Introduction for True Materialism

Yet Marx and Engels make clear that they categorically reject any form of “mechanical materialism”; human activity, in their view, cannot be properly understood in terms of the basic laws of matter in motion.⁶ This raises the question: if not mechanical laws, then what sorts of laws do concern the historical materialist? I want to suggest that they are precisely the same laws that poets and artists are responsive to in choosing this or that word or rhyme scheme or in choosing to exaggerate their brushstrokes instead of concealing them. They are the same laws that Thomas Mann adheres to when choosing to write a Bildungsroman that contains no real “development,” or that Samuel Beckett observes when rooting out the last vestiges of realism in the novel. In fact, these are not “laws” at all; they are rather the purposes, ends, and norms in light of which historical agents act and live out their lives. Far from representing mere “records” of otherwise verifiable social and historical processes, works of art—on the account I will give—participate in such processes and indeed are partly constitutive of them.

I want to suggest, accordingly, that the materialist theory of history remains fatefully incomplete without an account of our attempts to give narrative shape to our lives; and that literary theory falls short of its object if it does not understand it as an integral aspect of our attempts to materially reproduce ourselves as living beings. This book will thus attempt to vindicate—and radicalize—Benjamin’s remarkable claim. On one reading, Benjamin is claiming that Marxism alone can practice great philology only with respect to the previous century, because Marxism and nineteenth-century literature are “of a piece”; they share a certain context and Marxism brings that context to theoretical self-consciousness. The stronger claim that I will defend is that a historical materialist outlook is a condition of possibility of comprehending literature—irrespective of period—on its own terms. At issue is the “being” of literature, what makes it the distinctive sort of practice that it is, and thus the standard internal to the practice by which success can be distinguished from failure, good literature from bad. This is quite a tall order, since to vindicate Benjamin, one would have to show that literary works, precisely as literary works, must be understood in terms of our historical modes of production. Attention to such material conditions is non-optional, if we are to grasp literature on its own terms. While Jameson’s point above might seem closer to the mark, I read him as arguing that Marxist critical insights render literary works intelligible by exposing their “political unconscious,” the social and historical forces that produce them—thereby dispelling the illusion of their autonomy. By contrast, this book will show that it is only in accepting the autonomy of the work of art that a materialist approach can truly do it justice, and this will necessitate a fundamental inquiry into and rethinking of form—biological, social, and literary—itself.

In a striking line in a letter to his close friend Leo Popper from 1910, Lukács speculates that form in literature “may be a biological need [biologisches Bedürfnis] (not in the ‘natural scientific’ sense of course [. . .]).”⁷ While Lukács would go on in Theory of the Novel to advance a profoundly generative account of the relation of literature to historical “life,” he never returns—at least to my knowledge—to this suggestion of a biological theory of form. In recent decades, several scholars have attempted to develop naturalistic approaches to criticism—but precisely in the “natural scientific” sense Lukács rejects. In the early aughts, the Literary Darwinists sought to theorize literature as an inherited cultural trait conducive to the survival of the species.⁸ Inspiring a generation of distant readers, Franco Moretti adopted the empirical methods of evolutionary biology to explain literary history by analogy with natural selection.⁹ More recently, Devin Griffiths has argued that literary critics must do what the sciences did long ago: give up the fixed, essentialist concept of form handed down by Aristotle and take up Darwin’s understanding of form as “the contingent history of open systems.”¹⁰

This book will argue that—on the contrary—the Aristotelian conception of form can alone ground a unified theory of literature, and as it will turn out, historical materialism is just what such a unified theory will amount to. Thinkers like Griffiths have attacked Aristotle not only because of his essentialism but also because of the racist anthropologies it would later be used to underwrite, in one tradition in particular: German Idealism. There is no question that Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel held repugnant views regarding racial difference—views that cannot simply be dismissed by appeal to antiquated conventions, since some of their most esteemed contemporaries were already engaging in sophisticated forms of criticism of racial injustice.¹¹ Nevertheless, there is no more powerful weapon in the philosophical arsenal against race-based forms of discrimination and subjugation than the philosophy of freedom Kant and Hegel develop—in part through a profound engagement with Aristotle’s concepts of life, reason, and form. In what follows, I will argue that, far from underwriting a racist ecology, the theory of organic form Hegel inherits from Aristotle is the key to exploding any such race-based essentialism and to developing a non-mechanical, historical-materialist account of human activity—including art-making.

We will return to Aristotle’s metaphysics below, but here I want to emphasize the aspect of his account that will prove so important for both Hegel and Marx, the two heroes of the philosophical side of our story: his understanding of form as activity (ἐνέργεια). According to Aristotle, to understand the “being” of an entity is to understand not just what makes a pen a pen or a horse a horse but what makes anything the sort of thing it is. Aristotle shows us that the being of an entity is to be understood neither as mere matter (the materialist mistake of the ancient atomists) nor as mere form (the idealist mistake of Plato’s school) but as a unity of form and matter, or as substance.¹² Yet substance is not properly grasped as a mere “addition” of two self-subsistent things, form and matter. For Aristotle, form is the principle of the unity of a substance, whereby its matter—otherwise indeterminate—is individuated as a “this-such,” a particular instance of a kind (γένος); without form, matter could not so much as be matter at all.

Now, in his Physics, Aristotle specifies four fundamental causes or grounds (αἰτία) of the existence of substance: (1) a thing is made possible by the material it is made of, like the brick and mortar of a house; (2) for those materials to become that thing, they must be given its characteristic shape, its formal attributes; (3) the efficient ground of the thing is the agent that initiates a process of change that has the thing as its effect, such as a housebuilder; (4) and finally, the process of change must be directed at some end, for the sake of which the thing is to exist—in this case, a home for dwelling.¹³ The final cause of a thing (its end) unifies the other three grounds (material, formal, efficient), but it is not just a terminal “endpoint.” It also constitutes the function (ἔργον) of the thing, what it is supposed to do. It is in view of its function of “enabling one to dwell,” say, that a house can be made of the right stuff or not, have the requisite formal features or not, be well-made or not, and ultimately be a good house or not.

