File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1998/postcolonial.9804, message 35


Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 12:51:40 -0400
From: Sam Durrant <4srd1-AT-qlink.queensu.ca>
Subject: critical realism


I've forgotten who it was who was interested in the re-emergence of
critical realism.  No doubt the thread never got taken up because the
question seemed purely aesthetic.  I tried to indicate the ideological
dimension to the question with some no doubt not-very-helpful notes on the
Lukacs/Adorno debate.  I should instead have quoted from Jameson's
conclusion to the _Aesthetics and Politics_ book (NLB, 1977), in which he
meditates on what we can salvage from the Frankfurt school's debate about
realism/modernism.
	"In these circumstances [those of la societé de consommation] there
is some question whether the ultimate renewal of modernism, the final
dialectical subversion of the now automatized conventions of an aesthetics
of perceptual revolution, might not simply be . . . realism itself!  For
when modernism and its accompanying techniques of 'estrangement' have
become the dominant style whereby the consumer is reconciled with
capitalism, the habit of fragmentation itself needs to be 'estranged' and
corrected by a more totalizing way of viewing phenomena.  In an unexpected
dénouement, it may be Lukacs--wrong as he may have been in the 1930s--who
has some provisional last word for us today" (212).

One footnote: what Jameson has in mind by "a more totalizing way of viewing
things" is the rendering visible of society as a totality,  as a struggle
between classes.  Jameson's essay was written in 1977--maybe now we would
want to expand the Marxist concept of totality: we would then be looking
for a critical realism that would reveal the struggle between races,
classes, genders, sexualities etc.  The question would then be to what
extent do we need to think of these struggles in terms of a totality at
all.  People like Robert Young, influenced by the "poststructuralist"
critique of Marxism, would say we have to stop thinking in terms of a
totality.  But then how do you make sense of all these struggles? Is it
still possible to think in terms of a revolution that would not be
piecemeal, fragmented and ultimately contradictory and self-defeating?
Isn't postcolonialism--indexed as it is towards the idea of a truly
postcolonial future--precisely this attempt to unify (without conflating),
to establish solidarity between, these various struggles and thus to
reinvent the Marxist concept of totality?
Sam.


Sam Durrant
PhD candidate,
English Dept.,
Queen's University,
Kingston, Ontario.




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