Utopia or dystopia: On Eastern European Marxist insights into science and technology in aesthetics

Nature of science in contrast to art

What do Eastern European Marxists think of the essence of science? From the point of view of aesthetics, this question can be answered more clearly and effectively. György Lukács and his leading student, Agnes Heller from the Budapest School, contribute some answers to the same question in terms of the nature of the aesthetic sphere.

Lukács retains an interest in the comparison of science and art all his life and, by comparison, he reveals their separate natures, which he inherits from Immanuel Kant, who defines the three specific spheres of three critiques, and accepts Max Weber’s theory of differentiation of cultural modernity as science, moral and art. He maintains in his book Soul and Form (1911): ‘science affects us by its contents, art by its forms; science offers us facts and the relationships between facts, but art offers us souls and destines. Here the ways part; here there is no replacement and no transition’ (Lukács, 1974: 3). In primitive worlds, science and art are integrated and form a single whole, but with the development of society they gradually become high, abstract and independent spheres. In Lukács’ 1963 masterpiece Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen [Specificity of Aesthetic], he pays more attention to comparison of science with art from everyday life to higher spheres and defines the Marxist materialist root of science as reflection of social reality. In everyday life, science and art are located in a mixed complex and thus share a common basis. Beyond this common basis, during the process of labor and praxis, science and art develop separate higher spheres with different features. For him, science, as an abstract and universal form, is characteristic of Desanthropomorphisieren [de-anthropomorphization] (Lukács, 1981: 134), which involves the absence of subjective wills and subjective objects. This doesn’t mean that this is alienating or anti-humanistic, for true science as a scientific reflection of social reality is the foundation of human ethics. Science abstracts from everyday life and goes back to it, thus enriches and influences it. Lukács interprets the nature of scientific abstraction and universality from Ivan Pavlov’s theory of the signal system. If the aesthetic sphere operates according to the principles of Signal System 1, which Lukács invents on the basis of Pavlov’s topology of Signal System 1 and Signal System 2, because this sphere represents universal meaning by means of specific and rich images during the flow of contingency, then science complies with the principles of Signal System 2. For Pavlov, Signal System 2 is related to language or speech, that is to say ‘Signalen von Signalen’ [‘signal of signal’] (Lukács, 1981: 30) and thus closely associates with the nature of things. But for Lukács, Pavlov neglects the intimate relationship between Signal System 2, language and labor, and develops the social and historical features of scientific reflection. Obviously, Lukács mainly lays a materialist foundation for scientific forms against its idealist understanding.

Different from her teacher Lukács’ notion of science and art, though related to his, Agnes Heller, one of the most important members of the Budapest School, offers a more insightful understanding of the nature of science. Many of her writings concern the differences between science and aesthetics. Modern science is becoming more and more independent and problematical, but there exists a positive relationship between science and art, which is apparent in the Renaissance. According to Heller, it is an altogether traditional feature in Leonardo’s theory of scientific techné that he subordinates technique to science, but he sees the necessary correlation of technique and science. This means that science has nature as its praxis: ‘just as a captain without soldiers is no captain, so, too, a science without a praxis is no science’ (Heller, 1978: 406). During that period the social situation of artists and scientists could scarcely be called problematic. Artists and scientists were subject to the conventions of craft and community, and their patrons, but there was a new phenomenon to witness: ‘the emergence of scientific and artistic intelligentsia, illustrative of the status of science and art in the bourgeois order: production has become a matter of separate professions, products have become commodities’ (Heller, 1978: 406). In addition, in the Renaissance there was a harmonious relationship between science and art, between objectivity and subjectivity, for science gave rise to a new way of seeing. Heller interprets this relationship from art theory, which maintains that art is mimesis and art is science. In the Renaissance, art was the imitation of nature, different from the ancient notion of mimesis, which was the imitation of ethos; therefore the new interpretation was associated with artistic originality, reality and the scientific and technical program. In other words, art as mimesis had already dissolved its moral meaning. Art as science was an important theory in the period:

to be scientific was tantamount to becoming conscious of what one was doing. It was not enough for an artist to learn his art as a craft. He had to know what he was doing. He must be aware of the laws of his art and, what is more, of the laws of nature and reality which he is obliged to reproduce in his art. Finally, he must be conscious of the methods which make it possible to render as well as possible the observed relationships of nature. These methods are scientific and technical. Moreover, they can be developed further, just like the methods of science. (Heller, 1978: 410)

Paradoxical unity of science and art

Eastern European Marxists pay attention to the conception of modern culture which derives from science and art. As mentioned above, science and art belong to the conception of high culture in modernity and constitute a paradoxical unity of structure. György Markus, who is one of the leading critical members of the Budapest School, offers a key contribution to this consideration.