In the case of the sorts of beings that have a “nature,” they find their principle of motion or change within themselves, rather than in an external agent, like a builder.¹⁴ Plants and animals, for example, have a nature because their function is to produce and organize their own members. A horse maintains itself as a horse in accordance with standards specific to its species (εἶδος), and the body of a horse is so organized as to be capable of such activity. Hegel and Marx both inherit this understanding of the “nature” of living things, but in the case of rational animals, the idea of a nature undergoes a radical shift. Hegel refers to us as the “free genus” (freie Gattung) and Marx—as early as 1843 and at least as late as 1857, well into his “mature” period—calls us the “genus-being” (Gattungswesen).¹⁵ This is because we do not act in accordance with a natural kind but act in accordance with our representation of our kind (εἶδος). We are the being for whom its kind is—and ultimately for whom “kind-ness” is, the division of thought and the world into universals and kinds, respectively. As such, we are always gripped by the question of what it is to be us—a question that nature or instinct cannot answer. This transforms the nature of “kind” in our case: it is no longer just a matter of what is good for this or that species; it is now a matter of the genus or the “generic” itself, what it is good to do or believe, period.¹⁶ The “human function,” then, is unique: we maintain our own bodily integrity through the activity of reasoning with one another about how best to do so—about what the conceptual criteria for flourishing are.

At first glance, it might be hard to see how this avoids three persistent bugbears, essentialism, teleology, and rationalism; the idea of a “human function,” something we all are supposed to do “by nature,” can seem odious. Here I want to make explicit and underscore the distinction implicit above between natural and rational forms of teleology. Natural teleology is concerned with ends that entities possess just by being those entities. They do not give themselves or choose those ends; they rather find themselves with such ends, owing to—for example—natural selection. They cannot contest their ends and so are not responsible for them. Rational teleology, by contrast, is concerned with ends that reason gives to itself through its own innate sensitivity to the possible demand to justify its actions and beliefs. Because to believe something is to take one’s belief to be true (otherwise one could believe without believing),¹⁷ one cannot be indifferent to the reasons given for opposed beliefs; one must either give a more compelling justification or give up the belief.

But is this approach not excessively rationalistic? I want to emphasize that to be rational here is not to be thinking strategically or in a formally consistent manner. Rather, rationality is an embodied power for acting in a manner responsive to the reasons for so acting—reasons that constitute the shared normative horizon of the members of a historical community. One might count one’s love for one’s child as a reason to sacrifice one’s own welfare, or one’s commitment to one’s country as a reason to risk one’s life in war; these are precisely non-strategic forms of reasoning. An individual born with cognitive disabilities or intellectual impairments is not less rational in this material or embodied sense because the sensitivity to reasons still constitutes her basic way of being in the world. To be a rational being is thus to be subject to a standard of rationality, but this also means that only a rational being can act irrationally. A dog that barks at people with Black or brown skin has perhaps been habituated by its (contemptible) owners to see skin color as a threatening marker, but the dog cannot be said to be racist or to be acting irrationally. This is because the dog itself does not have reasons for perceiving skin color as a sign of a threat; it is not attuned to the (un) justifiability of its own behavior. By contrast, its owners do have reasons, and this is why they can rightly be accused of irrationality—not of having no reasons (non-rationality) but of having bad reasons (e.g., “because skin color is predictive of character”). And the ideology of race is a perfect example of how one’s reasons can fail to be truly self-authorized or one’s “own,” as racial prejudice is a well-known mechanism for dividing workers, naturalizing labor hierarchies, and reinforcing an unjust status quo. What counts as the essence, function, or final end for animals like us is thus a matter of what can, ultimately, survive rational self-scrutiny—a point we will return to again and again below.¹⁸

This “nisus” of reason was first described by the Greeks. Inscribed over the entrance to the Temple of Apollo in Delphi was the well-known imperative to “know thyself” (γνῶθι σαυτόν), which, Hegel argues, “does not have the meaning of a law externally imposed on the human mind by an alien power; on the contrary, the god who impels to self-knowledge is none other than the absolute law of mind itself.”¹⁹ According to Hegel, then, we cannot be the sorts of animals we are without struggling to understand or know ourselves as such animals, or “spirit” (Geist). Yet a crucial dimension of this story has, until now, been almost completely neglected. The drive to self-knowledge and truth has its original antecedent in the primitive attempt of a plant or a unicellular organism to be “true to itself” by fulfilling its function—by corresponding to its own internal standard. To be “true to itself,” the rational animal must make its attempts to achieve self-knowledge public; they cannot be understood by one unless in principle they can be understood by all. For Hegel, the norm of mutual intelligibility finds fulfillment in specifically modern institutional life—the nuclear family, civil society, the state. And art and philosophy are two ways in which we publicly and dialogically manifest our understanding of ourselves as having achieved such mutual intelligibility. I call this Hegel’s original bio-aesthetic insight: we thus achieve organic integrity through the struggle to confer narrative unity on our lives in poetry and prose. A radical implication of this argument is that some form of literature—however primitive—is a condition of our material reproduction; and some mode of production must exist to objectify our narrative self-understanding.

In an important article, Jonathan Kramnick and Nersessian note the tight connection between “form and explanation” and suggest that different ideas of form are suited to different forms of inquiry in literary studies.²⁰ They advocate a pragmatic, “pluralist” conception of form, drawing on the work of philosophers like Ned Block and John Dupré, who respectively argue that “consciousness” and “species” have too often been taken to have one-size-fits-all definitions when in fact they have plural, context-specific uses. Yet this is not a metaphysically neutral, or merely pragmatic, point; Dupré, for example, understands species not only as “not fixed” (the right Darwinian premise) but also as subject to a constant Heraclitan flux (the wrong, skeptical conclusion).²¹ What, after all, unifies these diverse uses of a species concept? What is their shared referent? To recall one of Hegel’s favorite examples:

In zoology in the division of mammals, the claws and teeth are used above all as the ground of the division, and this is sensible since mammals themselves distinguish themselves from one another through these parts of their bodies and the general type of the diverse classes of them [i.e., mammals] is to be led back to this.²²

That is, species are not arbitrary divisions made by a zoological observer for taxonomical purposes; they rather represent real divisions made by animals themselves through their self-maintaining activity. The Aristotelian point is that the function (ἔργον) or final cause has explanatory priority insofar as “it is this that explains the matter, and not the matter the end-state.”²³ It is only in light of a unified conception of what literature is for that we can begin to understand why it comprises the materials it does, why it has these formal attributes and not those, and what authors are doing when they write. Crucially, what I am calling the “literary function” (ἔργον) is not a matter of an evolutionary advantage it affords us or an instrumental quality it happens to possess; the literary function is an internal and non-instrumental principle that allows literary works to be the distinct things they are and thereby grounds the idea of the autonomy of literature.

