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Georg
Lukacs (1885-1971) is an important 20th century philosopher
and literary critic and one of the major Marxist theoreticians.
Many see him as the most important and influential
Marxist philosopher of the 20th century. But interest
in his writings has almost entirely disappeared. Four
years ago, I sought to purchase in Berlin the German
edition of Lukacs’s most important works, like
History and Class Consciousness, but was unable
to find them in any bookstores, new or second hand.
Translations of his books in English or French are
nowadays often hard to find or out of print.
Interest
in Lukacs’s work seems to have disappeared after
the collapse of really existing socialism. In spite
of its importance, few scholars today devote articles
or books and conferences to the study of Lukacs’s
thought. The fact that today you can not even find
Lukacs’s books in the bookstores of his hometown
of Budapest prompted the editor of this collection
of interviews to ask a number of theorists that were
influenced by Lukacs what relevance his thought had
“after communism”. Ten people are interviewed
in this collection. The majority of them are literary
critics or theorists, only two are political theorists.
The interviews are of uneven interest. The best parts
of the book are the interviews with Frederic Jameson,
Etienne Balibar, Michael Lowy and Terry Eagleton,
because all of them have a sophisticated understanding
of Marxism and have engaged with Lukacs’s thought
over the years. In the case of Jameson and Eagleton,
one also has to add their brilliant insights into
aesthetics and postmodernity. George Steiner is particularly
interesting on Lukacs’s literary criticism, and
Roberto Schwarz is to be welcomed for his analysis
of Lukacs from a “third world” and “postcolonial”
point of view.
If
Georg Lukacs is going to be remembered for one book,
it will be History and Class Consciousness
(1923). It was an attempt to recast Marxism conceptually
in Hegelian terms, with the proletariat playing the
role of the Absolute Spirit, as the subject-object
of history. As Jameson puts it, History and Class
Consciousness was “a very great and creative
conceptual leap” on Lukacs’ part. Written
in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, what remains
of the book “after communism”? Michael Lowy
points that the book has “certain methodological,
theoretical and philosophical gains that remain useful
today”. Lukacs’s definition of Marxism as
being not just an assortment of dogmas, but as being
first of all a method is an idea “which seems
altogether profound” for Lowy. This is exactly
what permits the assurance of the continuity of Marxism
beyond the breakdown of a series of political and
ideological structures without touching the profound
significance of the method. Lowy adds that the way
in which Lukacs defines his method with the help of
the category of totality “remains entirely valid
as a procedure to follow toward the understanding
of how to act.” And certain of his analysis in
the book such as the one of reification “retain
all of their value.” (19-20) Lukacs’s analysis
of reification is probably his most significant contribution.
For
Balibar, what is “extraordinary” about Lukacs,
is that he was one of the few Marxist philosophers,
who starting from Marx’s chapter on “The
Fetishism of the Commodity” in Capital,
“really added something to Marx’s views”.
First of all, he invented the notion of reification
(Verdinglichung) which cannot be found directly in
Marx. Reification refers to the process through which
the exchange of the products on the labour market
leads to the transformation of social relations among
human beings into apparently natural relations among
things. Secondly, he generalised the notion of fetishism,
which remained in Marx a partial moment in the description
of capitalism into a global instrument of explanation
of bourgeois society. The concept of fetishism is
really crucial and can be developed in different directions.
Balibar believes that “Lukacs chose, in a very
powerful manner, one of the possible directions, but
there is another direction which you can take, which
is the direction of symbolic structures. That is an
alternative to Lukacs, so to speak.” (119-120)
There
seems to be a consensus among those interviewed that
Lukacs’s analysis of reification has not been
exhausted at all, given the fact that the whole of
contemporary society turns around commodity fetishism,
but it is surprising that none of them discuss Lukacs’s
own 1967 self-criticism for failing to distinguish
between the process of reification and objectification.
The latter is the inevitable process by which people
objectify themselves in material objects and related
patterns of social organisation, the former a form
of alienation. It is necessary to make such distinction,
because only in certain forms of society is there
reification of external objects. And without this
distinction, it means that de-reification will imply
that there are no objects, material or social. Also,
none of those interviewed pointed out the problems
raised by presenting reification as the master principle
which characterises capitalist society, in the absence
of Lukacs developing a theory of the structure of
the capitalist mode of production, providing no systematic
analysis of labour, of the links between social relations
of production and reified exchange relations, and
of the connection between those and the proletariat
as a revolutionary class.
Lukacs
is also famous for his contribution to Marxist aesthetics
in general, and literature in particular. Although
he clearly distanced himself from so-called “socialist
realism”, Lukacs’s advocacy of realism in
aesthetics has not been very popular and has been
much criticised. Lukacs is accused of making a fetish
of one historically relative form, that of 19th century
realist fiction (the novels of Balzac in particular),
and of then dogmatically demanding that all other
art should conform to this paradigm. Ernst Bloch and
Bertolt Brecht already criticised Lukacs in the 1930s
for this unhistorical approach: such dogmatic/normative
aesthetics ignore the historical basis of form. By
demanding to recreate past forms rather than create
new ones, Lukacs is blind to the best of modern literature.
