Date: Sat, 8 Mar 1997 11:37:13 -0500 (EST) From: Spoon Collective <spoons-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU> Subject: Re: BHA: truth (fwd) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 08 Mar 1997 10:14:43 -0500 (EST) From: MSPRINKER-AT-ccmail.sunysb.edu To: owner-bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU Subject: Re: BHA: truth State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355 Michael Sprinker Professor of English & Comp Lit Comparative Studies 516 632-9634 08-Mar-1997 10:01am EST FROM: MSPRINKER TO: shmage-AT-pipeline.com ( _owner-bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU ) Subject: Re: BHA: truth The Marx passage to which Shane refers comes, not in a letter to Engels, but at the end of the Introduction to the Grundrisse. Nor is it as silly as it's been made to sound. Marx's worry is perfectly reasonable--commonsensical, even--from the ponit of view of historical materialism: to wit, how is it that even though the mode of social being (which determines consciousness, according to Marx) that produced Greek epic and tragedy (for Marx, the slave mode of production) is now a thing of the past, we can still experience the pleasures offered by these works? If one believes in historical determination of consciousness, the question is a real one. Marx's answer, which is not entirely satisfactory, but neither is it just loopy, is that works of art possess a set of distinctive features, linked to fundamental human experiences of play, that make them continually available to different cultures and epochs. Marx was a faithful disciple of Weimar Classicism in this respect. What Marx might have said, in answer to his own question, was that the appreciation of Greek art that he, like so many of his generation, valued so highly was less a matter of anything intrinsic to the art than it was to do with a specific educational attainment that made these objects desirable for a particular class of people. After all, plenty of people around the world would not experience similar pleasure when viewing Greek art, either in Marx's day or our own. Realist aesthetic theory need not entail cultural chauvinism. Michael Sprinker --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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