The materialist tradition has always had an uneasy relationship with the notion of aesthetic autonomy. Theodor Adorno—perhaps its greatest Marxist theorist—explicitly defines such autonomy in terms of art’s “growing independence from society” in the modern era.²⁴ According to this account, it is the “functionlessness” of autonomous art that constitutes its “social function,” since it is purportedly by standing outside of society (the capitalist system of exchange) that the modernist work of art in particular holds open the possibility of a different form of social organization.²⁵ Because art can never fully free itself from its social determinants, it reenacts the subjugation of the modern individual and thereby achieves a non-propositional, “mimetic” knowledge of human suffering. Yet Adorno is trading here on an ambiguity in the notion of a function, which—as we just saw—need not be understood instrumentally, like the tree whose function is to supply wood for making paper. I have shown that there is an internal notion of function, such as the function of the tree to feed and maintain itself, which Adorno must presuppose in claiming that it is essential to what art is that it secure such non-rational, mimetic knowledge.

To the extent that autonomy is “lived,” under capitalism, as the freedom from one’s social dependencies, Adorno’s account is compelling; the modernist artwork, we will see below, is the “mimesis” of the contradictory struggle to realize the ideal of autonomy so understood. Yet this notion of mimesis also suggests an alternative, and more fundamental, conception of autonomy, not as art’s “growing independence from society” but as its growing into its social function—owing to, say, the emancipation of art from the external ends of church and state. On my account, this function is social because it is a necessary dimension of the struggle to achieve mutual intelligibility. But is it right to understand the “literary function” as a matter of achieving a non-rational form of knowledge?²⁶ Is it true that, as Adorno puts it, “suffering conceptualized remains mute and inconsequential”?²⁷ Adorno is surely right that knowledge in art is not conveyed with “concepts, propositions, and syllogisms” and thus is not subject to standard truth conditions or the principle of bivalence.²⁸ But at the same time, we can only make out what artworks “know” or mimetically embody by attending to their “concept” or final cause, an author’s or artist’s tacit reasons for organizing things in the work in the specific way she has. We will return to this point in chapter 2 below, but I say “tacit” here because such reasons can diverge from what an author explicitly avows; they are rather revealed by the work itself to have been the reasons the author was responsive to precisely in the making of it.

As we indicated above, this notion of rationality has its original ground in the drive of the organism to “truth,” or to correspondence with itself. What Adorno misses in Hegel with a perverse consistency is that reason is not a “nature-dominating” faculty that subordinates objects to our procrustean concepts and ends.²⁹ Rather, it is in the first place the internal principle or function by which living organisms both orient themselves and are knowable as what they are.³⁰ Their bodies manifest reasons for the organization of their bodies (why this part in this place) and their actions manifest reasons for acting (why move to this place at this time)—with the crucial caveat that only animals like us are responsive to reasons as such. Such “organic reason” establishes a precedent in Hegel—a precedent entirely neglected by Adorno—for the non-propositional rationality manifest in the work of art. And it is Lukács, I want to claim, who in that 1910 letter comes as close as anyone to hitting on the literary function or “for the sake of”: the novel in particular has as its purpose the self-narration without which we cannot constitute ourselves as the distinctly biological beings we are. As we will see, the modernist novel takes this a step further: its function lies in the reflexive narration of the novel itself as part of the struggle to realize the “human function,” our freedom.

In his 1844 manuscripts, Marx celebrates Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel as a “great achievement” that constitutes the foundation for a “true materialism,” which makes “the social relationship ‘of man to man’ the basic principle of the theory.”³¹ What makes such materialism “true,” for Marx and Engels, is that it moves beyond the reductive and mechanical materialism propounded by the followers of Descartes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, true materialism sees in history not just billiard-ball causality, “one damn thing after the next.” And on the other, as Engels points out, it does away with the “old teleology” according to which “the whole of nature [testifies] to the wisdom of the creator.”³² The implied new teleology rejects both the reduction of history to mechanical laws and the equation “causa finalis = God.” It has rarely been noted, but the middle term between history and nature for Marx as for Engels lies in a conception of organic “matter and its mode of existence” as “their own final cause.”³³ For the true materialist, human beings are “the sole animal” whose “normal state is one appropriate to his consciousness, one that has to be created by himself.”³⁴ Our “causa finalis” lies in nothing given, including our own species form, but rather in our consciousness of our own ends, which are incarnate in “changes in the modes of production and exchange.”³⁵ What makes this position a materialism is that it concerns the social and historical conditions for the unification of the matter of animals like us, the bodies that we are.

This is in supposed contrast to Hegel, who is held to make “thought” or Geist—and not the real ends of historical agents—the basic principle of his theory. This picture of Hegel persists across the humanistic disciplines, and one of the tasks of this project is to defend the counterintuition that the possibility of a materialist criticism has its foundation precisely in Hegel’s account of the primacy of thinking and reason. As we will see, Hegel is not, in fact, centering thought as a kind of supernatural, independent historical force. Hegel is rather concerned to show that we cannot undertake a critique of our practices, institutions, and forms of life without first understanding what it is to understand such practices, institutions, and forms of life. This will require a brief foray into that most forbidding of philosophical territories, the “realm of shadows” or of “pure thinking” in Hegel’s Science of Logic. Let us consider Hegel’s way of grounding the materialist strategy of immanent critique, which will be deployed throughout this book.

An immanent critique of an institution identifies the normative criteria constitutive of it as that institution. To understand the idea of a “constitutive norm,” think of the rules of chess. To play a game of chess is to subscribe to the rules that govern the game—pawns move one space ahead except on their first move, bishops move unlimited spaces on the diagonal, and so on. To fail to abide by the rules—to move one’s pawn three spaces, say—is not to play chess differently but to no longer be playing chess at all. The rules are constitutive of the game. Now, an immanent critique targets such constitutive norms and proceeds in two steps.³⁶ First, it pursues a form of internal criticism: the United States Supreme Court is tasked with adjudicating highstakes legal disputes with decisive implications for how constitutional principles are to be understood and applied. In recent years, the Court has issued a number of controversial decisions—like Citizens United and the reversal of Chevron—that have arguably reflected a conservative form of “judicial activism” that has greatly benefited corporations. Yet this is at odds with the Court’s avowed mission of impartially dispensing justice. Internal criticism has reform as its consequence; in this case, term limits might be instituted as well as a set of ethical guidelines to which the justices must adhere. Second, internal criticism becomes immanent critique when the principles of the institution are themselves shown to entail their own corruption or contravention—when, that is, internal criticism fails. The Supreme Court must ultimately uphold and reinforce the right to property underpinning American democracy. Yet this innately favors and shores up the propertied class, contradicting its own internal norm of impartial justice. This suggests that the present idea of the Court cannot be realized simply by bringing existing practices into accord with its internal principles; rather, the very conception of justice as the preservation of the right to property must be “negated” to be realized as justice.

