The publication of Gillian Rose’s lectures on the Frankfurt School, originally given in 1979 at the University of Sussex, as Marxist Modernism (2024) allows us to reflect on contemporary thinking about art and Marxism.[1] The book’s title, and its central thesis, is that art and Marxism face the same pressing need to modernise or die in the face of change.[2] This suggests a further need for Marxism to welcome modernism in art and for modernism to welcome Marxism. There should be a convergence of both and that lies largely in the issue of a critical attention to form. The innovation of modernism (or modernisms) is to confront the problem of form in all types of art and the issue that Marxists must face is the importance of form (as in the value-form) to account for domination in contemporary capitalism.
While this is an old story, and these lectures were given over forty years ago, their republication suggests that this moment and this argument are not as dated as we might suppose. For all the twists and turns in contemporary art, for all the movements, theoretical and otherwise that have flashed before our eyes, the underlying premises, I want to suggest, have stayed virtually the same. While Bruno Latour famously suggested We Have Never Been Modern,[3] I want to argue that We Have Never Stopped Being Modern(ist) or (using an unattractive double negative) We Have Never Not Not Been Modern(ist). While various theoretical and artistic movements of the recent past have argued for the abandonment of large swathes of that past this has not stopped them being modern and modernist in some fundamental ways.
The attention to form and the disruption of form remains central in many recent movements in art and theory. A movement like speculative realism has argued for a human-independent reality: ‘the great outdoors’.[4] To access that outdoors there is a turn to the aesthetic, in which the aesthetic can grasp or mimic this non-human ‘outdoors’ through the disruption of its usual human limits. Quentin Meillassoux turns to mathematics and the elements of the code in the poetry of Mallarmé as such a disruptive aesthetic of the non-human.[5] Graham Harman has explored the aesthetic more generally as the primary mode in which we can make inexhaustible non-human reality present to us in all its strangeness.[6] Similarly, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has invoked reality as chaotic materiality to wreck the forms of capitalist value and demand innovative artistic expression.[7] Other critics, like Jaleh Mansoor, have returned to recent experimental art, such as postwar Italian abstraction, as a model for the disruption of the value form by an insurgent materiality.[8] These parallel gestures suggest a convergence on thinking the disruption of form aesthetically and politically through a turn to a resistant materiality, to some great outdoors.
Perhaps the most convenient position that summarises this convergence of philosophy and politics in Mark Fisher’s aesthetic of the weird. For Fisher realism is only capitalist realism, a mirror of how capitalism has saturated our world.[9] The way out is through an aesthetic of the weird, which disrupts this sense of reality and opens to an outside, beyond the limits of reality and existing forms.[10] In this way Fisher combines an anti-realism with a desire for a reality that cannot be saturated by capitalist social relations or exhausted by its relation to the human. The weird, in the form of the cosmic weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft or the grotesque of the post-punk group The Fall, to choose only two of Fisher’s examples, allows us a disruptive experience of the outside.[11]
To return to Rose’s argument, the emphasis on form is the way in which Marx and modernism are merged. In Marxism this is the value-form and commodity fetishism, while in art it is the formalism of modernist art. If the power of capitalist domination lies in its capacity to reify, to turn relations between people into relations between things, and if this reification penetrates all aspects of society (and the production of art),[12] then this is the central problem. Content is, in this narrative, rendered irrelevant as form is all, and the capacity of capitalism to shape the form of things (and people) into value generating shapes is what must be contested. This is why modernism, in all its variants (including the avant-garde), becomes important as the disruption of form. The questioning and probing of form in art can then be coordinated with a Marxist analysis of the value form. As the commodity form is supposed to intrude at every level, from conception to consumption, the more thoroughgoing the questioning of form the better.