Critically adopting much from the Frankfurt School, especially Adorno and Benjamin, Markus clearly takes sciences and arts as spheres of high culture, which are conceived by him as culture’s ‘most important and determining domains’ (Markus, 2011: 64). He investigates the structural relation between sciences and arts based on the conception of culture and discovers two different striking phenomena. One is related to contemporary times. Science and arts develop towards similar tendencies. There are ‘strange similarities in the contemporary situation of the two great cultural domains: science and art’ (Markus, 2011: 60). For example, even the recent ‘science wars’ are closely mirrored by the ‘culture wars’ in the arts. Equally, we often hear of prognoses about ‘the end of art’ and ‘the end of science’; the well-known slogan of the ‘death of the author’ in literary theory finds its parallel in the ‘reflexivist’ approach in science studies, with its advocacy of a new, ‘multivocal’ form of science writing. This is a signal of absence of cultural modernity. The other phenomenon refers to the typical and classical structure of culture from the late 18th century to the end of the Second World War, on which Markus concentrates. Markus advances the theory of paradoxical unity of culture by interpreting the structure of ‘classical modern culture’. In terms of the relation of Author–Work–Recipient, he grasps the common characteristics necessarily shared by all forms of cultural practices as objectivation, idealization, autonomy and novelty. For sciences and arts, cultural objects are regarded as culturally significant only because they are conceived as vehicles and embodiments of some ideal complex of meanings which are regarded as intrinsically valuable, original and creative.

In modernity, however, this cultural relation doesn’t simply include these common characteristics but also their own fundamental difference from each other that confers an essential unity upon culture in terms of the same relation of Author–Work–Recipient. Thus Markus maintains that culture has an abiding structure with strict complementarity. ‘Unity was based upon the fact that the two most significant domains of this culture were constituted, both categorically and institutionally, as polar opposites’ (2011: 74). He compares arts with experimental sciences of nature. In the aesthetic domain the relation of the work to its author becomes specified as expression. The work of art is to be comprehended as the generally significant, yet unique, manifestation of an original and incomparable creative subjectivity, because for Markus subjectivity is most intimately connected with what makes something a work of art. The ‘subjectivization’ of aesthetic significance implies also the ‘subjectivization’ of reception, of ‘taste’. In aesthetic modernity there is increasingly a gulf between artistic practice and its public. The demand for originality in principle always implies an incongruence between the work as meaning-complex and the ingrained expectations of the recipients.

On the contrary, as for science, the interchangeability of the roles of author and recipient is made possible by the depersonalization of the authorial voice and its role in science. The textual objectivization that transforms the happenings in a laboratory into an ‘experiment’ simultaneously transforms a local, complex, and messy history into an ‘objective’ general description. One could say that the textual objectivations of experimental science reduce the role of literary form to the minimum possible, in order to foreground their referential, factual content. Thus in respect of their autonomy the two great domains of culture are constituted in sharply divergent ways. For the arts, autonomy means their defunctionalization, while modern science refers to the essentially monofunctional. As a result of its professionalization and specialization, and the dissolution of the very idea of a stable ‘scientific world-view’, a succession of ‘revolutions’ arises in its basic disciplines. Moreover, there are also equally fundamental differences between art and science in respect to how tradition is constituted and how new works are inserted into tradition. The aesthetically relevant tradition is ever expanding with great depth in time. Scientific tradition, on the other hand, is short term, since it is an ‘evolving’ tradition. Therefore, Markus concludes that from the viewpoint of the principles regulating the Author–Work–Recipient relation, the arts and the sciences are constructed as possessing directly opposed characteristics. In his view, this paradoxical unity is associated with the different institutional mechanisms of modern society:

this direct opposition is reflected in the fundamental differences in the institutional mechanisms through which their practices are integrated into the broader society. To put it simply – works of art are legally and economically constructed as private property which is at the same time a common good (in the economic sense). Scientific knowledge, as the genuine product of science, is treated as a common good, the appropriate employment of which can legitimately give rise to a particular form of private property. (Markus, 2011: 70)