Terry Eagleton is “very suspicious of general
doctrines of realism”, that there should be something
either inherently progressive or reactionary about
realism, and argues for “a much more conjunctural
estimation of literary forms.” (131-132) For
example, to Adorno the idea of realism today was ridiculous,
but one has to remember the revolutionary effect that
realism must have had when it first appeared. The
Brazilian intellectual Roberto Schwarz argues that
if there are uses for the Lukacsean concepts, one
must always be careful to remember to use them “differentially”.
(189) Lukacs put together a model for the European
history of ideas and for the European history of the
novel, but this construction might be inadequate for
Latin American realities. One “cannot take his
outline and apply it to Brazilian reality in the same
way you can in Europe.” (181)
Though
he is far from being uncritical, Frederic Jameson
offers a very interesting defence of Lukacs’s
advocacy of realism -something quite unusual as very
few today defend Lukacsean realism. For him, Lukacs
“is using that nineteenth century moment to construct
a model of a more general historical situation in
which an opening to the social totality is possible
and a kind of narration is possible which solves some
of the problems of the modernist crisis of representation.”
(81) If this reading of Lukacs is adopted, “then
we are talking about the way in which a certain kind
of narrative might have as its vocation what I would
call a “cognitive mapping” of the social
totality; and in that case, if one want to go on using
that word, one has a notion of realism which is much
broader and that might include a lot of Third World
writing today or “magic realism” and would
not limit us to the older, very estimable realist
models of the classic nineteenth century novel, which
pretty clearly are not suitable for postcontemporary
conditions.”(82)
As
a literary critic, Lukacs wrote principally on 19th
century literature, mainly French, German and Russian.
Balzac, Zola, Walter Scott, Tolstoy, Gorky and Thomas
Mann were some of the authors he wrote most extensively
about. Roberto Schwarz points that whatever the rigidity
of Lukacs’s aesthetic conceptions, “his
good pieces of criticism do not suffer from this abstract
normativity.” (193) Balzac was one of the authors
Lukacs was most fond of. In particular George Steiner
brands as “an insight of genius” (62) Lukacs’s
distinction between realism and naturalism. His essay
“Erzahlen oder Beschreiben?” (Narrate or
Describe?) is concerned with both the form of Balzac
and Zola’s writing as well as its content. Lukacs
is impressed by the ability of Balzac’s narrative
to give the reader a total picture of the world, whereas
Zola’s “naturalism” is a distortion
of realism because the author’s descriptions
sort of dissolve reality and don’t get the reader
to see the complications of society the way Balzac’s
realism make you see everything. “The Historical
Novel” is another work of Lukacs that is highly
regarded. George Steiner calls it “a masterpiece”,
due to Lukacs “comparative approach to literary
criticism, the enormous literacy, the range of reading,
the range of awareness and of reference.” (61)
Frederic Jameson is also convinced that in this postmodern
age in which there is again a great plethora of historical
representations (for example in what the author called
“nostalgia films”) “Lukacs’s analysis,
which obviously bears on very different objects from
ours, that we could not think of reviving, still has
much to say and maybe much new to say.” (77)
If
Lukacs wrote very competently on 19th century literature,
beyond that period his views are quite problematic.
Lukacs’s advocacy of realism lead him to attack
modernism, and his positions on Joyce or Kafka are
seen as discredited today. For Lukacs, the choice
was clear: “Kafka or Thomas Mann”. For Steiner
Lukacs’ lack of appreciation of modernist writers
has little to do with aesthetics: “He felt that
they were dwelling on defeat and on dirt. And this
has nothing to do with literary theory whatsoever.
This is an ethical prejudice.” (72) However,
Jameson asks for more prudence. In our postmodern
age, we are distant enough that we can be less passionate
about the modernism debate, and “entertain a
suspension of disbelief in weighing some of Lukacs’s
thoughts on the matter.” (87) Although Eagleton
rates Lukacs’ literary criticism “very highly”,
he thinks that “one of the limitations of his
literary criticism is a certain repetitiveness”.
(149) Also for Schwarz, if Lukacs “is very good
on composition but not on prose.” (195) One must
look at prose, in particular in modern literature
where everything goes on in the writing itself, to
a certain degree at the expense of action.
The
main weakness of the collection is that a good number
of Lukacs’s major works are not discussed. For
example his last - but very important- work The
Ontology of Social Being is not even mentioned.
Nor is his monumental The Specificity of the Aesthetic.
And his project for an ethic is ignored. The problem
is that works written by Lukacs during his last period
have received little international coverage. His Ontology
for instance has only been partially translated into
English, and no translation of The Specificity
of the Aesthetic is available. This means that
outside those able to read German and Hungarian, we
will only have a partial reception of Lukacs’s
thought. One can only hope that sometime there will
be a revival of interest in it. The collection of
interviews is also weakened by the fact that no thinkers
associated with the so-called “Budapest School”,
students of Lukacs like Istvan Meszaros, Agnes Heller
or Gyorgy Markus, were interviewed. They would have
brought a significant contribution to the debate.
The fact that there were only one or two philosophers
or political theorists interviewed in this collection
also limits the discussion of the properly philosophical
- as opposed to literary - contributions made by Lukacs.
Finally, the lack of sympathy for, and the lack of
understanding of Marxism both as theory and practice
by the interviewer limits the pertinence of questions
asked. But the book has nevertheless the immense merit
of discussing the relevance and stressing the importance
of Lukacs’s thought in this postcommunist age
where his thinking has been buried.
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