Page 74 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

WESTERN MARXISM

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the bourgeois myth of the autonomous work of art. Adorno shared
many of Benjamin’s concerns, but viewed his antipathy to traditional
art and his corresponding enthusiasm for mass culture as essentially
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one-sided. Adorno, it is true, is neither simply a high modernist nor
simply hostile to mass culture. But it is very clear that modernism
appears to him as an adversarial culture of quite fundamental
importance, and that he can therefore have no sympathy at all for the
later Lukács’s nostalgia for realism. 65
The dispute between Lukácsian anti-modernism, Benjamin’s
enthusiastic popular modernism, and Adorno’s tortured and tortuously
pro-modernist dialectic, is perhaps the single most intellectually
intriguing incident in the history of Western Marxism. For all the
acrimony with which it was conducted, especially as between Lukács
and Adorno, it should be obvious that the entire debate rests upon the
shared assumption of an antithesis between culture (whether realist
or modernist) and mechanical (rationalized, reified and detotalized)
civilization. But where Marx had linked that antithesis to the critique
of ideology, and had aspired to its transcendence in the proletarian
revolution, both the later Lukács and Adorno remain content with its
reproduction in essentially unamended culturalist form. Benjamin
alone of the three, like that other enthusiastic popular modernist,
Leon Trotsky, had continued to aspire to a revolutionary politics
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that would be at once proletarian and avant-garde. Their respective
fates, Trotsky’s assassination by the Soviet secret service, and Benjamin’s
suicide after an unsuccessful attempt to escape into Spain from Nazi-
occupied France, both in 1940, tell us much about the ultimate destiny
of Western Marxism.
While Perry Anderson is clearly mistaken to suggest that Western
Marxism was born from a moment of failure (quite the contrary—it
was born from a moment of high revolutionary optimism), it is
nonetheless certainly true that it came eventually to be characterized
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by “a common and latent pessimism”. Hence the preoccupation
with the ways in which culture as ideology (reified thought/the culture
industry) functions so as to legitimate the capitalist system, and hence
too the growing scepticism as to the possibilities for successful working-
class opposition. This shift from an initial celebration of the
emancipatory potential of culture as human self activity, to a subsequent
recognition of the debilitating and disabling power of culture as ideology,
marks the historical trajectory of western Marxist thought from the

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