Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries (review)

Liu Kang's excellent study of aesthetic Marxism traces the ways in which culture and cultural revolution are intertwined with Marxist critiques of capitalist modernity and proposals for an alternative modernity. In Aesthetics and Marxism, Liu critically assesses the aesthetic debates shaping Chinese Marxist discourse in the twentieth century. At the same time, he offers insights into the relationship between Chinese debates and concepts and those that frame contemporary Western Marxism. Through this comparative framework, Liu discusses the structural resemblance between the contemporary Western criticism of capitalist modernity and the primacy of cultural critique in modern China. The comparative framework highlights the need to broaden the understanding of Marxist aesthetics beyond a Western framework. The end result is an extremely erudite and provocative analysis of the centrality of culture and aesthetics to modern Marxism. Liu's analysis disrupts through a consideration of the aesthetic in China's alternative modernity the totalizing myth of the capitalist West as modernity.

Liu begins his examination of Marxist aesthetics in China with the assertion that "the aesthetic is a discourse of modernity par excellence, for it articulates the intrinsic contradictions of modernity in the most concrete and 'sensuous' of terms" (p. 3). He then proceeds to historicize the ambiguity of the term and the ways in which the aesthetic became a preferred topic through which Chinese intellectuals mediated the contradictions associated with a Chinese passage to modernity. He argues that the ways in which the aesthetic discourse was articulated in the Chinese context exacerbated the inherent tensions of modernity, replaced bourgeois subjectivity with revolutionary subjectivity, and resulted in the concomitant politicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics.

One of the main questions addressed in this book is how culture became so central to the Chinese Revolution. By insisting that we focus on the dynamic interaction between the political and cultural spheres, Liu calls for understanding the Chinese Revolution as an alternative modernity project. He objects to earlier studies of culture in the Chinese Revolution that attribute the importance of culture to voluntarism, utopianism, culturalism, and subjectivism in Mao's thought. Instead Liu proposes new interpretations of Maoism and culture that explore the embeddedness of the aesthetic discourse in both realpolitik and cultural politics. To do this necessitates recognizing the pluralism of Chinese Marxism represented by the diverse ideas of Hu Feng, Qu Qiubai, and Li Zehou in addition to the standard Maoist text, the Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art (1942). Liu brings to the surface the ways in which Maoist aesthetics constituted both innovative theoretical and strategic strategies and instrumentalist measures. At the same time, by examining the ideas of those who challenged Mao's ideas on art and aesthetics, Liu avoids the simplistic conclusion of much of the scholarship on culture and politics in modern China that culture was ultimately subservient to politics. Rather, Marxist theorists of this period, including Hu Feng, who continuously challenged Mao's ideas on aesthetics, did not separate aesthetic form from political or ideological content. Rather, as Liu states with respect to Hu Feng, they "looked instead at the immanent ideological content of the aesthetic form itself" (p. 101).

Likewise, as a participant in the 1956-1964 aesthetic debate, Zhu Guangqian countered Mao's ideological orthodoxy and mechanical materialism with an alternative interpretation of the Marxist notion of ideology and art. In each of these instances, as Liu adeptly demonstrates, the aesthetic is central to political debate and it is not a matter of privileging one over the other. While the point thus stated simplifies the complex argumentation of the book, it is an important point often glossed over in politically situated critiques of art and ideology in the Maoist period that presume a totalitarian state concerned only with power and not with alternative modernity as a project.

Another important concept analyzed throughout the book is that of subjectivity. Liu examines subjectivity in...