Historically, Marxists have treated this model of immanent critique as a way of retaining a dialectical method without encumbering themselves with the metaphysical baggage of Hegel’s system.³⁷ Yet as Hegel argues, it must be shown that to think things as they materially are is to think them on the basis of such internal norms; this is not a metaphysically neutral conception of the world. The Science of Logic helps us to see that all conceptions of reality—including empiricism and materialism—are just that, conceptions; every account of being is an account of how being is to be thought. This is why, in the Logic, Hegel claims that the forms of being (“metaphysics”) and the forms of thought (“logic”) coincide. As conceptions, then, such accounts of being raise the question of their own justifiability, the reasons for taking them to be true, and whether a given candidate will turn out to be viable—will prove to be being—will hinge on whether it is thinkable, internally consistent, or “makes sense.”³⁸

For example, the thought of pure, sensuous “matter” bereft of form ceases to be intelligible as matter. Matter, just to be matter (a material “this”), must already be determined by form, individuated by a kind; otherwise, it lacks the determinacy and unity required to be anything at all. Pure matter is thus a key example of how thought itself determines what can count or make sense as “being”: in trying to think pure matter, thought autonomously “negates” itself by inferring the impossibility of such a thought. Thought thereby determines a priori, or independently of any kind of empirical observation, that matter must be minimally form-determined if it is to be matter at all. The hardness of the “must” here is not that of an external, natural law but that of the rules that thought gives to itself just in trying to think anything at all. If one is to count as thinking, in other words, one must be thinking in accordance with such rules.

The aim of the Logic, ultimately, is to show that the only consistent account of being—the only account that can do justice to the determinacy of objects, the distinguishability of this from that—is the one that understands “the actual” as “the rational,” the world as shot through with normativity. At the same time, the rational itself must be grasped as actual and in the world—namely, as a way of being a living being. To be sure, the Doppelsatz—“What is rational, is actual, / And what is actual, is rational”—is perhaps the most notorious line Hegel ever wrote. Yet it also remains the most poorly understood.³⁹

What Hegel means is not that the status quo is inevitably rational, that whatever is the case must be justified just by virtue of being the case. Rather, Hegel means to invoke the Aristotelian idea of actuality (ἐνέργεια) mentioned above, according to which the principle of the determinacy of a thing is its internal norm, its reason for being and for being the way it is. Just as an eye is only “actually” an eye to the extent that it is functional as the organ for sight, so is the judiciary “actual” only to the extent that it lives up to its avowed aim. “What is rational, is actual” thus implies that the rational consists only in those principles that are genuinely institutionally effective; a state founded on totalitarian principles, for example, cannot functionally be a state. Correlatively, “what is actual, is rational” signifies that only those institutions that are self-sustaining and able to fulfill their function are truly rational ones or are justifiable by those participating in them. This indicates that part of what it means for a form of life to objectively be what it is (be “actual”) is for it to be affirmable by the subjects sustaining it.

Far from reflecting a reactionary view, the Doppelsatz is thus meant to express a critical conception of (social) being.⁴⁰ Accordingly, to think practices and institutions along materialist lines as “self-contradictory,” as failing to live up to their own promise, is also to think what it is to think such a thought—namely, the rational as the principle of the actual. And ultimately, to understand ourselves as historical agents is to understand what it is to understand such agency—to be committed to some “logic of agency” or freedom.

We can begin to get into view why Marx and Engels and materialists more broadly need an “idealist” account like Hegel’s by briefly considering Engels’s own attempt to theorize life in two canonical works in the Marxist tradition, the Anti-Dühring and the incomplete draft of Dialectics of Nature. In these works, Engels argues that organisms owe their animacy to certain proteins, specifically albumen (Eiweiß). According to his account, albumen is the “lowest living being known to us” and is as such the basis of all life.⁴¹ The problem with this picture is that it is manifestly circular: all entities that contain albumen are living, because albumen is itself the most primitive living being. This fails to explain what it is supposed to explain, namely, what it is to be alive.

Yet this is not just a logical error on Engels’s part; it reflects an intrinsic limit of a materialist program that takes itself to be an alternative—instead of a complement—to Hegel’s idealism. Engels’s account strikingly illustrates that the concept of life cannot be derived through empirical inquiry; any empirical property (e.g., albumen) or cause (e.g., a “selfish” gene) we might point to will ultimately beg the question it is supposed to answer. Even though Engels himself invokes the notion of “self-renewal” as the “mode of existence” of albumen, he explicitly rejects the idea of “inner purpose” in Kant and Hegel as “itself an ideological determination.”⁴² What Engels misses is that the relevant “mode of existence”—the being of the living in our Aristotelian terms—is the distinctly organic activity of self-maintenance; in the absence of the concept of such activity, the distinction between the living and the non-living would not be so much as intelligible. An animal dying from disease would be formally indistinguishable from a piece of iron rusting in a humid environment, and while we could predict how the parts of the animal might respond to this or that stimulus (e.g., its leg might move if a specific part of its brain is probed), we could not predict how they might function as parts of the animal without illicitly assuming the purposive whole. This is so remarkable because it shows that, where the materialist would need a non-empirical, distinctly philosophical category (“inner purpose”), he is compelled by prejudice to appeal to empirical properties alone (albumen). At the same time, Engels is able to acknowledge that “in Kant and Hegel inner purpose is a protest against dualism” and that “mechanism applied to life is a helpless category.”⁴³ However dimly, Engels recognizes in such passages the necessity of a “logical” account of how we must think about living entities if we are to make sense of them as the sorts of material systems that they are.