Adorno is the hero of this story because he insists that commodity fetishism operates throughout the process of art production and consumption, because he values modernism as a probing of form, and because he offers criticisms of both modernism and popular art. Although it should be noted that Adorno’s criticisms of popular forms, most infamously jazz,[13] are much more stinging and dismissive than his criticisms of high modernism.[14] There is no equivalent of a figure like Beckett or Kafka that Adorno finds in popular culture. The nearest to these figures are some limited positive remarks about the Marx brothers and Chaplin by Adorno and Horkheimer.[15] These popular cultural figures are often valued as residues of a pre-capitalist cultural vitality, while modernist figures are seen as the dissonant representatives of art engaged with a dominant capitalism. Despite these issues, Adorno is the hero (at this point) for this fusion of Marxism and modernism through a critical discussion of form and style. Rose’s account remains an influential statement of a common view. You don’t have to choose Adorno as the hero, many prefer Walter Benjamin (for Rose, Benjamin does not recognise the problem of form all the way down).[16] The account, however, involves a celebration of Marxism that operates as an analysis of the value form and which values modernist or avant-garde movements that disrupt or innovate artistic forms.
The difficulty is that the constant questioning of form, and the notion that the value form operates at all levels, offers no way out. All we have is disruption and probing and no transcending. This would be something Rose began to question later, with her suggestion that Adorno remains within a negative dialectic or dialectical criticism and cannot achieve what Hegel called speculative thought.[17] While this is a useful point, and a useful re-statement of the importance of Hegel, Rose does not really follow through on how this might transform her earlier account. Instead, in her later shift to more existential and religious registers she backed away from the speculative and into the notion of transcending capitalist reality through love.[18] The transformative dimensions of Marx’s own account of capitalism remained stymied by the insistence on the total dominance of the value form. If capitalism could not be abolished, which meant both destroying and preserving, then capitalism was left as a perpetual enemy. This reproduced Adorno’s pessimism. Transcending capitalism was left as work of individual transformation in thought or experience (love’s work), and not reconnected to the revolutionary overturning of capitalism (even as a horizon).
We could also add that Marx does not seem to have a problem with the word content. In a text like ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Marx is happy to chide revolutionaries of the past for failing to measure up to the revolutionary content of their struggles and suggested, for future revolutionaries, ‘the content transcends the phrase’.[19] Here it seems that revolutionary content overrides and must transcend limited past forms to make ‘poetry from the future’.[20] While content is not used much in Capital, even there Marx is concerned with labour and use-value as qualities, opposed to the quantitative measures of value. While these points are much debated and the value-form interpretation, influenced by Adorno, has become commonly accepted, we should note that this debate is far from settled. The particular difficulty, as I have already noted, is that the total dominance of the value form or commodity fetishism seems to weaken the critical value of the concept. We have no alternative, just some escape, and capital, rather than being the site of contradiction and struggle, is reduced to a homogenous consumer of value – a ravenous blob (as in 1950s science fiction).
We could turn, instead, to the villain of Rose’s story, Georg Lukács, or, to be more precise, the later Lukács. The early Lukács is acceptable for his influence on the Frankfurt School. This is the Lukács of The Theory of the Novel (1916), who is correct, Rose argues, for his tracing of what is historically possible (or impossible) in the realm of art. The Lukács of History and Class Consciousness (1923) is also vital for his argument concerning commodity fetishism, while his arguments for the party and totality can be jettisoned. After that, however, Lukács is treated as a failure for his embrace of realism, his critique of modernism, and his compromises with Stalinism (from which Ernst Bloch is excepted). This is not to deny those compromises or to suggest that Lukács is immune from criticism. The difference is that Lukács’ own realism, as we will see, also offers scope for criticising the limits of Lukács’ thinking.
