Lukács’s Concept of Imputed Consciousness (pdf full text) Nature, Society and Thought, 15(2), 2002, 133-155
Lukács’s Concept of Imputed Consciousness in Realist Literature
Robert Lanning
Hans Freiberg is a partisan, a student of philosophy, and the son of a German-Jewish professor. Between partisan activities, “traveling in night trains, on our way to derail night trains,” he introduces his comrades to Masaryk, Adler, Korsch, Labriola, Lukács, Marx, and Engels. Hans knows the odds of fighting in the French forests in the 1940s, and if it comes to it (which it does), he wants to choose the meaning of his death. For Hans, death as a partisan is a choice; as an individual it is a refusal “to have [a fascist] destiny inscribed in his [Jewish] body.” We know little more than this of the character in Jorge Semprun’s The Long Voyage (1964), and these pieces lie in sections of the novel separated by 150 pages.
In an interview in the 1960s, Georg Lukács considered Hans and the mother in Heinrich Boll’s Billiards at Half-Past Nine, to be representative of the “formation of a conscious minority [as] the precondition of a mass movement.” On the strength of a few sentences, Lukács gives to Semprun’s character the status of a literary type: “this Jewish communist partisan who falls in France is the first figure in literature who stands at the level of the Warsaw uprising” (1975a, 67–70). Hans can be given such a heightened status because he articulates a moral lesson about the partisans’ actions, and because these are integral to Semprun’s larger narrative of consciousness and resistance. Similarly, the mother in Boll’s work is a background figure throughout the novel whose defining action occurs only at its end. We may not need to know more about such characters to confer upon them the status of literary type, such as we do about Goethe’s fully developed Wilhelm Meister or Adrian Leverkuhn in Thomas Mann’s Faustus. With or without extensive representation, the literary type is able to represent both the tensions of everyday life, and historical trends and conflicts that shape the wider world.
The realist, Lukács argued, has a responsibility “to seek out the lasting features in people, in their relations with each other and in the situations in which they have to act; he must focus on those elements which endure over long periods and which constitute the objective human tendencies of society and indeed of mankind as a whole” (1977, 47). A literature that reflects the substance, contradictions, and uncertainties of life, that demonstrates the political and ethical ground upon which characters develop, illuminates the critical choices for or against human progress. As he remarked to Anna Seghers, this is the “intellectual and moral work” of the writer, reflecting the lives of people through the imaginative and analytical work of literary construction in ways that might lead to a greater awareness of how historical relations produce a social environment of a given time and place (Lukács 1981, 178).
The tremendous social power of literature consists in the fact that it depicts the human being directly and with the full richness of his inward and outward life,in concrete fashion not equalled by any other field of reflection of objective reality. Literature is able to portray the contradictions, struggles and conflicts of social life in the same way as these appear in the mind and life of actual human beings, and portray the connections between these collisions in the same way as they focus themselves within the human being. (Lukács 1981, 143)
Realism is the superior form of literature, for it is capable of bringing to consciousness the possibilities and problems of social life which the interested person may then bring to bear on the struggle for social change.
In contrast to his views on realism, Lukács had a clear dislike for “illustrating literature” that trapped characters in didacticism and immediacy, illustrating appropriate paths of behavior and acceptable political attitudes. Although Lukács characterized these literary problems as “Stalinist” after 1956, his term “literature-as-illustration” more appropriately captures the central problem applicable to other literary styles. Expressionism, naturalism, and romanticism carried their own problems, some of which were similar, some different from the so-called “Stalinist” literature. None of these forms was capable of fully representing the complex reality of capitalism and the necessary struggles against it. The term “literature-as-illustration” describes a literature devoid of the historical substance of class struggle, scientific inquiry, and philosophical debate—a literature that reduces history and the problems of everyday life to slogans and formulaic resolutions.
The realist writer or critic can argue against illustrative literature, but the realist cannot argue for an approach to narrative and character development that considers political and ethical issues to be an affront to a supposed neutrality of writer and reader. The tension implicit here is what moved Steiner to note, “Marxism-Leninism and the political regimes enacted in its name take literature seriously, indeed desperately so” (1998, 323).