In works like the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Encyclopedia, Hegel attempts to show us that—if we are to render ourselves intelligible—we must understand the human being as a historical, socially interdependent, and rationally self-determining kind of living creature. Otherwise, without the right, rational conception of our animality, we risk collapsing the distinction between ourselves and nature. Take the distinction between actions like poetry-writing or helping a friend and mere events like lightning striking. If they are collapsed, we lose the normativity of human activity, since everything that happens would have to happen in accordance with mechanical laws. Under that assumption, there could be no question of better or worse, health or sickness, moral or immoral, but only a question of difference: a sick person would not be worse off than but simply different from a healthy one, since “sickness” would just be the necessary effect of some prior cause. Not only would we be unable to distinguish between those who require care and those who do not, we would be unable to think or act at all, since one cannot think without taking oneself to have better reasons for one’s beliefs than the beliefs they oppose, and since one cannot intervene in the course of the world without taking oneself to have better reasons for acting than for forbearing from action.

By way of such arguments, Hegel tries to entitle himself to what Marx’s own notion of “genus-being” simply takes for granted, a theory of thinking as the formally distinctive way in which human animals live their lives: “for thinking in general [überhaupt] belongs to the nature of human beings to such an extent that one is always thinking, even in sleep.”⁴⁴ That we are thinking “even in sleep” should signal just how unusual and embodied Hegel’s notion of thinking is. Hegel shows us that the final causality invoked by Engels consists in reasons—understood precisely not as contents “in the mind” but as the intelligible form of our bodily acts and as the principle of the unity of our bodies themselves. Far from falling below the “true materialism” of Feuerbach, then, Hegel gives us a rich and rigorous, Aristotelian account of the conceptual conditions for its possibility. This book will demonstrate the implications of such a true materialism—as encapsulated in the following six theses—for literary criticism:

(1) The form of the organism lies in its activity of self-maintenance.

(2) The form of literature lies in its activity of self-narration.

(3) Self-narration is constitutive of the self-production of rational animals.

(4) Literature cannot, therefore, be understood in abstraction from our historical modes of production.

(5) Accordingly, autonomous literature is not literature divorced from society and history but literature conscious of its own purpose of giving distinctly narrative form to our lives.

(6) Modernism in the arts constitutes the achievement of such autonomy; the modernist novel is thus the meta-narrative of literary narrative itself as partly constitutive of our organic self-production.

It must be noted, finally, that the modernist achievement of autonomy was not the triumph Hegel himself might have expected it to be. While contemporary Hegel-inspired critics have noted that the modern ideal of freedom has foundered, we still lack a comprehensive Hegelian account of why.⁴⁵ To answer this question, I turn to the most powerful explanation we have of the incompleteness of the project of modernity: Marx’s critical theory of capitalism.

The great realist novels of the nineteenth century captured the plight and desperation of the working class and rigorously taxonomized the “types” of decadent modernity, from the petit bourgeois climber who mistakes accumulation for self-realization (the eponymous protagonist of Madame Bovary) to the erstwhile liberal upstart disfigured by professional ambition (Lucien Chardon in Illusions perdues). Yet by the early twentieth century fundamental realist categories like Bildung, the technique of reportage, and even the récit or traditional narrative form itself were being called into question and had begun to lose currency. “Since the transformation of the superstructure proceeds far more slowly than that of the base,” Benjamin writes, “it has taken more than half a century for the change in the conditions of production to be manifested in all areas of culture.”⁴⁸ The decline of realism marked the beginning of the “real subsumption”—to use a Marxian term of art—of the novel form under capitalism.⁴⁹ This distinction tracks the progression of capitalism from its appropriation of preexisting forms of labor to its transformation of labor under the factory system. Just as textile manufacture went from a cottage industry only “formally” capitalist to a machine-driven process “really” shaped by the wage relation, so did the novel, during the 1910s, begin to materially embody the very social contradictions that realism—inspired by advances in the natural sciences—had sought to describe with great precision.⁵⁰ The more reflective the novel became, and the more it sought to loosen and dissolve its scleroses, the less able it was to keep alive the illusion of its traditional integrity, until—in the words of the late Ezra Pound—“the dreams clashed and were shattered.”⁵¹ In the work of the most ambitious novelists and poets, like Kafka, Joyce, and Stevens, as well as the Pound of the Pisan Cantos, the unavailability of a unified form itself became the object of a second-order attempt at unification. Rather than proceeding as if nothing had changed, such attempts made no effort to hide the precariousness of their new condition.

The shaping of modernist literature by production was not, however, a matter of external economic motivations, such as the “material interests” of a class,⁵² or a matter of a cultural “reaction” to capital’s transformation of our everyday experience.⁵³ In his groundbreaking contribution to a materialist theory of modernist art, Aesthetic Theory, Adorno formulates the relationship between art and production as follows: “Modern art is just as determined socially by the conflict with the relations of production as it is inner-aesthetically through its exclusion of what has been used up and of procedures now obsolete.”⁵⁴ This takes us a long way toward the right thought, but our recovery of the idea of a bio-aesthetics above helps us to see that Adorno’s claim must be qualified in several respects.

It is not that—per Adorno—there are two separate determinants of the work of art, social relations of production, on the one hand, and artistic forces of production, on the other. It is rather that the exclusion or ruling out of past technical and formal choices is itself an embodied, artistic expression of what the historically specific conditions of social production now demand of art. This is not an external demand, for reasons we began to explore above. According to Hegel’s key bio-aesthetic insight, artistic self-representation is partly constitutive of the organic self-maintenance of animals like us; in developing their “forces of production,” artists are thus searching for ways to objectify a historical community’s reasons for reproducing themselves in the way they do. The formal experiments of the modernists are reflexive interventions in the artistic development of such forces—interventions that make explicit the way that our technical means of reproducing ourselves are form-determined by their social function (ἔργον), the accumulation of capital. Just as the machines made to increase the tempo of the labor process evince in their very design a disregard for the human lives they are supposed to serve, so does the work of art in the age of its real subsumability openly exhibit the unattainability of the integrity artists and authors necessarily strive to achieve.