Although we can see some influences from Lukács’ conception of science and art here, Markus further develops the theory of cultural modernity and interest in the structural mechanism and social institutionalization of sciences and arts. Certainly we can identify some similar ideas between Heller and Markus, who both regard science as a sphere of high culture full of meaning and value, but the differences between them are that Heller emphasizes the relation of culture to everyday life and norms/rules and function by means of a conception of homogeneity, while Markus makes good use of the methods of structuralism and theories of institutionalization. For me, Heller more deeply goes into cultural modernity through the two main imaginary institutions of signification, to use Cornelius Castoriadis’ term in The Imaginary Institution of Society, that is, historical imagination and technological imagination. And owing to the three logics of modernity, which consist of the logic of technology, the logic of functional allocation of social position and the logic of political power, which twists together like a network with the two main imaginary institutions, modern high culture as the first conception of culture is filled with unsolvable paradoxes: ‘the paradox that follows from the first concept of culture cannot be resolved or removed’ (Heller, 1999: 123). However, paradoxical unity doesn’t result in negative attitudes towards science and arts but in opportunity for modern persons. These attitudes will be present once again in the later discussion.

Possibility of scientific aesthetics

In Eastern Europe, the construction of scientific aesthetics is part of Marxist aesthetics. The field is complicated, paradoxical, and contradictory. Marxist-Leninist aesthetics is scientific in a sense, not only because of its association with scientific socialism, but also because it can take scientific achievements into consideration. Therefore, it can integrate art and science.

From the critical disputes on the possibility of Marxist aesthetics in Yugoslavia in the 1950s, the conception of scientific aesthetics was advanced and discussed in general by certain significant theorists. Ervin Šinko reveals that scientific aesthetics, as a programmatic aesthetics or normative aesthetics, was determined by Stalinism: ‘The time has come, to say once and for all: the thesis that Marx, Engels and Lenin created a scientific aesthetics is a fabrication, a legend created in the last decades of the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union’ (1955: 84). To the contrary, Boris Ziherl maintains the possibility of scientific Marxist aesthetics:

It is not clear from Comrade Šinko’s paper whether he rejects or acknowledges the possibility and necessity of scientific Marxist aesthetics. He claims that neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin created any scientific aesthetics, let alone an aesthetic canon full of imperatives, or a new normative science. I think Comrade Šinko told only half the truth. It is true that neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin created any system of aesthetics, similar to Kant or Hegel. Their work has never been explicitly directed in that direction. But they, and especially Marx and Engels, are undoubtedly the creators of a scientific theory of social development, so-called historical materialism, which alone can serve as a basis for building a truly scientific aesthetic. (Ziherl, 1955: 218)

Romania has contributed much to this topic. There are representatives in two periods when Marxists put forward the issue: the first generation includes Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea and contemporary semiotic or logic philosophers Wald Henri and Solomon Marcuse. The former is original and creative, given to conceive of a kind of scientific criticism of art, while the latter is systematic, designing logical and mathematical poetics.

Gherea, as a first generation Romanian Marxist literary theorist, accepts the Western scientific standpoint about arts, such as Hippolyte Taine’s notion which is characteristic of the scientific cult. In 1893–4, Gherea published writings on literature and science. On the basis of Marxism, he maintains a unity of science, art and revolution. In the essay ‘On Literary and Scientific Movement’ (‘Asupra Mişcării Literare şi ştiinţifice’), Gherea appeals to the true scientific spirit from Western Europe and longs for the dream of disinterested science. In his eyes, science means new objective and universal truth. He describes the German situation: ‘When educated youth came enthusiastically from all corners of Germany to listen to their great teachers Fichte or Hegel, it was of course a beautiful scientific movement. The longing for light and truth enlivened this youth; the longing to spread light and truth enlivened her great scholars’ (Dobrogeanu-Gherea, 1976: 419–20). For Gherea, this is also the beginning of a cultural movement, the beginning of a real literary and scientific movement that bears beautiful fruit. However, in Romania, there is no such science, and at the same time there appears the drought of literature: ‘we lack both the factors of a literary and scientific movement: writers and literary productions, on the one hand, and an audience to which these productions would address, on the other’ (Dobrogeanu-Gherea, 1976: 420). There exists a vicious circle: the public does not read because literary work is not produced and it is not produced because it is not read. Against this situation, Gherea advances a new possibility of literary and scientific movement on the basis of economic production and consumption: ‘A literary or scientific movement includes both factors or – in economic terms – includes both literary producers and consumers. A society also produces writers and readers, who influence each other and, together, form what we call a literary movement or a scientific movement’ (1976: 421). In other words, movements of literature and science have the same mechanism: both need to establish a healthy interaction between production and public readers. In my view, this is the first attempt to seriously conceive of Marxist scientific aesthetics. As to the literary movement, the generation of 1848 realized the communication of revolution with literary production, the harmony between production and the public. Gherea points out: ‘This movement fulfills all the conditions required of a true literary movement; it sprang from the needs of the social life of that time and, in turn, influenced this life; it had both the necessary factors in harmony with each other – the reading public and the literati’ (1976: 424). Here he introduces the conception of the modern proletariat armed with science and culture, which plays a decisive role in literary and scientific movements. From Gherea, literature as culture keeps harmony with science as intelligence.

