Indra Ter
Introduction
Marxian dialectic method has wider appeal and far-reaching implications for neo-Marxists, post-Marxists, critical theorists and scholars at large. Marx’s method, known as dialectical method or historical materialism, has had further development in the hands of later generation of philosophers like Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Slavoj Žižek, and Paulo Freire. Such dialectical approaches can be noticed in different arenas of critical inquiry such as critical pedagogy, post-colonial studies, gender studies, politics and philosophy itself. The dialectic method involves “intercourse” or interplay between two opposing forces, usually known as thesis and antithesis. Although this method comes from W.G.F. Hegel, Marx perfected it on material grounds. Marx undertook a symptomatic reading of Hegel’s works in light of his own writings and brought the latter’s ideas to the study of ‘man’ and his material conditions. Marx claimed that his ideas sprouted from the earth and transcended to heaven in contrast with Hegel’s whose ideas supposedly engendered from heaven – Hegel based his ideas on consciousness that is directly bestowed onto man by God. On the contrary, Marx asserted that consciousness does not derive as an a priori system from some unknown entity or abstraction like God, but it directly results from the material experiences of man. In Marx, thus, God does not make man, instead, man makes God, as a direct implication from his statement “Man makes religion, religion does not make the man” (Marx, 1970, p. 1).
Although Marxist philosophy is largely considered as a political or sociological philosophy, it is, in essence, a philosophy of ‘man’. Marx saw a diseased condition of man’s spirit (essence) wrought by modern capitalist industry and thought that someone needed to rectify it. While the working-class people were, Marx noticed, endlessly enslaved to their material conditions that they cannot escape from because the idea of escaping such material conditions costs them their own existence as they are tied to the material activity as a means of their subsistence, the capitalist class or bourgeoisie were also suffering from a different kind of disease – the disease of insatiable greed. Thus, capitalism was flatulently symptomatic and it would lead to a cataclysm sooner or later. Therefore, man’s condition needed to be changed, capitalism be overthrown as soon as possible and a new social order in line with socialism needed to be established. Thus, Marx comes up with an emancipation agenda, an agenda of change: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx & Engels, 1845, p. 5).
Marx is known as a philosopher of freedom (Walicki, 1988) in that he sought to bring real freedom for ‘man’ liberating him from his enslaved condition caused by the capitalist mode of production. He envisioned a more or less perfected world, a utopia or a paradise, as it were, where class interests and class conflicts would have already dissolved as the edifices of capitalism crumble and man is liberated from the bondage of labor; where people can intently engage in the social production of their choice (as there would be no provision for private property but only social property) thus bringing abundance and economic growth; where man would have plenty of leisure for art and creativity (akin to that of the Classical Greek period); and where man would reawaken into a new kind of enlightenment, not of spirit but of consciousness. Marx termed this type of new social order as socialism or communism, but such socialism or communism is not an end in itself: Rather it is a means to an end. It is a means for the creative realization of man’s self through engaging in different types of creative activities of his choice and at his disposal.
Marxian Aesthetics
Although Marx had an inherent inclination towards art and aesthetics and he together with Engels produced some discrete set of writings on art and aesthetics — for example, (Marx & Engels, 1978) – he did not formulate a consolidated theory on aesthetics such as nature, form, and process of aesthetics. However, Marian theory of historical materialism is supposed to have an inherent aesthetic dimension (Marx & Engels, 1978). Marxian aesthetic dimension is often associated with his voice for freedom in creative activities. His popular statement on the kind of freedom he envisaged for creative artist articulates his deep sensibilities on the value of artistic creation without being enslaved to the creative field itself: “… to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” (Marx & Engels, 1845, p. 47). By implication, man must be free to choose his life-activity consciously which also includes creative activity (Marx & Engels, 1978). In this respect, Tucker (1961) argues that Marx’s original purpose was ‘transformation of economics into aesthetics’ through liberating man to his true nature as a creative artist rather than “an enslaved producer”.
