Page 73 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

theoretically, with Zhdanovism. Yet there is evidence to suggest that
he arrived at a theory of realism both independently of, and prior to,
the Comintern. And Lukács’s position is never simply Zhdanovite:
for him the model for socialist realism is provided by the great bourgeois
realists, Tolstoy, Balzac, and Thomas Mann, not Zhdanov’s
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“revolutionary romantic” propaganda. Hence the political audacity
with which Lukács was to nominate Solzhenitsyn as of central
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significance to contemporary socialist realism. But hence, too, the
vigour with which Lukács prosecuted his own case against literary
modernism: “modernism leads not only to the destruction of traditional
literary forms”, he wrote, “it leads to the destruction of literature as
such”. 60
History and Class Consciousness exercised a considerable fascination
for the Frankfurt School (as it did also for Karl Mannheim). From
Lukács the School inherited a stress on the notion of totality, a rejection
of both science and scientific socialism as partial and detotalizing,
and a sense of the truth value of theory as related to its social rôle,
initially as theoretical companion to the working class, always as in
itself emancipatory. They inherited also Lukács’s quasi-Weberian notion
of reification. For Adorno and Horkheimer, capitalism is a fully
rationalized system of domination, a system whose inherent logic
tends towards fascism. Fascism is thus a culmination of the dehumanized
and positivistic, science and society unleashed by the Enlightenment:
“Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men [sic].
He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them”. The mass
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media—the culture industry, as they termed it—became central targets
for this critique. Art involves a necessary confrontation with already
established traditional styles, they argue, “inferior” work the practice
of mere imitation: “In the culture industry…imitation finally becomes
absolute. Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the latter’s
secret: obedience to social hierarchy”. The working class, which
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had appeared to the young Lukács as a prospective identical subject
and object of history, is thus transformed into a passive “mass”, the
object of systematic manipulation by the media.
For almost all the writers associated with the Frankfurt School,
modernist art and music came to represent key sites of resistance to
domination. In Benjamin, the connections are deliberately forged
between the cultural avant-garde on the one hand, and the new popular
media on the other, pitting the emancipatory potential of each against

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