In the essay ‘On Metaphysical and Scientific Aesthetics’ (‘Asupra Esteticei Metafizice şi Štiinţifice’), on the basis of scientific logic, Gherea follows pressing disputes with a disciple of Schopenhauer, Romanian literary theorist Titu Maiorescu, who insists on the aesthetic purity which is characteristic of metaphysical aesthetics, following Plato’s idea. He reveals logical errors and contradictions of Maiorescu’s aesthetic views and then clearly expresses his own notion of scientific aesthetics: ‘Analyzing a little this theory exposed in a few words by Mr. Maiorescu, we will see once again the difference between our views and his, between metaphysical aesthetics and modern scientific aesthetics’ (1976: 450–1). Gherea’s notion of scientific aesthetics implies a modern integration of secularization of aesthetics and science with universality and objective truth. Aesthetics goes hand in hand with science towards a common goal which overcomes egoism and subjectivism. It attests to the legitimation of Marxist aesthetics in modernity.

Gherea’s scientific aesthetics lay the foundation for the later Romanian Marxist aesthetics. In contemporary times, logical and mathematical poetics is a typical theory, which in a strict sense is called scientific aesthetics. Here we mainly are concerned with Henri Wald and Solomon Marcus.

Henri Wald reconstructed a dialectical logic poetics in the late 1950s (Introducere în logica dialectică, 1959) which attempts to unify the subjective and objective, human and nature, humanistic value and scientific truth. He is concerned with Albert Einstein’s notion: ‘What has constantly been beyond our knowledge is that we can have knowledge of the world’. In nature, there are no scientific truths. This doesn’t mean that knowledge is simply subjective but objective. The objectivity of knowledge follows not from social agreement but from its reflection of reality. From this, on the basis of dialectical thinking he criticizes structuralism. According to Wald, structuralism, as an ideology of resignation to the technocratic and bureaucratic tendencies of contemporary society, worships structure and becomes deterministic at the expense of freedom: ‘Structuralism restricts time to space, spiritual significations to physical signals, explanation to description, culture to nature, creation to production, individual man to a system of social relations and history not even to evolution but succession’ (1980: 4). Even so, structuralism has its relevance. With it a new science, semiotics, appears and contributes a deeper and more comprehensive new definition of the human, that is homo significans. Wald emphasizes rationality in the human world. Wald makes good use of structural analysis to interpret cultural and aesthetic activities. He disagrees with scholars like Heidegger on the irrational, and persists in the dialectical understanding of language: ‘Language, as a dialectical unity between speech and thought, has not only a cognitive, but also an emotional function; it does not hinder, but supports the development of knowledge much the same as air does not prevent but supports the flight of birds’ (Wald, 1980: 7). Therefore language does not only convey thoughts but also breeds thoughts. If an idea hasn’t been crystallized in a particular verbal form, then it is not yet an idea, but just a feeling of intellectual uneasiness. Only if an idea assumes verbal expression does there exist a thought. Language touches the essence of things in a special logic form. For Wald, literary text with the form of language achieves thoughts and meaning, so there exists a kind of logic of literature. We can call it logical poetics. Metaphor is a case in point. Wald critically touches the notion of Barthes’ interpretation of style and metaphor: ‘style is no more than metaphor’, which means ‘to write without writing’, but develops his own understanding: ‘the metaphor is precisely the carrier providing the uninterrupted flow between sensitivity and reason’ (1980: 223). Therefore, Wald’s idea is different from general aestheticians who consider a more expressive function and less cognition. He establishes the relation of individual and general through metaphor. According to him, ‘metaphor’ means ‘transport’: ‘The metaphor carries a particular meaning not only from the abstract to the concrete, but primarily from the concrete to the abstract’ (Wald, 1980: 224). He names metaphor as a kind of special logic, an infralogic, which is not prelogical, not extralogical nor illogical, for this special logic takes an unmediated part in the crystallization of logic form. In a word, Wald forms a new kind of aesthetics with structural analysis and scientific truth and develops the relationship of necessity and freedom of the human being. This is a ‘new humanism’ in his trilogy, i.e. Reality and Language (Realitate şi Limbaj, 1968), The Signifying Man (Homo significans, 1970), and Language and Value (Limbaj şi valoare, 1973) (but see Wald, 1973: 73).