For Rose (and many others) Lukács’ realism is only about content, it is compromised by its supposed celebration of Stalinism, and it is fundamentally conservative for embracing reality as it is. Lukács’ criticisms of modernist art are to be dismissed because they occupy a space of realism that is outside of the consensus about the importance of modernist form. In contrast, Adorno’s critical remarks about the fragmented aesthetic of modernist art can be accepted because Adorno argues that for all its problems this fragmented aesthetic is the best way to grasp our damaged reality. If we take the time to read Lukács, however, we might find some important challenges to this received image of Lukács as a conservative and Stalinist. Lukács argues that the modernist translated reality into subjective impressions, adding to the fragmented and alienated reality of capitalism. In the end all modernism can express is nothingness, to which it gives an ontological weight.[21] The reason for this is that the modernist artist abandons reality as the source of progress and development and so in its place we find a fundamental emptiness. By focusing on their own subjective impressions and their own sense of nullity the modernist artist can reveal a profound experience of alienation but not actually grasp the complex dynamics of reality, which include alienation and also forces moving to the abolition of alienation.
We can see the convergence between classical modernism, emerging in the early twentieth century and then blossoming in the 1920s and 1930s, and the fascination of contemporary art and theory with the breakdown of reality into the fragmented abject or the Lacanian ‘Real’ (which defies representation and mediation as part of reality). Lukács’ suggestion that modernist art was an allegory of nothingness, telling a repeated story about finding a void or emptiness at the heart of reality, echoes as a critical judgement across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. For all the claims to innovation by modernist art, summarised in Ezra Pound’s injunction to ‘make it new’, what Lukács suggests is a repetitive realisation and representation of the same thing: a subjective sense of emptiness or nullity, grounded in capitalist alienation, but projected onto reality as its only truth. In contrast, the realist explores the complexity of reality as having moments of alienation and the potential to overcome alienation. While realism might be seen as ‘limited’ by representing reality, for Lukács this demand opens us into a world of complexity and change, while modernist art evades reality and reproduces nothingness.
This realism is not just negative. The importance of realism, for Lukács, is that it is an artistic mode that allows us to grasp the dynamism of reality. Realism is not limited to describing the fallen reality of capitalism or capitalist reification. In fact, this would be modernism, which reflects only our alienated reality in subjective forms. Instead, realism, through the use of human types, not ‘harmonious characters’, as Rose has it,[22] reflects the human relation to the contradictions of social reality and the potential for transcending that reality. For Lukács the problem with his earlier work was that it remained too sociological, not concerned with the dialectics of nature, or what he would later call the metabolism of humans and nature. It was also a problem that he put his faith in the proletariat as if this was an external solution, something to be willed, rather than a resolution generated by the contradictions of capitalism. Lukács’ realism can be seen as an answer to these criticisms, in the sense of tracing the contradictions of reality and the inevitable breakdown of capitalism into socialism or barbarism. Objective reality—shaped by human labour—has its own dynamism, which art can reflect and engage with.
While Lukács did make compromises with Stalinism and agreed with Stalin on certain things, such as the claim of socialism in one country, his realism also challenged the limits of Stalin’s own subjectivism.[23] Stalin claimed the dominance of his own will over reality, while Lukács would develop, especially later in life, a more Leninist understanding of reality. In this understanding, reality is the rational condition for action and cannot simply be overcome by the invocation of the leader’s will. Lenin’s realism involved the attention to material reality as the condition and site of political (and artistic) development.[24] In contrast, Stalin’s version of socialist realism limited it to the romantic celebration of Stalinist achievements, thus dissolving the contradictions of reality. A true socialist realism was still in development and would have to look back to bourgeois realism to develop a realism that would be critical and revolutionary.
This then is a Marxism that aims to see how art can help us see the possibilities of change in reality through the contradictions of reality, including the contradictions of capitalism, which demand resolution. In terms of art, of course, Lukács’ choice of Thomas Mann over Franz Kafka seems to go completely against the current of our time. Adorno’s choice of Kafka has won out. Rose argues that while Adorno makes criticisms of Kafka he also recognises how Kafka’s style renders terror and isolation as effects and not themes.[25] Once again we are back with form and the valorisation of form. I would say Lukács’ realism is also concerned with form, but in how the artistic work forms a relationship with reality. This is not just a realism of capitalism, which would be another hopeless mirror of the repetitive and static surface features of capitalist reality.
