Western Marxism’s central concern was the aesthetics of developed capitalist culture.
Evidence
In compensation, Western Marxism found its centre of gravity in philosophy, where a series of outstanding second-generation thinkers — Adorno, Horkheimer, Sartre, Lefebvre, Marcuse — constructed a remarkable field of critical theory, not in isolation from surrounding currents of non-Marxist thought, but typically in creative tension with them. This was a tradition deeply concerned with questions of method — the epistemology of a critical understanding of society — on which classical Marxism had left few pointers. But its philosophical scope was not merely procedural: it had one central focus of substantive concern, which formed the common horizon of this line as a whole. Western Marxism was above all a set of theoretical investigations of the culture of developed capitalism. The primacy of philosophy in the tradition gave these enquiries a particular cast: not exclusively, but decisively, they remained true to the concerns of aesthetics. Whatever else it included, culture signified, first and foremost, the system of the arts. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 175
Categorization
- XREF: Frames Western Marxism’s aesthetic core — the very lineage (Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno) Jameson inherits and that postmodernism will interrogate. — connects to: Western Marxism advanced aesthetics but never extended Marxist political economy — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 290; Jameson’s postmodernism theory is the culminating synthesis of Western Marxism. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 178; Marxism shaped Cultural Studies by posing central questions even as practitioners worked against it (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Capitalist commodification displaces the aesthetic value of art
#expands(0.85) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 69 - Marxism shaped Cultural Studies by posing central questions even as practitioners worked against it
#expands(0.78) - Marxist ideology carries a negative judgment and must be analyzed as superstructure
#qualifies(0.75)