Solomon Marcus is similar to Wald but more consciously advances mathematical poetics, or the school of mathematical poetics in terms of linguistic science or semiotics. In the 1960s, he advanced the conception of ‘mathematical poetics’. In his book Mathematical Poetics (1970), ¹ Marcus constructs a systematic theory about mathematical poetics on the basis of analyses of difference and relation between mathematical speech and poetical speech. He is interested in mathematical models in the study of literature. The idea of using mathematical methods in the study of literature is not exactly new. Baudelaire already observed that, in order to deepen the spirit of a poet, one must look for the words that appear most frequently in his work. This paved the way for the application of statistical methods in poetic research. The mathematician A. Markov, starting from the way in which vowels and consonants alternate in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, introduced, at the beginning of the 20th century, the concept, now famous in the calculus of probabilities, of the ‘Markov chain’. Étienne Souriau wanted to build an ‘algebra of the theater’, and Paul Ginestier elaborated a ‘geometry of the characters’. Marcus draws on the Romanian contributions. In the 1940s, mathematics penetrated the study of poetry not only in its quantitative aspects but also in its structural characteristics. An important precursor of structural mathematical poetics is the French scholar of Romanian origin Pius Servien, who created a structural representation of the opposition between lyrical language and scientific language. Hence, mathematical poetics as a fairly well-defined interdisciplinary domain is justified. What is mathematical poetics? Marcus defined it as follows: ‘Mathematical poetics is a friendly provocation that mathematicians direct to poets, literary critics, aestheticians, and stylists. It is proposed, like any poetic work, to explain the nature of poetic language and deepen its structure’ (Marcus et al., 1978: 129). This poetics is intended to obtain its scientific goal: to achieve the greatest possible adherence to the object. In the case of literature, there are two ways to achieve such adherence. The first way is to regard the relation of language to object as imitation by literary criticism; the second is differentiation of meta-language as language of research and poetical language, which belongs to mathematical poetics. Of course, poetic language and mathematical language are, from very different perspectives, incompatible. In mathematical language there is a concordance between the nature of expression and that of meaning, both presenting a discrete character, while in poetic language those natures are in contradiction, since the first is discrete and, therefore, countable, and the second is continuous or not countable. Mathematical significance is like a set of isolated points, while poetic significance suggests a solid line. However, Marcus insists that at a higher level of organization, mathematical and poetic language own a good number of common features that make them very mutually beneficial. Both are research and discovery languages and, precisely because of this, both promote maximum concentration of expression. And both can be put into motion, in the pursuit of their respective ends, the fundamental figures of language, both metaphorical and metonymic.