In fact, Lukács argues that modernism is only a mirror of the repetitive and static features of capitalist reality. He goes on to argue that this makes modernism like its precursor, the aesthetic of Naturalism, which attempted to produce a faithful and scientific representation of reality. The most famous example of Naturalism would be a writer like Émile Zola, obsessed with producing a scientific image of reality in his fiction, but for Lukács Naturalism is a recurrent temptation. The problem with Naturalism is that it is limited by its positivism into producing a limited and static view of reality. In this way reality becomes a fixed background, noticeable in the concern of Naturalist writers with hereditary traits and the laws of nature, construed in limited forms, which in fact mirror the fatalism of capitalist reality. It is this static view that then encourages the leap out of reality, which pairs this positivism with an existentialist desire to escape. All this will be inherited and exacerbated by modernism and the avant-garde, which often grasps reality in mechanical forms only to emphasise the need for a leap outside of reified social relations.[26] Today, we are more likely to find the science used a version of quantum theory or biological speculation, and the leap outside is more likely to be made by an object or some chaotic materiality or radical alterity, but the structure remains the same.
Lukács, in parallel to Marx (and Lenin), argues that capitalism has a dynamism, even if this dynamic is limited by its contradictions. This is not only the contradiction of capital and labour, but all the other contradictions that mark capitalism, not least that of imperialism and colonial exploitation (we can add between mental and manual labour, the contradictions of the family and gender, town and country, etc). The positive resolution of these contradictions into socialism or communism requires a critical understanding of this dynamic reality. That is why Lukács, unlike Adorno, argues that this reality can be transformed by taking control of the means of production and then transforming the means and relations of production into socialism. It is these ‘old-fashioned’ beliefs (or arguments) that drive Lukács’ realism and drive an understanding of art as capable of grasping reality as a site of possible transformation.
Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, ed. Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson (London and New York: Verso, 2024). ↑
Rose, Marxist Modernism, 9. ↑
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). ↑
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 7. ↑
Quentin Meillassoux The Number and the Siren, trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2012). ↑
Graham Harman, Art and Objects (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). ↑
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Third Unconscious: The Psychosphere in the Viral Age (London: Verso, 2021). ↑
Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). ↑
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009). ↑
Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016). ↑
On Lovecraft, see Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 15 – 25; on The Fall, see Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 32–38. ↑
Rose, Marxist Modernism, 108. ↑
Theodor W. Adorno, “Perennial Fashion – Jazz,” in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. and intro. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 199–209. ↑
I owe this point to Harrison Fluss. ↑
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 109. ↑
For Rose (in 1979) Benjamin overestimates the power of art to change society due to not grasping the depth of commodity fetishism; Rose, Marxist Modernism, 73. ↑
Rose, Gillian, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 53–64. ↑
Gillian Rose, Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life, intro. Michael Wood (New York: New York Review Books, 2011). ↑
Karl Marx, The Political Writings, foreword Tariq Ali, intros. David Fernbach (London and New York: Verso, 2019), 483. ↑
Marx, The Political Writings, 483. ↑
In Rose, Marxist Modernism, 117. ↑
Rose, Marxist Modernism, 96. These characters in ‘harmonious’ relation to society would be reserved for a future socialist realism in which a truly socialist society had been achieved, one of intelligibility and control of the means of production. Of course, it is possible to imagine that even then harmonious relations of humans to reality might not exhaust that reality completely. ↑
Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1963), 128. ↑
Benjamin Noys, “Lenin’s Realism,” “Lenin – A Century After,” ed. Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda, Crisis and Critique 11, no. 2 (2024):
https://www.crisiscritique.org/storage/app/media/2025-02-07/benjamin-noys.pdf ↑
Rose, Marxist Modernism, 122. ↑
Christopher Caudwell, Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture, intro. Sol Yorick (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 2009). ↑