The political-literary in contemporary aesthetic and literary theory

Invitations to literary and cultural analysis through the lens of historical contextualization have not been uncommon. Yet, appeals such as Fredric Jameson's proverbial, 'Always historicize!' (1981: ix), dating back to the early 1980s, have not been comprehensively implemented in literary theory. In 2019, Galin Tihanov notes that our understanding of literary theory has been greatly skewed and impoverished by our reluctance to historicize it' (2019: 5). More recently, and with particular attention to the connection between German hermeneutics and philosophy, Erhard Schüttpels evaluates Theory' (and he uses the English word in his original German source) as a 'hybrid form of a deliberately anti-historical or anti-theoretical discussion' (2023: 163). In light of the above distinction between political literature and the politics of literature, I add that the ongoing paradigm of the politics of literature often in fact ignores the specific historical and social, ideological and political contexts of literature. Related discussions simply miss the conceptual grid through which they could capture more straightforward literary action - or what is here denoted as political literature.

After a period of exhaustion with its discursive omnipresence in New Social Movements (in line with the motto, 'Private is political'; see Jameson 1984: 189), the political dimension of literature again became popular in the laudatory reception of a theory that resists disciplinary compartmentalization in existing academic niches: accompanied by a series of related works that oscillate between political theory and aesthetics, literary, film and performance studies, Rancière's seminal The Politics of Literature (2007) led to a revival of discussions about the relationship between literature and politics, but on a basis substantially different from the positions we know from modern debates about realism and the avant-gardes. Thanks to its spectacular popularity, the politics of literature lost its original attachment to a single theorist. As it continued to grow conceptually; it became a symptom of an ongoing epistemological shift which virtually eliminates connections between literature and politics altogether. For all the differences between individual thinkers, contemporary aesthetics - especially in its confluence with political thought - hinges on an understanding of the aesthetico-political (Plot 2014; see Chapter 2), which is not so much concerned with politics as interest-based and goal-oriented action but rather with various discursive articulations of aisthesis that are regarded as somehow political. The aesthetico-political is not so much concerned with the rigorous analysis of economic tendencies, or of political institutions and movements which articulate the paradoxes in the material and immaterial reproduction of society; as it is with the interventions in the symbolic constitution of society that hopefully open a space for the disruption and transformation of the whole (see Plot 2014: 4). By turning away from political action in the traditional sense of the word, these discussions implicitly and explicitly reject the intersections of literature and organized politics as ideological, authoritarian and potentially totalitarian." It is only logical, then, that in the respective renderings of the politics of literature the historical and undoubtedly more radical chapters of the political-literary are left out of the frame.

What Perry Anderson says about Western Marxism, namely that until the 1960s it alienated itself from any form of revolutionary praxis, applies equally to post-1968 theory, both literary and political. Anderson explains this alienation of theoretical Marxism by referring to the practical disappearance of revolutionary politics: 'At its deepest level, the fate of Marxism in Europe was rooted in the absence of any big revolutionary upsurge after 1920, except in the cultural periphery of Spain, Yugoslavia and Greece' ([1976] 1989: 42). This assertion corresponds with Kristin Ross's later conclusion on the limited political horizon of theoretical innovations which soon came to be identical with '1968' (Ross 2002b) - implying first and foremost, 'the revolutionary character [of] modernist language' (Juvan 2020: 740; see Kristeva 1984). Especially when one considers the antithetical constellations of literature and politics in '1928' and '1968, the discourse on the politics of literature appears to be a third-generation heir that excessively squanders the legacy of its own historical antecedents. As long as critical thought capitalizes on the fruits of the long summer of theory' (Felsch 2021) and therefore continues to revolve around the caesura of 1968, incessantly overlooking its own prehistories, it naturalizes its own disciplinary identity. Ultimately, it becomes as ideological as any traditional theory' (Horkheimer 1988), thus closing the historical circle - from ideology to critique and back.

The notion of the politics of literature is, furthermore, compatible with an ongoing depoliticization of the discipline evident since the 1990s. This latter process can be summarily presented as follows: when literary theory, in the times that followed the 'end of history (Fukuyama 1992), successfully liberated itself from the ideological predilections it was infused with in the more activist 1960s and 1970s, this depoliticization of the discipline went hand in hand with a return to the origins of literary criticism emerging in the nineteenth century. A symptom of this process was the revival of the world literature concept (see Holden 2003: 231; Schaub 2019, esp. 15-17) based on the great modern narratives of cosmopolitanism and liberalism. In the 1990s, the revamped literary theory began to resemble its own nineteenth-century predecessor, which at the time did not emerge as a historical discipline (Gumbrecht 2003: 46). Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht relates this ahistorical profile to the successful revolutions' (2003: 46) that preceded the emergence of literary theory as a new field of intellectual inquiry in nineteenth-century France, England and the United States: In these victorious new states, the normative image of society was constituted not by supposed remembrances from a glorious national past but by general "human" values without any specific index of historicization' (2003: 46). Accordingly, one may add, literary studies in the victorious state of global capitalism (after the funeral of socialism as its challenging other) remain more interested in topographies and synchronicities than in the historical and social dynamics of literature.

This troubling state of the discipline fortunately provokes intervention, and the last decade has been remarkably productive in studies that explore political and literary proposals and solutions which operate against and also transcend the binary logic that propelled the short twentieth century by juxtaposing war communism with warmongering capitalism or Stalinist authoritarianism with unfettered market liberalism. The potential in exposing these heterodox twentieth-century proposals and solutions is to counteract the devastating denial of alternatives (see Wemheuer 2008b: 8) on which the post-political era was based, and which also survives the clash and dissolution of empires that we have been experiencing in recent years. If we are to seek this counteraction today, we need knowledge - knowledge not in the sense of individualistic ethos and private Bildung but in the sense of invigorating a broad social - Lukács would say 'total' (1972: xxi) - consciousness that has been deemed obsolete in the lifespan of just one generation (my own in particular). For the sake of this invigoration, this book hopefully releases the suppressed utopian potential of a form of thought and a strategy of political action that Lukács calls tertium datur. It makes its own specific contribution to the above titles, offering new ideological and aesthetic outlooks to the contemporary reader.

Tertium datur

Throughout the book, the perspective of tertium datur is maintained as a lesson: not as a historical lesson to be passively acquired and consumed, but as a critical foundation upon which deep learning can be built. In line with this, the generative grammar of this book sets out from the warning 'not to fall back on the idols of old in our moment's crisis' (Mohan and Dwivedi 2019: 217) and then excavates the historically forlorn third solutions to the dilemmas and juxtapositions of evolution and revolution which negotiate the political in the very paradigm of politics. As will be variously describe throughout the book, sometimes these solutions (and there have been more than on kind) opt for hybridization of the juxtaposed sides, sometimes for their symbiosis, and sometimes for a dialectical synthesis.