Page 22 - Cultural Theory

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••• Cultural Analysis in Marxist Humanism •••

him, of Kant – Lukács re-opened the whole question of the relationship between
knowledge and the nuomenal world of things-in-themselves.

Culture, Totality, and Reification

These philosophical considerations were put to work in a systematic examination of
the ideas of class consciousness and ideology. The orthodox Marxist view of base and
superstructure saw all artistic expressions as mere epiphenomena of an economic
base. Lukács rejected this, seeking to recognize the autonomy of cultural production
and all forms of social consciousness. This was combined with a reconsideration of
the role of Marxist parties in forging proletarian class consciousness. His key aim was
to develop a new philosophical and theoretical basis for what remained an essentially
Leninist view of politics.
The crucial idea in Marxism, Lukács argued, was not the idea of the base and the
superstructure, but that of the whole and its parts. The parts have always to be
grasped in relation to the whole or totality in which they are bound. The idea of the
totality is central to the dialectical method of thinking and is the core of what Lukács
took from Hegel. According to Hegel, the concepts used by people can provide only
a partial perspective on the world, and each partial perspective has to be seen as a
‘moment’ of a larger truth. Each particular point of view gives a limited and one-
sided picture, but the whole contains all of these limited representations of it and so
is superior to any of them considered separately. Partiality can be overcome through
the constant criticism – or ‘negation’ – of intellectual ideas, reconstructing them and
so moving them closer to an overall picture of the totality.
Lukács agreed that the meaning of all observed facts derives from the whole of
which they are mere parts and that each particular fact is an analytically isolated
aspect or moment of the whole. The process of relating part to whole is a process of
‘mediation’ (Mannheim, 1929), a creative act of ‘synthesis’. In historical study, ‘social
being’ is the relevant whole and is logically prior to the forms of consciousness and
social institutions that form its various parts. A social totality is, moreover, a dynamic
totality. It is constantly in process of change and development, and all social facts
and events must be seen in relation to the past, the present, and the future of the
social totality of which they are parts.
The ‘method of totality’ does not follow the natural science method followed in
positivism and orthodox Marxism. There is, as Dilthey and Rickert argued, a funda-
mental difference between the natural sciences and the historical sciences. With
Weber, Lukács saw values as the bases from which concepts are constructed in the
historical sciences. However, he held that all consciousness and knowledge is socially
located and that values, therefore, had to be related back to their social origins. From
Marx he took the idea of the centrality of class location, and concluded that all
knowledge of the social, historical world is constructed from the standpoint of par-
ticular class positions. There can be no ‘detached’ or external form of knowledge.
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