By Lukács’s definition, realism is political as written and as read; it is an act of motivated discovery through a particular perspective on the world. From the Bildungsroman of bourgeois realists such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, to the novels of “upbringing” and “development” in the German Democratic Republic, realist literature has been designed to illuminate the formation of the self, the individual’s ethical outlook, his or her relation to the structural and interpersonal relations of society, and, as Caudwell put it with regard to poetry, “emotional reorganization” (1946, 245). But while realist literature can contribute to the political development of the individual, any socializing or educational effect on the reader is an indirect result (Kiralyfalvi 1975, 52–53, 120–21).
Literature-as-illustration, as an interpretation of reality, was intended to have the direct purpose of shaping the self toward predetermined ends. Its violation of the principles of critical and socialist realism was also an affront to the integrity of those expected to appropriate its formulas. The rejection of such literature, however, is not a refutation of the issues that give it substantive political orientation. As Martens has pointed out, notwithstanding the problems of “socialist realism” in the German Democratic Republic, women’s educational and occupational opportunities, relatively greater control of one’s body, and related issues were themes of legitimate social and individual need (2001).
Literature can never be reduced to its educational value, nor can “educational work” constitute the foundation of socialist transformation (Lukács 2000, 85–86). It was Hegel’s caution against the certainty of educational outcomes (Lukács 1963, 112) and Goethe’s rejection of didacticism that informed Lukács’s view of the educational value of literature.
Goethe sought a unity of methodical planning and chance in human life, a unity of conscious direction and free spontaneity in all human activities. Thus hatred of “fate,” of any fatalistic resignation is constantly preached in [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship]. Thus the educators in the novel constantly stress contempt for moral “imperatives.” (Lukács 1968, 57)
Literature is never more than one contribution to social and individual development. As Margolies has argued, in order for literature to achieve even the indirect purpose demanded by realism, “there must be at least a common denominator of emotional consciousness”(1969, 109; cf. Caudwell 1946, 158, 165). There must be an argument for how realist literature can contribute to the formation of individual and collective consciousness on terms other than didacticism and prescription.
Thus, while literature-as-illustration is rejected, it is nevertheless important to demonstrate that the work of the realist, as Lukács describes it, has a purpose in shaping the reader’s view of reality, even if that amounts only to a “broadening of horizons.” To suggest that the reader engage in the same kind of intellectual and moral work as the writer is to argue for a dialectical “completion” of the act of writing. The effect of the work on the reader is not complete, but is only an invitation taken to reflect on the portrayal of reality and relate that portrayal to mediating influences of which he or she becomes aware. Subjectively, the realist portrayal can be accepted or rejected. But if the realist portrayal is to be evocative (Kiralyfalvi 1975, 77), its evocation is aimed at generating or further developing interest in the reader, to move him or her to consider the work of art as a mediation between objective reality and the individual’s experience of it. Just as wage workers and corporate bosses are drawn together in their differences as political beings, the political act of literary creation is not left to writers alone. As literature reveals historical transformations, individual divergences and patterns of being, it becomes a source for the political and social formation of the individual. The writer provides a map of the terrain of conflict that the reader may independently substantiate and develop. But such a response is not imminent in the novel itself. If literature is “a central force toward shaping” the lives of people (Steiner 1998, 328), the expectation of reflection and analysis is required of the reader as well as the writer.
This article proceeds with a discussion of Lukács’s expectations of the writer’s work, followed by an explanation of two closely related concepts in his aesthetic methodology—the typical and the category of specialty. I then suggest that the important connection between these two points of discussion is to be found in Lukács’s concept of imputed class consciousness, one of the criteria for the adequate formation of social knowledge and of self-consciousness in the individual.
The writer’s knowledge of reality
Realist narrative is not satisfied with the reflection of immediate reality, but a representation of objectively possible reality drawn from the writer’s work of observation and analysis. The root of this perspective is Aristotle’s distinction between the crude facts of history and the possibilities of poetry, and his discussion of the relation of potentiality to actuality (1963, 113–14, 419–20). Narrative written and appropriated by historical subjects is evocative of feelings or passion underlying action. Objectively, we assess the meaning in terms of the form and content of the narrative itself: Is it historically possible? Do the moral lessons that can be drawn from it meet a legitimate need? Are these lessons relevant to a program of progressive social change? Is the meaning simply relativistic? The reader’s outlook, derived in part from his or her biographical experience, whether politically committed or socially passive, plays a part in the reception of the work; it shapes the reading but need not restrict its possibilities.
