ABSTRACT
In brief, to the degree that ‘art is largely autonomous vis à vis the given social relations’,5 a Marxist analysis, while it may offer supplementary illumination, can never touch the truly essential questions. The only oddity here consists in Marcuse’s claim that this position constitutes a critique, rather than an accurate characterisation, of Marxist approaches to the study of artistic phenomena. Except for the respects in which his argument is directed against the official Soviet codification of the doctrine of socialist realism, it is surely misdirected: Marxist approaches to the study of art, when taking the form of an attempt to develop a distinctive Marxist position within the tradition of philosophical aesthetics (Lifshitz, Lukács, Vazquez, della Volpe, Althusser), have entirely conformed to the dualistic logic of analysis which Marcuse proposes. Sociohistorical analysis may reveal this, that or the other interesting particular about individual works of art, but never anything about Art itself which, in the last analysis, is the ultimately determining force behind, or within, every individual work of art: the individual formulations may vary, but each of the major traditions of
Marxist aesthetics developed to date offers a restatement of this central and shared proposition.