The works of Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann play a special role in this story. According to the Hegelian account, in modernity we begin to grasp that normative authority lies neither in nature nor in divinity but rather in us: we are responsible for the norms that bind us. In the literary context, this involves an increasing impatience with the realist assumption that the world dictates to art and that art must thus conform to a “given” world.⁵⁵ Among the modernists, Kafka and Mann are especially attuned to the increasing obsolescence of realism. They strive to realize the autonomy of narrative by revealing that “the real” is not so much a positive given but a kind of result of our own self-determining activity. This is not to suggest that the world is somehow existentially dependent on our actions and beliefs, or oppositely, that we are trapped in a “prison-house” of narrativity. What the modernists teach us is that there is no non-narrative standpoint from which “the real” or “what is the case” could finally be grasped. The idea of “reality in itself,” beyond any possible point of view, is just as much a narrative—yet one that cancels itself out and thereby rules out such a non-narrative view of “the real.”

The modernists thus innovate what I call an expressive realism, so called because it expresses or makes explicit the self-imposed narrative conditions of acquaintance with the world. Narrative—rather than “the real”—increasingly becomes the object of narrative, as novelists can no longer take for granted what counts as novel-writing. Modernist works, therefore, tend to no longer conform to preestablished generic conventions—or when they do (as in Mann’s Bildungsroman), they unsettle such conventions by exposing their historical grounds. Likewise, instead of merely “reflecting” or “representing” the tensions of society from a safe distance (as in realism), such novels demonstrate the entanglement of literary form in the modern struggle to achieve self-knowledge and mutuality. As I will argue, the modernist pursuit of autonomy—of a literature responsive not to the demands of church or state but to its own internal technical and formal requirements—lays bare the embattled nature of the ideal of freedom that binds both capital and labor and animates our (self-undermining) commitment to the capitalist form of life.

The period of “late modernism,” exemplified here by the novels of Samuel Beckett, is marked by a radical skepticism concerning the possible realization of such social and narrative ideals. As Adorno notes in a lecture from the mid-sixties, the decreasing “extraterritoriality” of the working class and its progressive integration into modern consumer society over the previous half century had led to the dissolution of political struggle informed by a class-conscious standpoint.⁵⁶ Throughout this book, I refer to this state of affairs—commodity production without a (self-conscious) proletariat—as “late capitalism.” On the account advanced by Marx, Lukács, Adorno, and others, workers’ consciousness of their labor power as a commodity had enabled not only the struggle for a more equitable distribution of wealth but also—and far more radically—the struggle to abolish the way wealth is produced: wage labor. This is because proletarian “class consciousness” is an epistemically distinctive perspective that affords knowledge of capital not as a group of individuals set on exploitation but as a self-imposed system of domination.⁵⁷ Labor, in other words, comes to understand that it itself engenders the conditions that rigidly necessitate both the expropriation of its products and its exchange for a wage.

While it is often thought that class consciousness is the basis for conflict and disunity (between workers and capitalists, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie), the loss of such consciousness actually undermines the possibility of a sharable narrative of why the project of modernity remains incomplete. As Marx already argues in the early 1840s, the standpoint of the proletariat is a universal standpoint to the extent that the normative claim it articulates is not a claim to a “traditional title but only a human title”—a title that would thus belong not just to workers but to every “genus-being.”⁵⁸ And it should be emphasized that this is not an “essentialist” or anthropological demand: it is rather a rational demand—a demand made on the basis of reasons—for institutional conditions mutually justifiable to all. Beckett’s trilogy, which grows out of the late capitalist context, is the struggle to narrate the loss of this very possibility for collective narrative—a loss with devastating consequences for the organic self-production of animals like us.

By emphasizing the modern ideal of freedom, this book seeks to shed new light on a materialist story that is otherwise familiar—the critique of realism, the dissonance of modernist works, the permeation of art by capitalist lateness. Yet as narrated thus far, even this distinctive version of the materialist story of the rise of modernism remains crucially incomplete. The Marxist ideas of social contradiction and historical consciousness presuppose a theory of rational agency—of our responsiveness to reasons to transform our lives—that the materialists themselves have failed to elaborate. Furthermore, on its own historical materialism cannot demonstrate the non-arbitrariness of its own ideal of universal emancipation under socialism—not without first explaining why the capitalist ideal of a free life is not just a contingent historical ideology but a rational and even necessary—if still partial and self-defeating—solution to all prior failed attempts at social unification. By the same token, materialist theorists of modernist art, from Adorno to Jameson, from Benjamin to Moretti, have failed to provide a satisfactory account of “aesthetic determinacy,” of the categorial constraints that render art intelligible as art, in contradistinction to mere entertainment, religious iconography, and so forth. Without such an account, the deep connection they all presuppose between artistic technique and forces of production, between artistic form and social form, between art and life, will remain underdetermined and obscure.

To make good on its own promise, the materialist theory of modernism must clarify—and work to entitle itself to—concepts like “subject,” “form of life,” and “contradiction.” As I have already suggested, to take responsibility for its own categories, the materialist tradition must return to the philosopher who most inspired Marx and yet whom the tradition has consistently abused and misread since its inception: Hegel. Through a critical synthesis of Kant and Aristotle, Hegel develops a philosophy of freedom that specifies the structure of agency presupposed by Marx’s critical theory of capitalist modernity and grounds an account of the work of art as an embodied, sensuous expression of our shared understanding of what counts as social reproduction—as flourishing for animals like us.

In the following chapter, I will sketch a new reading of Hegel’s idealism as the most powerful account in the history of modern thought of the inseparability of reason and life. Perhaps the single-most important thought in German Idealism is inherited from Rousseau: the idea that freedom lies neither in “freedom from” external interference nor in “freedom to” do as one pleases but rather in the self-legislation of one’s own constraints. We will first examine Kant’s inheritance of this idea and elaboration of a sharply dualistic metaphysics of agency. This will position us to understand Hegel’s own philosophy of freedom, which I read as a radical critique of Kant’s anti-naturalism. According to the standard story, Hegel conceives of freedom as a form of mutual recognition through which modern agents find confirmation of their self-understanding as autonomous ends. Yet Hegel also understands such mutuality as a condition of organic vitality for beings like us; in Aristotelian terms, only beasts and gods can live outside the polis. In what follows, Hegel’s criterion of human flourishing—freedom—will be shown to underwrite Marx’s critical theory of capitalist modernity, which specifies in turn the material foundations of modern civil society—the “mode of production”—which only become fully visible following the Industrial Revolution and the “Year of Revolution,” 1848. Such foundations, we will see, turn out to be deeply inimical to the “system of freedom” they are meant to ground. Instead of reading Marx as Hegel’s materialist competitor, I claim that Marx’s immanent critique of bourgeois society makes good on the promise of Hegel’s conception of right (Recht) “not merely as the limited juristic law, but as the actual body of all the conditions of freedom.”⁵⁹

Utilizing these historical and theoretical building blocks, I will then elaborate in chapter 2 a new naturalistic account of Hegel’s philosophy of art, what I call his bio-aesthetics, which will allow us to read the novel as the distinctly narrative struggle for the mutuality and freedom that we require to flourish as the rational animals we are. Counterintuitively, it is Hegel’s idealist approach that will enable us to see that the materialist understanding of works of literature in terms of modes of production not only does not violate their autonomy but is indeed a sine qua non of heeding and respecting it.