As a principle of historical materialism, the greatness of a writer, whether of bourgeois or socialist orientation, “springs from the depth and richness of his experience of reality” (Lukács 1963, 134). This “experience of reality” is not limited to its subjective character, nor is it a product of factual observation and recording alone. Rather, narrative that results from these methods attempts to substitute a more dynamic synthesis of possible experience for precise detail copied from everyday life.
In Scott, Balzac or Tolstoy we experience events which are inherently significant because of the direct involvement of the characters in the events and because of the general social significance emerging in the unfolding of the characters’ lives. (Lukács 1971b, 116)
The writer must show through the narrative the dynamic relation between character and social reality. This is a creative possibility only if he or she knows what conditions and relations are possible to imagine within a particular historical context. So crucial is this principle of realism that the political orientation of the writer need not be a criterion for literature that may serve the ideological and organizational purposes of socialism. Lukács’s numerous discussions of the critical realism of Balzac and Mann and Lenin’s references to Tolstoy (1963a, 1963b, 1963c) are examples of writers who produced literature that contains knowledge of reality beyond their personal political orientation. This is what Steiner refers to as “the concept of dissociation—the image of the poet as Balaam speaking truth against his knowledge or avowed philosophy” (1998, 321).
Specialty and type in the method of realism
In his introduction to Lukács’s Essays on Realism, Rodney Livingstone suggests that after Lukács’s withdrawal from politics at the end of the 1920s, he concentrated on realist literature as a substitute for the working class that had failed to fulfill its historical function. In Livingstone’s interpretation, for which he draws support from Ferenc Feher, Lukács adopted an essentialist view of realism that placed literature at the center of the struggle to “dereify reality” (Livingstone, in Lukács 1981, 11–12). According to this view, after working-class failure, Lukács accepted literature as the actual moving force of social change.
Reification, of course, was one of the major problems Lukács addressed in History and Class Consciousness. His concern was the perceived overdetermination of the proletariat’s immediate conditions and experience. Reification freezes the immediate conditions and experience as an inevitable, immutable, and impenetrable reality. For the individual, reification throws up an inner barrier to the complexity of reality, especially those elements obscured by the familiarity or oppressiveness of everyday life that might actually serve as resources for social change (Lukács 1971a, 164). Indeed, literature is one source, but not the essential one, with which to de-reify reality. Since Lukács recognized that his expectations of the working class were excessive, the essentialist view of literature would merely re-create the idealist-oriented errors he felt he had committed in History and Class Consciousness. If one accepts the “de-reifying” powers of literature on these terms, a direct relationship between the novel as written and a consequent course of action by the reader is the logical expectation. According to such a view, realist literature would achieve this on its own; it would provide a precise map of social change and the coordinates of conscious development and action; it would, therefore, be illustrative.
Instead, Lukács opened the possibilities within literature through his category of specialty. Specialty is described as a site or space in which mediations between the categories of Universal and Individual take place. It is a “space for movement” (Parkinson 1970, 131) in which social phenomena lose their immediacy (Jameson 1971, 167) and become more concretized subjects of knowledge through interaction in a field of mediating phenomena. In Marx’s methodology (for example, 1986a, 108–9), mediation is not merely an interaction or relationship between two phenomena; it is a rational, objective activity that is diffused throughout social reality. As a field of mediations, specialty is an “organizing mean.” The example Lukács adopts from Hegel helps to clarify: “If I plan to plow a field, the plow is a ‘mean’ between myself and my object. But this ‘mean’ is something rational, and in a sense higher than the ends – e.g. the pleasures of eating – which it serves” (Parkinson 1970, 127). Methodologically and practically, consideration of mediating influences is a way of thinking, an act of learning that rejects the immediate appearance of reality as incomplete and draws attention to the multiple influences not readily apparent. From influences that are outside the immediate situation, the aesthetic organizing mean develops the content and character of the subject in a way that could not be achieved through immediate experience alone. The aesthetic organizing mean is capable of developing the literary subject and preserving its individuality as an element of the dialectic (Parkinson 1977, 39; cf. Lukács 1971b, 28; Kiralyfalvi 1975, 34–37; Marx 1986b, 38). In “its immediate mode of appearance,” Parkinson writes, individuality “contains in itself all its determinations, but in an ‘underdeveloped’ (unanalysed) form” (1970, 129). It is the aesthetic development and analysis of social determinations that make them a source of knowledge and potential direction for the historical subject.
