect consider
Anton Webern
Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 188315 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern (), was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and stead ...
.
Probably it would be fair to say that two of the most influential writings in Marxist aesthetics in recent times, and apart from Marx himself and Lukacs, have been Walter Benjamin's essay ''
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), by Walter Benjamin, is an essay of cultural criticism which proposes and explains that mechanical reproduction devalues the ''aura'' (uniqueness) of an ''objet d'art''. That in the age ...
'', and Herbert Marcuse's '' One-Dimensional Man''. Louis Althusser has also contributed some small but significant essays on art and his theory of ideology also impacts in this area ("
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)" (French: "Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d'État (Notes pour une recherche)") is an essay by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. First published in 197 ...
").
The field remains polemical, with camps of modernists, post modernists, anti modernists, the avant garde, constructivists, and socialist realists all referencing back to an ostensible Marxist aesthetic theory that would underpin their art practices by grounding an art theory.
See also
*
Marxist literary criticism
Marxism was introduced by Karl Marx. Most Marxist critics who were writing in what could chronologically be specified as the early period of Marxist literary criticism, subscribed to what has come to be called "vulgar Marxism." In this thinkin ...
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.
An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish ...
, Verso Books, 2003, .
* ''Aesthetics and Politics: Debates Between Bloch, Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno''. 1980. Trans. ed. Ronald Taylor. London: Verso. .
* Adorno, Theodor W. 2004. ''Aesthetic Theory''. London: Continuum. .
* Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. ''Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic''. Ed. and trans. John Willett. British edition. London: Methuen. . USA edition. New York: Hill and Wang. .
* ---. 2000a. ''Brecht on Film and Radio''. Ed. and trans. Marc Silberman. British edition. London: Methuen. .
* ---. 2003a. ''Brecht on Art and Politics''. Ed. and trans. Thomas Kuhn and Steve Giles. British edition. London: Methuen. .
* Daly, Macdonald. ''A Primer in Marxist Aesthetics''. London: Zoilus Press, 1999.
*
Eagleton, Terry
Terence Francis Eagleton (born 22 February 1943) is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.
Eagleton has published over forty book ...
. 1990. ''The Ideology of the Aesthetic''. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. .
* Marcuse, Herbert. 1978. ''The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics''. Trans. Herbert Marcuse and Erica Sherover. Boston: Beacon Press.
*
Marx, Karl
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...