By combining semiotics and mathematics, i.e. mathematical linguistics, Marcus applies poetics to literary analysis. For instance, techniques of the Romanian poet Tudor Arghezi’s poem Ceasul de-apoi, ‘La hora postrera’, are interpreted by the set of concepts and results of the theory of trees, an important chapter of the mathematical theory of graphs. Throughout the poem, the paradigmatic distance between the terms of the metaphorical phrases grows, since it is successively equivalent, to 4 (abstract-metal), 5 (abstract-animal) and 6 (abstract-vegetable). This evolution is achieved at the cost of increasing the difference in generality between the two terms, which passes successively through the values 2, 3 and 4, while the degree of heterogeneity remains the same in all the metaphors considered. Now, the results obtained also depend, to some extent, on the way in which we construct the reference semantic tree. By means of Octav Onicescu’s theory of information energy, which is mathematical statistics, Marcus finds that Eminescu’s poem has an objective basis. He also explores poetic syntax. It is known that poetry often adopts a contorted syntax which is unfamiliar, according to formalism. He, however, discovers a precisely mathematical model here. In natural language, there exists a principle of structure-dependency which is created by French linguist Lucien Tesniere. For example, in the proposition ‘Cítese o carte foarte frumoasa’ (‘I read a very beautiful book’), ‘o’(a) depends on ‘carte’ (book), ‘carte’ on ‘citesc’ (I read), ‘frumoasa’ (beautiful) on ‘carte’, ‘foarte’ (very) on ‘frumoasa’. This structure-dependency is named by Marcus as syntactic projectivity. Poetical language is different from this projectivity; it is an exceptional phenomenon: ‘An examination of syntactic non-projectivity shows that one of its main sources is the poetic effect’ (Marcus et al., 1978: 133). Cezar Petrescu wrote the following sentence in his novel: ‘O pisică trecu albă pe linia gardului’ (A white cat ran through the fence line). According to Marcus, what is surprising in this sentence is the ambiguous situation of the word ‘albă’ (white), since it shows a double dependence, one with respect to the name ‘pisică’ (cat), and the other with respect to the verb ‘trecu’ (ran through). The word ‘alba’ fulfills both an adjective and an adverbial function; the verb ‘trecu’ does not depend on ‘pisică’, despite being located between ‘pisică’ and ‘albă’. He argues that this proposition is not projective. So is folklore writing. It shows that literary language is more complicated. However, it is highly effective to explore their characteristics by combining linguistics and mathematics. Marcus sees that the United States and other countries are working on these problems, with mixed teams of folklorists and mathematicians who program on special electronic computers different algorithmic processes for the analysis of folkloric productions.

Nowadays, with the speeding up of Big Data and AI, mathematical poetics is more feasible and effective. One can still ask: is it possible for mathematical poetics to penetrate deeply into the entity of poetry at all? Marcus says it should not be thought that the use of electronic computers solves by itself the great problem of folk interpretation and the definition of the various genres that act there. For him, ‘it is essential to develop an intense activity in the use of powerful methods elaborated by linguistics and modern aesthetics and corroborated with formalization procedures obtained by mathematical modeling’ (Marcus et al., 1978: 135–6). The project of scientific aesthetics is possible, following Marxism, while nevertheless facing significant controversy.

Art in the age of technology

I have discussed the nature of science in contrast to art and the paradoxical unity of modern high culture, this based on the reading of Eastern European Marxists and the possibility of scientific Marxist aesthetics. Now I come to their understanding of the relation of art and technology, which in my eyes is equally interesting in contemporary aesthetics. The ‘art problem in the age of technology’ is an important topic among Eastern European Marxists – for example, ‘Art in a Technical Age’, an extremely lively and fruitful philosophical meeting that took place in 1965, which was organized by the Yugoslav Philosophical Association. Important Marxists from the Praxis Group in Yugoslavia – Mihailo Marković, Gajo Petrović, Danko Grlić, Milan Kangrga, Danilo Pejović, Ivan Focht, etc. – offered penetrating reflections on technology from the perspective of aesthetics and the possibilities of art from technology.

Mihailo Marković, as one of the leading members from the Praxis Group, attaches importance to issues of technology from the point of view of Marxist humanism. He discusses the nature of technology, the critique of the extreme notion of technology and new interpretations of Marx’s idea of technology. Of course, what he says is located in the association with the consideration of art. For him, the world in which we live is becoming increasingly a technical world and the human is becoming more and more technical:

in the way he works, in the manner he loves, enjoys himself or behaves in society, and even in the manner in which he produces works of art – there is less and less spontaneity, directness, impulse, or irrationality and more and more science, mediation calculation, organization, planning, rationality. (Marković, 1966: 343)

Based on this concept of technology, Marković criticizes two modern opposite attitudes towards technology. One view treats technology as a positive value in itself, and thus identifies socialism with a society of highest industrialization; the other regards technology as a form of non-authentic human existence and as a type of alienated human relationship to the world. Agnes Heller is similar to Marković here. She questions two myths of technology: one myth regards technology, technical progress and the machine in general as ‘the repository of a human future, the other as an unending contraction of human possibilities’ (Heller, 1968: 135).

According to Marković, Marx’s attitude to technology, which is much more complicated, complete and comprehensive, is different from these two opposite views. Marx’s idea has the original sense of Greek techné and regards a high level of technical development as a condition of human freedom. It is not a philosophy of technicism but it is related closely to the human context, for Marx considers technology to be only a detail of practice and thus only a detail of the human’s entire being. Marković puts it as follows: ‘work is not only a “purposeful activity with the objective of producing use-values” in which technology would play a dominant role, but also production according to the laws of beauty’ (Marković, 1966: 350). Thus work has a creative character and expresses and realizes human individuality, which transcends the factors of technique. For Marković, this involves the representation of dialectics of technology and creation.