The mediations chosen for development by the writer indicate his or her perspective. But a writer’s political orientation, as has been noted above, is not the only means by which the important and marginal features of a historical moment are chosen, or how the characters will be shown to develop (Lukács 1963, 33, 54–55; cf. Plekanov 1957, 25–26). Rather, a realist’s literary perspective is broader than his or her personal political outlook; the literary perspective includes an awareness that a work can (not must) be used to draw attention to, and develop consciousness of, a broad theory of society and a political program. The method Lukács advocates is indeed applicable to the critical realism of progressive bourgeois writers. However, despite Graham’s argument to the contrary (1998), the method is most important because Lukács links it to the struggle for socialism as a struggle for human betterment.
The concrete expression of specialty is the typical, the enduring, objective tendencies of social phenomena. From its Latin and Greek origins, type is an impression, image, or model of a thing or person. One of its Latin meanings is probrius, which denotes a special or peculiar thing. But the significance of typical is not that it is singular in the sense that something is outstanding; rather, the corresponding term, exemplar, helps to clarify the concept if the chosen connotation is that of an “example of a species,” instead of the common but erroneous usage that suggests something that stands above the remainder of its category. The literary type as an exemplary character is to be portrayed in a way that implies that his or her ideas and actions are not singularly different from the possibilities that other characters may also determine from a proper analysis of the same circumstances. We may say that a person who exhibits a self-conscious, relative mastery over the complex of social conditions, personality, and the structure of choice is typical. Dialectically, the typical is understood to be a simultaneous conservation and transcendence of its perceived limits. To be a typical human being, an exemplar of the species as a whole, means to recognize consciously that one’s “innermost being is determined by objective forces at work in society” (Lukács 1963, 122).
This is evident in the work of Anna Seghers, whose typical characters, though “weak and seemingly insignificant,” are persons in whom she “saw a force capable of shaping the future of society” (Bangerter 1993, 130). Her literary types are developed as characters confront the reification of everyday life. In The Seventh Cross, for example, the mundane reality among ordinary working people is revealed to have a deeper, more profound level in the simple but significant decisions that expose the apparently static character of everyday life as a facade. As they encounter and assist George Heisler, an escapee from a Nazi camp, Seghers’s characters do not experience a sudden transformation of self. Heisler, a member of the Communist resistance, is not portrayed as an extraordinary leader. In the course of his escape, he wishes to return to the peace and comfort of a village street but at the same time confronts his past feelings, remembering how he once “despised the strength and glamour of everyday life” where “every face and every paving stone reflected shame” (Seghers 1987, 50–51). Franz, one of Heisler’s associates, describes himself as a man with ordinary desires that are now beyond his grasp, since “this other thing—this yearning for justice—came into my life” (264). The ordinary life of which they wish to be a part is understood by these characters as much more than its appearance; it is attractive for its calm and familiarity, but repulsive because it obscures the awareness of an essential human struggle.
Dr. Kress and his wife Gerda have grown so accustomed to their daily relations that they surprise one another by their individual responses to Heisler’s dilemma; in transcending their previous caution and inaction, they reach a new level of relations with each other (308–9). Seghers’s typical characters emerge, even momentarily, from the safe haze of everyday life where the effort to fulfill needs and requirements of the day seems to blend people with the inorganic objects in their surroundings. Their emergence from the mass is a movement toward a more complex knowledge of reality than that to which they had conditioned themselves in the gradual encroachment of fascism.
To the extent that the reader comes to know something of these characters, a conception of them as individuals with identifiable traits and particular outlooks may be formed. These traits and perspectives are preserved in the narrative even while the aesthetic construction integrates the individual into more complex situations and collective actions. The qualities of personality Semprun gives to Hans—commitment, friendship, intellectual curiosity, and resistance—are sufficient to exemplify meaningful human conduct even through the minimal “disclosure of these latent potentialities” (Lukács 1971b, 154). The sufficient level of portrayal is the indirect significance of the representation that draws Gerard, Semprun’s main (autobiographical) character, to Lukács’s Concept of “Imputed Consciousness” pursue the partisan model initially struck by Hans.
