Crisis of Work, Crisis of Realism

In the wake of the World Economic Crisis of the 1930s, aesthetic realism became associated with a commitment to Marxist politics, most famously so in the Expressionism debate. In response to this debate, Bertolt Brecht observed that if artistic representation wanted to be realist it would have to unfailingly change and renew itself because the artist was at every turn confronted with new problems for whose resolution no theoretical precepts existed. By contrast, Georg Lukács's understanding of realism was more systematic but also narrower: Based on a dialectic of essence and appearance, Lukács condemned all forms of artistic expression that failed to give form to the essence of social antagonisms and instead remained beholden to the fragmented and distorted surface of reality. The aversion to fragmentation expressed in Lukács's vocabulary is no coincidence, for it indicates an identification of modernism with capitalism as such: In only mirroring the seeming disjointedness of capitalist social reality, modernism is structurally blocked from registering the underlying “total” historical tendencies.

Recently, Lukács's concerns with fragmentation and totality have received renewed attention. One prominent and much cited German example is the work of Bernd Stegemann, who has been employed as a dramaturg at the Berlin Schaubühne and Berliner Ensemble, and whose eloquent advocacy for the renewal of a critical realism habitually employs the Lukácsian vocabulary of “splintered” and “torn” surfaces. Echoing Lukács's conjoining of modernism and capitalism, Stegemann fuses postmodernism and neoliberal capitalism. Yet Stegemann's intellectual foundations are not, as in the case of Lukács, the works of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Karl Marx, but rather the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, from whom he takes the distinction between “other-reference” (Fremdreferenz) and “selfreference” (Selbstreferenz). In Stegemann's assessment, contemporary art suffers from an excess of self-referential effects, and he proposes that it can be cured from it only by cultivating collective and mimetic dramatic practices. He views neoliberalism as isolating and alienating and yearns for the renewal of communal bonds (Gemeinschaft).