Marković’s dialectical and humanistic notion of technology is held in common with other members of the Praxis Group, and some Eastern European Marxists. Danko Grlić’s consideration of the relationship between technology and aesthetics is the most fruitful among the Praxis Group. In my view, his ideas are concerned with two points: the first is the paradoxical relationship between art and technology; the second is the interpretation of the central conception of technology in Walter Benjamin’s Marxist materialist theory of art.

In his paper ‘Wozu Kunst?’ (‘For What Is Art?’), he reflects on the situation of art in the age of increasing technology and reveals the complicated connection between them. He points out that, in modern society, technology speeds up to influence all human activities, not only material life but also spiritual life, and to transform ideal and value in philosophy, hence to change the relationship between the human and art. In the world of dominant technology, life and society are impoverished and instrumentalized, and it is vital for art to emerge as an original, individual and autonomous form, as Nietzsche’s aloneness. This world more and more needs authentic art, which expresses humanity and the meaning of Being. According to Grlić:

the age of the unheard-of success of technology, our technical age, which is also constantly being technologically advanced, will, under certain conditions, also become an age of unlimited potential dissemination of art: at the same time, however, it will also become an age of tiredness, resignation and total disinterest in art. (1966: 274)

From the above analysis, one can see that Grlić’s idea is similar to but different from the Frankfurt School’s position. In my opinion, he dialectically understands Adorno’s radical critique and Benjamin’s positive attitude. This can be witnessed in Grlić’s booklets, especially in Misaona avantura Waltera Benjamina (Walter Benjamin’s Thought Adventure). This booklet on Benjamin is filled with insights which critically provide a new and open interpretation of his aesthetics on technology. For Grlić, Benjamin’s thought is based on the key term ‘technology’, which is neglected by most interpreters such as Adorno, Paetzold, and Tiedmann: ‘Technology, therefore, occupies a central value place in Benjamin. In the technique, a work is read in its socio-practical function. It is important for an opus how much it manages to freely plead for the technique available to modern society’ (1984: 21). For Benjamin, technology is a central term of the new materialist theory of art with importance as to theoretical construction, because it breaks up the notion of form and content, and the theory of reflection. It pays more attention to how than what. Through an analysis of technology, a work of art is present materialistically and concretely, thus laying bare its mystery. What’s more, technology can resolve the dilemma between political tendency and artistic quality of work: ‘For Benjamin, for example, the most advanced literary technique guarantees both a progressive political tendency and a literary quality’ (Grlić, 1984: 20). It is through the concept of technology that Benjamin approaches Baudelaire’s poetry, Brecht’s epic drama, especially film and photography, involving modern artistic experience and its political situation – all of these artistic phenomena are characteristic of the passing away of aura in traditional and classical artwork. Thus, in the history of Western aesthetics which is explored by Grlić in the 1970s (Aesthetics I–IV), Benjamin’s art theory on this basis of technology goes beyond auratic aesthetics, that is, it proclaims the end of traditional aesthetics, and then becomes post-auratic or post-aesthetic theory which implies the materialist process of artistic production, that is the inevitable Renaissance of Marxist aesthetics. For me, Grlić’s interpretation is significant and creative, raising Benjamin’s art theory to the level of a history of aesthetics and making us rethink the justification of his adventure of thought.

However, Grlić doesn’t completely endorse Benjamin’s adventure. The reason is that Benjamin over-evaluates the positive face of new technology and media, and thus understates the negativity of technology. Grlić says, ‘To identify, however, social, economic, class, and even ideological progress with progress of technology – which in the case of art is exemplified with the possibility of technical reproduction of a work – has become quite problematical today’ (1984: 59). As mentioned above, he argues that we should treat technology with doubt and reflection, even if it advantages us. Furthermore, with the idea of freedom and humanistic creation, he questions Benjamin’s theory of the end of aura and destruction of aesthetic conception and autonomous art. For him, Benjamin mistakenly contrasts the auratic quality of work and technological reproduction and remains confident in the progressive force of technology. But he doesn’t heed that the most important measure is how to use technology to serve work itself, how best to express our thoughts and wishes. Grlić argues that, ‘technology is the medium of the realization of a work. The work determines technology, not technology work’ (Grlić, 1984: 71). For him, Benjamin simplistically identifies artistic technology and material productive technology, this without consideration of Marx’s well-known notion about uneven development between artistic creation and material production. Moreover, he doesn’t pay sufficient attention to the irrational structure and danger lurking in technology, which Benjamin radically opposes. Further, Benjamin’s theory of technology is dependent on political motivation and establishes the legitimation of the end of art, hence losing the legitimation of authentic or autonomous art against the cultural industry as justified by Adorno and Horkheimer. So there are some paradoxes in Benjamin’s considerations on the aesthetics of technology. To conclude: Grlić cautiously approaches technology and maintains a dialectical understanding of the tension between technology and art.

