                                                                                                                                                                                                                     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discussion is directed to the following theses of Marxist aesthetics: 1 There is a definite connection between art and the material base, between art and the totality... formulations of Marx and Engels, the conception has been made into a rigid schema, a schematization that has had devastating conse­ quences for aesthetics The schema implies a normative notion of the material base as the true reality and a political devaluation bf nonmaterial forces particularly of the individual consciousness and subconscious and their political function This function can be either... denigration of romanticism as simply reactionary; the denunciation of "decadent" art-in general, the embarrassment when confronted with the task of evaluating the aesthetic qualities of a work in terms other than class ideologies I shall submit the following thesis: the radical / , qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of the established reality and its invocation of the beautiful image (schoner... as qualitative differ­ ence Class society knows only the appearance, the image of the qualitative difference; this image, divorced from praxis, has been preserved in the realm of art In the aesthetic form, the autonomy of art constitutes itself It was forced upon art through the separation of mental and material labor, J7 as a result of the prevailing relations of domina­ tion Dissociation from the. .. imaginable material which the tradition transmits to the artists and with or against which they have to work; secondly, as the scope of the actually available possibilities of struggle and liberation ; thirdly as the specific po­ sition of art in the social division of labor, espe­ cially in the separation of intellectual and manual labor through which artistic activity, and to a great extent also its... transfer the action of Hamlet or lphigenia from the courtly world of the upper classes into the world of material production ; one can also change the historical framework and modernize the plot of Antigone; even the great themes of classical and bourgeois literature can be represented and expressed by characters from the sphere of material production speaking an everyday language ( Gerhart Hauptmann's... the privilege of an "elite" removed from the material process of production The class character of art consists only in these objective limitations of its autonomy The fact that the artist belongs to a privileged group negates neither the truth nor the aesthetic quality of his work What is true of "the classics of socialism" 18 is true also of the great artists : they break through the class limitations... whole: a poem, play, novel, etc.4 The work is thus "taken out" of the constant process of reality and assumes a signifi­ cance and truth of its own The aesthetic transfor­ mation is achieved through a reshaping of language, perception, and understanding so that they reveal the' essence of reality in its appearance: the re­ pressed potentialities of man and nature The work­ of art thus r�re�nts reality... requires a conceptual analysis, which can hardly be transposed into the medium of sensibility During the great debate on Marxist aesthetics in the early thirties, Lu Marten suggested that Marxist theory possesses a theoretical form of its own which militates against any attempt to give it an aesthetic form.11 But if the work of art cannot be compre­ hended in terms of social theory, neither can it be... reduces the power of estrangement and the radical, transcendent goals of change In this sense, there may be more subversive potential in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud thap in the didactic plays of Brecht xiii In a situation where the miserable reality can be changed only through radical political praxis, the concem with aesthetics demands justification It would be senseless to deny the element of