Art has a powerful influence on social development. In this respect, Scanlan (1976) proposes three interconnected themes on the perception of art: a) economic determinism or the view that societies are controlled by economic forces where art has no major influence; b) aesthetic partisanship, or the view that creative artists are imbued with the power and agency to represent particular class interests in art; and, c) aesthetic historicism, or the view that art should only be judged by the aesthetic values of the age and as such, it has no “historical applicability”. Out of the three types of perceptions on art, Marxian aesthetics heavily assimilates the perception of ‘aesthetic partisanship’. According to Marx, art upholds and represents the ruling class ideology, as such in the bourgeois society, art tends to articulate bourgeois values and portrays their culture as a refined and sophisticated culture, and thus contributes to solidifying the superstructure. Therefore, Marx’s scheme of things orients towards counterattacking bourgeois aesthetic paradigm with proletariat aesthetic paradigm by bringing in such polemic representations and literary texts that serve two conspicuous functions: a) polemizing bourgeois values and bourgeois culture through dismantling the inherent self-interested class ideology and capitalist lip service; and b) raising the consciousness of the oppressed through bringing to sight/ consciousness their alienated conditions. These two schemes of Marx have been more comprehensively capitalized on by later generation of neo-Marxists.
Neo-Marxian Approaches
On average, one man out of six studies Marxism with three apparent purposes: to follow, to modify and to oppose (Poudel, 2019). Neo-Marxists have to a great extent modified Marxism rather than opposed and have further elaborated the cross-currents of classical Marxian aesthetics by critically engaging in the fundamental concepts of Marxism in the light of Freudian psychoanalysis. In this respect, the seminal contributions of notable neo-Marxists like Gramsci, Althusser, Žižek, Freire and bell hooks are worth discussion.
While Marx proposes the idea that the base or the material reality determines the superstructure and superstructure influences the base, Gramsci posits that superstructure is in a dialectic relationship with the base, rather than being simply influenced by it (Giray, 2013). Gramsci also brings into notice the important concept of hegemony as soft domination realized through general consent of people. Gramsci sees the State as comprising political society and civil society (Gramsci, 2004). Both of these societies function differently to maintain the ideology of the ruling class. The political society forges consent through coercion while the civil society uses ideological manipulation (hegemony) in favour of the ruling class to induce consent from the ruled. Thus, the problem of the capitalist society lies in State apparatus and civil society. Gramsci proposes a strategy of counter-attacking the hegemonic relations by bringing into force counter-hegemonic apparatus at the level of civil society through education. Althusser also brings similar concepts of Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) and Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) that State and the few chosen individuals (Despots and priests) use to create illusionary ideological reality. In his essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Althusser (2004) brings into light his theory of ideology in terms of two theses: a) Ideology creates an imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, and b) Ideology does have a material existence (Althusser, 2004, pp. 693–695). Althusser (2004) posits that only scientific knowledge remains unaffected by such imaginary ideological relationship. Althusser further argues that although individuals do know about this imaginary/ illusionary manifestation of ideological relationships which are inserted into their material existence prior to their knowledge and even prior to their birth and governed by material rituals thus already rendering them into mere subjects (they are subjected to ideology), they can do nothing to liberate themselves from such imaginary ideological relationships. That is, there is no escape from the ideological relationships imposed upon ‘subjects’, for their own subjectivity is predisposed. Thus, “there is no practice except by and in an ideology” and “there is no ideology except for subjects and by subjects” (Althusser, 2004). Thus, according to Althusser (2004), ‘subject’ is the interpellation inscribed in the very existence of the individuals by ideology. Thus, Althusser reaches the conclusion that man is an ideological animal by nature (Althusser, 2004).
Starting with the analysis of the notion of symptom in Marxist theory as pronounced by Lacan, Žižek (2008) goes on to demonstrate the homological relationship between Freudian analysis of dream and Marx’s analysis of the commodity. Žižek proposes that this homologic relationship rests on the analogous type of form and content relationship between the manifest text of the dream and the latent dream content, and also between materials of production (resources) and value created in the commodity. In both cases, content poses a problem because it manifests in the form in subtle relations. By the same token, the dream-work that is at work in translating the latent thought into the manifest dream is in homologous relationship with the labour that is expended for a fixed amount of labour time in translating the resources of production into a commodity of value. Marx was concerned with how a worker expends his physical labour into generating value in the commodity although the value is also a subject to comparison among identical commodities. At any rate, this translation of resources of production into a commodity of value is a secret, an intangible feat that the worker undertakes. Marx ascribed it to certain attribute in the labour itself which he termed fetishism of commodity. By the same token, Freud was concerned with understanding how the latent thought in the subconscious gets translated into a symbolic dream through passing through a censorship mechanism that he called ‘repressive mechanism’. This process is as mysterious as the process of commodification. In both processes, the subconscious of the individual is alienated from the product.