In addition, Gajo Petrović criticizes Lenin and Todor Pavlov’s theory of reflection, which is based on science and technology, because it is ‘irreconcilable with Marx’s conception of man as a creative being of praxis’ (Petrović, 1966: 333) and naturalism-humanism. Danilo Pejović discusses the possibility of art at the epoch of technique from Aristotle’s theory of the production of art based on mimesis. Following Marx’s criticism of alienation and reification, he criticizes the concept of technology as metaphysics and then expresses his understanding of technology: ‘only humanized technology will again permit humans to admire the wonder of Being, to enjoy the beauty of nature, and to seek the hidden meaning of the world, without the hope that they will ever fully fathom it’ (Pejović, 1966: 216). Ivan Focht draws attention to the relation between modern music and the technology of instruments and identifies an important problem, namely, that there is lacking here a fully communicative function (but see Focht, 1966). Finally, I want to highlight Agnes Heller’s words about technology as the embodiment of the Eastern European Marxist dialectical notion of technology: ‘technology, I repeat, is our opportunity. We have to make use of this opportunity to create a world of genuine humaneness, whose technical base can only be laid down in the course of many generations’ (Heller, 1968: 142).

The same topic is discussed by Yugoslav Marxist aesthetician Milan Damnjanović, who does not belong to the Praxis Group but develops a more positive theory, similar to Lukács’ Marxist aesthetics. He published a prominent book, Suština i povest (Essence and History), in 1976. In the last chapter, ‘Art at the Technological Age’, he discusses art as an experiment, technology in art, information theory in aesthetics, the scientific and technical revolution, modern art and aesthetic education, and finally he puts forward the idea of a polyvalent aesthetics.

For him, there exists a conscious relationship or agreement between modern art and experiment, creation and scientific spirit. ‘Perhaps this agreement points to the common source of all true anaphoric human activities, those that elevate, renew or enhance our lives, to the core or essence of the creative human being’ (Damnjanović, 1976: 275). Art as true play represents agreement between technology and nature, cosmic and human, history and technology, historical reason and technological reason. From this, Damnjanović critically approaches two positions of technology, i.e. Heidegger’s existentialist-ontological view and the positivist-scientific one. In modernity, technology becomes technocracy and formalism, and thus is alienated from human and historical meaning. Information theory in aesthetics is a variation of experimental science, making the best of mathematics, cybernetics, and so on. This kind of aesthetics, for Damnjanović, is fit for a new age of technology, which is different from traditional aesthetics. More importantly, it is based on materialist theory: ‘The new aesthetics starts from the material nature of communication, from the materiality of the work of art itself’ (Damnjanović, 1976: 291). For him, it consists of aesthetics from semiotics, information theory, mathematics, cybernetics, etc. Statistic aesthetics is included here. However, its problem is that if art goes to the extreme in this direction, art will exist outside history and human existence, and then art will lose its special paradigmatic value and legitimation, which without doubt means the death of art.

However, Damnjanović takes a dialectical position and considers the unity of art and technology as the possibility of enriching human existence:

if we are talking about a modern man and an artist who takes an experimental position, then it is not just a question of some form of alienation, but also a search for opportunities to enrich human life and the human environment. If art and technology in our era originate from the same sources, from which today’s science and philosophy are nourished, then one can understand the aestheticization of practical purposes and technical objects, as well as the delusion of art into the practical existence of man: art itself thus becomes in a certain way technical, and technique artistic. (1976: 296)

To conclude, Eastern European Marxists provide many profound insights into science and technology in the field of aesthetics. Their positions and attitudes are diverse and complicated, characteristic of Marxist dialectics, not only critical but also constructive, which are different from Western Marxist’s radical universalism and aesthetic utopianism, this even while there have been many dialogues between Eastern and Western Marxists over the past 80 years. To some degree, then, these sources may be more helpful for Chinese socialism pursuing a good life than the theory of the Western Marxists.