Aesthetics in Transition: Splendor and Misery of Materialist Aesthetics

At the beginning of the millennium, Metzler-Verlag, then still based in Stuttgart and Weimar, published a reference work that was enthusiastically celebrated in specialist circles: “Aesthetic Basic Concepts. Historical dictionary in seven volumes«. The publisher advertised it as follows: “The aim is to open up current aesthetic knowledge in an inter- and transdisciplinary lexicon. Starting from the present and its media world, the respective development of terms in a European cultural comparison is shown.” In a review in the university magazine “Research Frankfurt” it was described as “Currently probably the most ambitious and conceptually original reference work in the field of aesthetic theory,” which will “probably remain in this leading position for a long time.” In the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin it was called a dictionary “a basic work on aesthetics and cultural studies”.

Jan Loheit, a German scholar and sociologist who teaches in Halle and lives in Weimar, has now worked through the history of the work’s creation. For his meticulous reconstruction of the creation of the anthology, in which around 150 authors were involved, he first takes into account the connection between aesthetics and social theory. Because a materialistic aesthetic, he writes in “Aesthetics and Social Criticism”, should not turn away from questions of shaping the world: “It knows that aesthetic experience unfolds in the functional and reception pleasure of design processes, in the comprehensive sense of the design of living conditions. Her main question is how community-oriented agency can be gained in the space of the aesthetic. This includes decoding the network of the reproduction of power in the imaginary and cultural purposeful action.«

The conceptual foundations for such materialist aesthetics were developed in the 20th century by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno and partly by structuralism and reception aesthetics. But, as Loheit shows, also from non-dogmatic thinkers in GDR cultural studies. The author reconstructs how the search for an unorthodox historical-materialist conceptual work, which saw itself as a solidarity-based revision of Marxist philosophy and cultural theory, was replaced “in the course of the change in cultural hegemony from the 1980s to the turn of the millennium” by an opposing effort: the search for Connection to hegemonic discourses of “the West”.

Loheit explores this process through close readings of publications by those involved and through careful work on unpublished archive materials. He can build on the few studies on the subject that have existed before him and he goes far beyond them. On the one hand, through his substantive focus on the fundamental debate about concepts of aesthetics, and on the other hand, through his own thesis formation on the current situation of a Marxist-critical social and cultural theory. His conversations with Michael Franz, one of the leading heterodox theorists during the GDR era, were particularly fruitful.

Loheit traces “the prehistory of the dictionary, (…) starting with the high-tech revolution that emerged in the early 1960s, the founding of the GDR cultural studies and the (Leipzig) Central Institute for Literary History, (…) up to the early 1980s.” . He outlines how the upheavals in the area of ​​technical productive forces resulted in a change in the culture of knowledge. Interdisciplinary approaches from philosophy, literary and cultural studies as well as design theory and art studies have led to internal Marxist reform attempts since the 1960s. Georg Lukács’ realism dogma should be transformed into an innovative concept of “appropriation” through readings of Benjamin and Hanns Eisler, but also through the reception of Adorno, structuralism as well as semiotics and reception aesthetics. Lothar Kühne and Wolfgang Heise’s “multi-place aesthetics” marked a categorical paradigm shift through a Marxist-based semiotics. For the first time, architecture, design, communication and perception could be adequately taken into account conceptually. “Aesthetic culture” became the new key term.

The dictionary project arose in a not unproductive political-institutional field of tension between the party, ML institutions and the group of cultural studies-oriented “Berlin Aesthetics”. This combined materialistic practical philosophy and semiotics with the aesthetics of mass culture and an emancipatory theory of product and spatial design. But in the end, the “Berlin aesthetic,” which the dictionary project originally used as a conceptual basis in conjunction with Leipzig cultural studies, was downgraded to a sideline in the history of ideas.

Loheit provides striking representations of the science-political constellations in which the editors of the dictionary tried to stay afloat with a research group at the University of Siegen and with the conservative Konstanz School of Conceptual History. A project that began as a collective theoretical reaction to the collapse of the aesthetic-cultural-scientific paradigms of Marxist-Leninist philosophy was transformed into a series of individual reactions to the paradigm collapse of cultural modernity due to the collapse of the (scientific) political power relations.

The reorientation caused a shift in the historical-materialist focus. A practical-philosophical search for possibly resistant aesthetic experiences in mass culture was replaced by uncritical descriptions of the global aestheticization of the living world. Aesthetic postmodernism was no longer criticized as the “cultural logic of late capitalism” (to paraphrase Fred Jameson); it was celebrated as a colorful new cultural era. Loheit’s thesis is: The criticism of reason inspired by Jean-François Lyotard, under whose flag Karl Heinz Barck set the dictionary project to sea when it began to lose importance in philosophy, lives again in current trends towards the aestheticization and culturalization of social theory on. Anyone looking for arguments for a pointed criticism of Andreas Reckwitz, Bruno Latour and Gernot Böhme in the age of digitalization and seemingly immaterial work will find what they are looking for in Loheit. His book reconstructs an important, unfairly neglected section of the GDR’s scientific history. Not in the sense of archiving, but with a view to the present and the renewal of critical social theory.

Jan Loheit: Aesthetics and social criticism. Contexts of the dictionary of basic aesthetic terms. Argument Verlag, 320 pages, br., 25 €.