PETER ZUSI

                            ECHOES OF THE EPOCHAL:  HISTORICISM AND THE REALISM DEBATE

1. The Present "As It Really Is"

FEW AESTHETIC CONFLICTS of the past century appear as stubbornly irresolvable as the "realism debate" that unfolded among Marxist critics and philosophers in the 1930s.  The vast differences in the aesthetic assumptions and artistic products defended on each side of the debate seem to admit no theoretical reconciliation. Worse yet, it is not always clear whether the insistent attempts to hash out these differences were even enlightening. At times the debate appears as a grand drama touching on the essential issues of modern aesthetics, while at other times it appears mired in arguments whose abstraction is reminiscent of the scholastic realism debates of the fourteenth century.  Indeed, the ambiguity about what precisely was at stake sometimes lends the twentieth-century realism debate the appearance of a literary-theoretical feud between modernist Montagues and card-carrying Capulets.

This impression is heightened by the sense of urgency saturating these exchanges —the sense that it was not only possible but even crucial to resolve these issues and demonstrate the error of the opposing camp. More was at stake than aesthetic method. To antagonists in the debate, the other side did not merely produce "bad art" (bad art rarely causes people to feel so threatened); rather, it promoted fundamentally false images. Thus, Fredric Jameson has described Georg Lukács’s concept of decadence as

the equivalent in the aesthetic realm of that of "false consciousness" in the domain of traditional ideological analysis. Both suffer from the same defect: the common presupposition that in the world of culture and society such a thing as pure error is possible. They imply, in other words, that works of art or systems of philosophy are conceivable which have no content, and are therefore to be denounced for failing to grapple with the "serious" issues of the day . . . ("Reflections" 138)

While the aesthetic absolutism Jameson describes here has often served as evidence of Lukács’ traditionalism, spokespeople for the avant-garde were usually just as contemptuous of the errors and emptiness of literary and artistic realism. On both sides ostensibly aesthetic issues merged seamlessly with broader campaigns against false consciousness, and arguments left no room for differences of taste or temperament.

This absolutism is clearly connected with the term realism itself. Again, in Jameson’s words,

the originality of the concept of realism . . . lies in its claim to cognitive as well as aesthetic status. . . . [T]he ideal of realism presupposes a form of aesthetic experience that yet lays claim to a binding relationship to the real itself, that is to say, to those realms of knowledge and praxis that had traditionally been differentiated from the realm of the aesthetic, with its disinterested judgments and its constitution as sheer appearance. ("Reflections" 135)

Such an expansion of aesthetic into cognitive concerns necessarily foreclosed any possibility of tolerating alternatives. Because aesthetics functioned as a privileged tool for recognizing the distinctive features of the present, to get aesthetic principles "wrong" meant being fundamentally misled about the social, political, and historical moment in which one participated.