On this renovated “Marxist-Hegelian” account, the modernist novel is a literary expression of our “felt” failure to realize or embody the value of a free life under capitalist conditions, as manifest in the modern institution of law (The Trial), the modern process of Bildung (The Magic Mountain), and the modern literary form par excellence, the novel itself (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable). As we will see in part II, “The Novel of Disfiguration,” each work manifests a distinct aspect of the social pathology of bourgeois freedom, which consists in the self-defeating attempt to achieve freedom from law (in K.’s struggle to leave his trial), freedom from life (in Hans Castorp’s struggle to escape labor on the flatlands), and freedom from narrative (in the Unnamable’s struggle to leave his own voice behind).

Aside from this positive task of developing a new framework for a materialist aesthetics, chapter 2 develops a critique of the work of the most important Marxist critic in recent memory, Fredric Jameson. Through an engagement with The Political Unconscious and other seminal texts, I argue that Jameson’s rejection of the notion of freedom in the sphere of politics and of autonomy in the sphere of art prevents him from fulfilling his own moving and courageous attempt to defend the explanatory ultimacy of a Marxist approach to literature. I then consider several other influential models of the relationship between literature and the social, such as Moretti’s evolutionary history of literary form and the anti-critical paradigm of Toril Moi and Rita Felski, in order to underscore the need for a materialist approach that understands literature both on its own terms and as a form of social knowledge. Rather than seeing these as mutually exclusive possibilities or as two sides of an antinomy (formalism versus historicism, say), I argue that we must seek to understand the distinctly aesthetic way in which literature embodies knowledge of society—from Kafka’s use of an elliptical realism to render the opacity of social form in late modernity to Beckett’s innovation of a “tragic naturalism” to register the breakdown of socially shared, embodied meaning following the collapse of “modernist” politics in the early twentieth century.⁶⁰

Many at this point will already have in mind a possible objection to this project, namely that its undeniable eurocentrism prevents it from recognizing and doing justice to non-Western visions of freedom as well as the “multiple modernities” unfolding the world over. Through a critical engagement with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s attempt to “provincialize” the Western narrative of universal Enlightenment, I argue that the stakes of the European tradition under consideration are not restricted in their significance to a Western context but rather reveal the deep contradictions of the Enlightenment as a historically specific global process.

In the final section of part I, I attempt to draw these threads together in the context of an overview of part II. The novels of Kafka, Mann, and Beckett, I argue, bring to speech the latent spiritual content (the social and historical specificity) of our means of material reproduction, which—for reasons I will explain—ought to be taken to include artistic form. As Marx writes, “The history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of man’s essential powers.”⁶¹ The novel is that book incarnate. The high modernists work to reveal, in a manner yet to be fully appreciated, the disjunctive history of literary technique as the tragic history of the human soul itself.

Notes

1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 476.

2. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1982), 75.

3. See Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 7. And see Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin Press, 1962), 52.

4. Anahid Nersessian, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 9.

5. Nersessian, The Calamity Form, 8, 9.

6. Such materialism is dismissed by Marx, in the theses on Feuerbach, under the rubric of “contemplative materialism.” See Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach [Original version],” in Marx-Engels Collected Works, ed. Maurice Cornforth et al. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 5:3, 5.

7. See Georg Lukács to Leo Popper, June 15, 1910, in Selected Correspondence: 1902–1920, ed. and trans. Judith Marcus and Zoltán Tar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 119.

8. See, for example, Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004). For an influential critique of Literary Darwinism, see Jonathan Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 (2011): 315–47.

9. See Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2007).

10. Devin Griffiths, “The Ecology of Form,” Critical Inquiry 48, no. 1 (2021): 72.

11. For a recent account of Kant’s contributions to the development of the pseudo-science of race, see Andrew Cooper, Kant and the Transformation of Natural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). For an important account of Hegel’s shifting views on race in relationship to the Haitian revolution, see Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

12. For Aristotle’s classic account of substance, see Book VII in Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2016). Strictly speaking, form is the principle of substance in Aristotle, whereas in Plato, form is itself a distinct substance in which the beings “participate.”

13. See Aristotle, Physics, 194b23ff.

14. Aristotle, Physics, 192b7–15.

15. Hegel deploys the notion of the “free genus” in G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part 1: Science of Logic, ed. and trans. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 290/§222; hereafter cited as EL. See also Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx-Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973), 3:276; hereafter EPM. For Marx’s later reference to genus-being, see Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 243. For a pathbreaking recent interpretation of genus-being in terms of collective self-narration, which has major implications for literary studies, see Christine Korsgaard, “Species-Being and the Badness of Extinction and Death,” Zeitschrift für Ethik und Moralphilosophie 1 (2018): 144–46.

16. On my reading, this genus is precisely what Hegel has in mind when he describes “the Concept” (the concept of kind, genus, or conceptuality itself).

17. This point is made powerfully in Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 739.

18. While Hegel does want to understand reason and nature as deeply continuous (in some sense even identical), it is also worth noting that he distinguishes between the sort of being that knows its “ends as ends” (rational animals) and “that which unconsciously acts in accordance with ends” (non-rational animals). This latter, he observes, is what Aristotle calls “nature” (φύσις). See G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences” (1830), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 389/§360RZ; hereafter cited as PN.

19. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 1/§377Z.

20. Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, “Form and Explanation,” Critical Inquiry 43 (2017): 650–69.

