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. --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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