Summer 2000
Volume 26, Number 4

What I'd like to suggest is that even when approached from Marxian traditions of dialectical criticism--perhaps especially when approached from those traditions, the Adornian most importantly--real doubts arise concerning the validity of the critique of aesthetic ideology's fundamental methodological translation. At issue is a presumptive ability--much asserted, but hardly demonstrated, in contemporary ideology-critique--to translate from Marx and Engels's anatomy (in The German Ideology) of left-wing "Young-Hegelian" consciousness philosophy's theory of politics and state power to the examination of an ostensibly homologous romantic, aesthetic, or modernist "ideology" of literature and art. Yet in crucial if sometimes unacknowledged ways, Marxian critical-theory traditions (starting with Marx and Engels) have effectively regarded the dynamics of Kantian and modern aesthetics as anti-aestheticist. To state this even more polemically: Those Marxian traditions proceed at key moments--pace today's Critique of Aesthetic Ideology--on the presumption that the aesthetic is anti-aestheticist and that the aesthetic's anti-aestheticizing propensity enables, among other things, the thinking of history and historicization themselves, the very ability to posit, however provisionally, the sort of "transhistorical imperative" that [Fredric] Jameson understandably associates with dialectical thought (and that knows its analogues in deconstructively conceived imperatives to think Otherness).

While Jameson's own writing has been extremely important to various critique-of-aesthetic-ideology critics, his oeuvre is scarcely capable of being wholly or even largely identified with straightforwardly anti-aesthetic revisionism. But because of its enormous influence on Marxian-inflected literary and cultural criticism, and because of its decades-long meditation on the place of ideological demystification within literary-critical activity, it makes sense, in a rethinking of aesthetic ideology and the materio-historical, to treat Jameson's work as exemplary and, it turns out, as a somewhat surprising touchstone. For in the nineteen years since The Political Unconscious sounded its clarion call for (or its codification of) a return to dialecticized historicism, Jameson has expressed interesting reservations about the overhasty or antagonistic positing of opposition between the materio-historical and the aesthetic. When one traces out the logic of these Jamesonian reservations, some positions begin to take shape that would be hard to square with much of the aesthetic-ideology criticism that regularly cites Jameson.

Robert Kaufman is assistant professor of English at Stanford University. He is presently completing two related studies, Negative Romanticism, Almost Modernity: Keats, Shelley, and Adornian Critical Aesthetics and Experiments in Construction: Frankfurt School Aesthetics and Contemporary Poetry. He has also begun work on a third project, Hamlet's Form of the Modern.