21. Under the influence of Alfred Whitehead’s “process ontology,” Dupré has developed a critique of substance metaphysics as a philosophical foundation for biological inquiry. In part, Dupré’s approach rests on a catastrophic misreading of Aristotle and neglect of his central thesis that the form of a thing is the activity (ἐνέργεια) of that thing. See Aryeh Kosman, The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle’s Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). The deeper issue is that the process approach cannot explain what things are such that they materially embody the potential for such activity; there is no room for an account of the logically irreducible material dimension of things, since it is always taken to be just “process” again. Yet without the matter component in the form/matter composite, things would not be so much as susceptible to change and motion. See John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson, “A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology,” in Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, ed. Daniel Nicholson and John Dupré (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3–48.

22. Hegel, EL, 294/§230A.

23. See Aristotle, Physics, 200a33. I follow the translation of this passage in Martha Nussbaum, Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 92–93.

24. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 225; hereafter cited as AT.

25. Adorno, AT, 227.

26. See Robert Pippin, Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 157.

27. Adorno, AT, 18.

28. Adorno, AT, 306.

29. Adorno, AT, 289.

30. Hegel identifies what he refers to as “reason in the world” with the ancient notion of νοῦς. It does not mean that “consciousness inheres in natural things,” as in panpsychism, but that whatever is, as what is, bears an intelligible structure and is thus potentially thinkable. Hegel does not just assert this; it is the whole point of his Science of Logic to demonstrate it. See Hegel, EL, 58/§24A.

31. Marx, EPM, 3:328.

32. Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, ed. Nadezdha Rudenko and Yelena Vorotnikova (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1987), 25:475, 323.

33. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 25:489, 533. My emphasis.

34. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 25:476.

35. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, 25:254.

36. For the distinction between internal and immanent critique, see Rahel Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, trans. Ciarin Cronin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

37. For the classic formulation of the conservatism of the system and the revolutionary character of the method, see Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, 26:371.

38. I here follow the pathbreaking interpretation of the Logic in Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). See also Pippin’s remarks on Hegel’s “emancipatory logic” (18ff).

39. See G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20; hereafter cited as EPR.

40. Hegel himself makes a version of this claim in a clarificatory remark about the EPR in Hegel, EL, 33/§6.

41. Engels, Anti-Dühring, 25:76.

42. Engels, Anti-Dühring, 25:76.

43. Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature: Notes and Fragments, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, 25:489–490.

44. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 69/§398Z.

45. See, for example, Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). There are several attempts to tell such a story about modernist painting. See T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); and J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Yet both Clark and Bernstein rely on a Weberian narrative of modern disenchantment that does not, to my mind, do justice to the deepest level of the “problem of modernity”: the problem of freedom. See note 60 below.

46. For a powerful and innovative account of this double-edged promise in terms of the phenomenon of the gimmick, see Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).

47. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, ed. Robert Daglish et al. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 6:499.

48. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version),” trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 4:251–52.

49. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguins Books, 1976), 1:1019–38.

50. For an important discussion of “real subsumption” and its relation to literature, see Nathan Brown, “Postmodernity, Not Yet: Toward a New Periodization,” Radical Philosophy 201 (2018): 11–27. Where my approach diverges from Brown’s is in my claim that the moment of “late capitalism” begins with the collapse of the proletarian movement for socialism in the 1920s and the rise of fascism and Stalinism. Following the work of Robert Brenner, Endnotes, and Théorie Communiste, Brown emphasizes the need for an account “not just of the structure of capitalist contradictions but of their history” (19). But Brown (and the theorists he cites) focuses on the objective history of the economy (the movement from formal to real subsumption, to the unfolding of the consequences of the latter during the long downturn of the 1970s) at the expense of what Georg Lukács refers to as “the subjective factor in history,” the class consciousness of the proletariat; see Georg Lukács, A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, trans. Esther Leslie (London: Verso Books, 2002), 53. Capital becomes “late,” on my account, in outlasting the proletariat, whose existence depends in part on its conscious self-organization (on its being for itself what it is in itself). I discuss this more below. While Brown rightly aligns the cultural category of “late modernity” with the economic category of “late capitalism” (39), I trace late modernism to the publication of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), which echoes the defeat of a unifying, emancipatory politics in its literary re-creation of the Tower of Babel.

51. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 802.

52. For the classic Marxist argument against class reductionism in art and literary criticism, see Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, ed. William Keach (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005).

53. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 10ff.

54. Adorno, AT, 34. Translation revised.

55. For a parallel argument about “representation” in painting, see Robert Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel),” in The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 279–306.

56. See Theodor Adorno, Philosophical Elements of a Theory of Society, trans. Wieland Hoban, ed. Tobias ten Brink and Marc Phillip Nogueira (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).

57. For the most important articulation of this argument, see “Class Consciousness” in Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971).

58. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Joseph O’Malley and Richard A. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 69. Translation altered. This point in Marx, which is the basis for Lukács’s later emphasis on the distinctiveness of the “standpoint of the proletariat,” has been conveniently forgotten by recent critics of so-called “class abstractionism.” See, for example, William Clare Roberts, “Class in Theory, Class in Practice,” Crisis and Critique 10, no. 1 (2023): 249–62.

59. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 242/§486.

60. By “modernist” politics, I do not mean the politics of the modernists, which ran the gamut from fascism (Pound and Lewis) to democratic nationalism (Mann) to various idiosyncratic socialisms (Joyce), but rather a modernist form of politics, grounded in a belief in the possibility of a self-consciously directed project of social emancipation. The politics that best represented this idea was that of the German Social Democrats to the West and that of the Bolsheviks to the East. For an account of the purportedly deleterious effect exercised by such a political project on artistic modernism, see the chapter on Malevich and Lissitzky in Clark, Farewell to an Idea. The problems with Clark’s approach are, to my mind, three: (1) Clark adopts a one-sided, Weberian narrative of modernization as a process of disenchantment, missing what Marx identifies as the unrealized emancipatory potential of the capitalist ideal of freedom; (2) modernism is understood in Clark as an idea to be left behind—as an alternately manic (Malevich) and melancholic (Pollock) recognition of the triumph of contingency and disenchantment in modernity. Yet modernism is better understood as demonstrating the objective social limits on the struggle to realize the ideal of autonomy; and (3) instead of seeking to grasp the essential historical content of artistic form, Clark pursues a “contextualist” approach whereby modernist technique is always understood as a reaction to a set of historico-political circumstances (David’s “written painting” to the ambiguity of Marat’s political role in the revolution; Pissarro’s pointillism to fin de siècle socialism’s need of anarchism; and so on). Clark fails, in other words, to provide an internal rather than external account of the relation of artistic practice to capitalism.

61. Marx, EPM, 3:302.