Freire’s contribution cannot be forgotten when we talk about neo-Marxism. Freire argues that Marxism had missed in developing a discourse on the subjectivity and pedagogical dimensions of the oppressed which are pre-requisite for the emancipation of the oppressed through education (Kellner, 2000). Freire proposed that the educator is an expert dialectician and that both the oppressed and the oppressor must enter into the dialectic interaction with the educator in order to transform their consciousness from magical to naïve to critical consciousness through a process Freire called conscientiziaco or consciousness raising. Action, reflection, and praxis are vital in this process of conscientization.
In her article ‘Confronting Class in the Classroom’, hooks (1994) argues how the practices like class domination and bourgeois ideology are practiced in subtler ways inside classrooms and comes up with a powerful polemic discourse to attack class-engendered ideology. As a neo-Marxian critic of class ideology, hooks justifies the need for persistent dialectical interactions on otherwise rarely talked issues of class ideology and gender discrimination.
The implication of Marxian Aesthetics in Classrooms of High School and Above
Marxian aesthetics has wide-ranging implications on education and pedagogical practices. First and foremost, in my personal viewpoint, is that education should aim to liberate human beings from their material conditions of existence that is the sole cause of alienation and from psychological turmoil, thereby giving them a full sense of freedom and enlightenment (consciousness) to act freely in the material world so that they can realize their full potential and engage in creativity and social production, assimilating their roles as creative agents of change in the world.
The second educational implication is that education should contribute towards creating a socialist society if not communist – for its political import – based on the principles of universal justice and democratic values (although Marx himself made no endeavours towards incorporating the principles of liberal democracy in his theory). Marx called his utopian world a paradise because therein each and every individual would enjoy full freedom to engage either in aesthetic activities or in social production, for there will be no hierarchies, no ideologies, no private properties, and most importantly no alienation and no domination. Such utopian world may not be possible in this material world, but education should uphold its ideal values. Combining these two Marxist aims of education, we can say that education aims to create a fully developed man (complete man) to function in a fully developed world. This aim of education may sound over-ambitious, but at any rate, as most educationists believe, the sole aim of education is to achieve the first-rate in education and prepare a whole man or complete man.
The third pedagogical implication of Marxian philosophy concerns with the study and discussion of literary works like fiction and poetry not so much in terms of its universal features and values but rather in terms of the underlying ideologies and local concerns. By the same token, literary texts can also be critiqued from other critical lenses such as psychoanalytical, feminist, gender, politics, and critical perspective. Likewise, in line with Freirean critical pedagogy, which also uses Marxian method of dialectic, Henry A, Giroux, Michael W. Apple, Peter McLaren among others have consolidated new foundations of critical pedagogy. Furthermore, postmodern philosophies like deconstruction, post-structuralism, feminism, gender studies, queer theories and the like also take the point of departure in Marxian dialectic method and Marxian aesthetics.
Conclusion
Coming to the postmodern age, Marxian aesthetics and dialectic theory have been reconfigured by later generation of neo-Marxists to make it more befitting to the present context and glocal realities. The beauty of Marxian theory lies in its flexibility and adaptability in varied contexts. Educators have also exploited this beauty of Marxian aesthetics at the policy level as well as in framing pedagogical approaches.
References
Althusser L. (2004). Hegemony. In J. Rivkin & M. Ryan (Eds.), Literary theory: An anthology (2nd ed., p. 693 – 695). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Giray, G. (2013). FALL 2013 Marx and Gramsci, Base and Superstructure, 1–10.
Gramsci, A. (2004). Hegemony. In J. Rivkin & M. Ryan (Eds.), Literay theory: An anthology (2nd ed., p. 673). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Hooks, B. (1994). Confronting Class in the Classroom. Retrieved from http://elearning.nou.edu.np/pluginfile.php/20023/mod_label/intro/bell%20hooks%20…Confronting%20Class%20in%20the%20Classroom.pdf
Kellner, D. (2000). From Classical Marxism to Critical Pedagogy. Retrieved from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/
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Poudel, R. C. (2019). On Karl Marx. Retrieved from http://elearning.nou.edu.np/my/
Scanlan, J. P. (1976). The impossibility of a uniquely authentic Marxist aesthetics. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 16(2), 128–136. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/16.2.128
Tucker, R. C. (1961). Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. Universal Library.
Walicki, A. (1988). Karl Marx as a philosopher of freedom. Critical Review (Vol. 2). https://doi.org/10.1080/08913818808459537
Žižek, S. (2008). The Sublime Object of Ideology. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/5786988/The_Sublime_Object_of_Ideology_-_Slavoj_Zizek
[Indra Ter, MPhil in English Education, is an educator, translator and researcher from Kanchanpur District, Nepal.]