The category of specialty, and therefore of type, does not serve aesthetics alone. As a field of mediations, it applies as well to ethics and to science (Parkinson 1970, 127–28, 131). Parkinson notes that for Lukács ethics is a “form of activity, perhaps better rendered ‘ethical conduct,’” and as an organizing mean stands between “purely objective law and purely subjective morality” (Parkinson 1970, 127; cf. Lukács 1975b). Ethics as conduct draws from universal laws that serve humankind as a whole. But aesthetics is less rigidly conceived than ethics; it possesses a wider range of reality that can be experienced as “good” or “bad” (Parkinson 1970, 127–28; Kiralyfalvi 1975, 65–66; Lukács 1963, 35–36). Aesthetics draws from moments of personal conscience as well as socially unreflective, self-preserving acts, yet encourages questionable ethical conduct to be addressed less conclusively, as dialogue rather than prescription.
Tim O’Brien illustrates the point in The Things They Carried when his main character has to decide whether to go to Vietnam or emigrate to Canada. He is confronted in his imagination by the ordinary scenes of American boyhood: “I saw a seven-year-old boy in a white cowboy hat and a Lone Ranger mask and a pair of six-shooters; I saw a twelve-year-old Little League shortstop pivoting to turn a double play; I saw a sixteen-year-old kid decked out for his fi rst prom” (1991, 60). His overwhelming concern is offending the ordinary folks in his hometown’s Gobbler Café whose conversations and concerns avoid the moral issues of imperialist war. Even as he makes a decision to participate in the war, O’Brien’s character illustrates a typicality as he reflects critically on the objective historical place of those facts of everyday life, understanding that they are an incomplete knowledge of reality. That he makes a decision that preserves the power of those images does not outweigh the significance of the character’s demonstrated knowledge of their place in the complex of social contradictions.
By contrast, literature-as-illustration has a direct, didactic purpose, to bring the reader to a certainty of judgment, finished as written and read; it leads in a predetermined direction, certain of its task of reshaping the reader’s thought and values. But such a completeness—the certainty of effect of writing upon reading upon action—is for Lukács a violation of the principles of the category of specialty, for the range of movement, deliberation, and choice is diminished or eliminated. Thus, incompleteness and indirectness remain aspects of a method that allows the space for mediations to remain an open field. Although a single work of art may constitute a turning point for a particular individual’s life, it is more probable that the “effect of the art-work upon [a reader] after the experience remains almost completely imperceptible, and only a whole series of similar experiences will reveal visible attitudinal, cultural changes” in the individual (Lukács, in Kiralyfalvi 1975, 120). Additional mediations outside the literary text are the source of this effect.
Lukács states that the typical is the invention of the writer, who “first defines the basic issues and movements of his time and then invents characters and situations not to be found in ordinary life” (1971b, 158). The meaning of this is twofold. First, the type is not a mirror image of the daily life of any particular individual, although such a life is not precluded from portrayal. When Lukács notes that the writer constructs characters in “situations that he could not possibly have observed himself,” he refers to the requirement of the artist’s work of investigation and analysis (1981, 180). For the realist, there is no escaping actual historical circumstances as a resource for characters, but the construction of a character by precise replication of historical fact cannot be adequate for realistic portrayal. As literary forms, reportage and naturalism accept the immediacy of observation and historical evidence as the essential in literature because these serve as adequate proximity to truth. The process of historical formation and the contradictions of social life through which individuals develop are obscured by factual, but superficial, literary representation, even though the writer has based the work on “the accurate observation of everyday reality” (Lukács 1971b, 158). Lukács viewed the “imminence” of facts as an organizational and methodological problem, an orientation that informed his later critique of illustrative forms of literature (1971a, 22–23). When Marx argued in volume 1 of Capital that it “is not enough that the conditions of labor are concentrated in a mass, in the shape of capital, at the one pole of society, while at the other are grouped the masses of men, who have nothing to sell but their labor-power,” he was alluding to the basic, factual arrangement of capitalist society that is further entrenched in the minds of workers when they accept the arrangement as the “self-evident laws of Nature” (1996, 726). Such facts, because they remain undeveloped and unanalyzed, become a source of reification.
Secondly, the intensification of characters and situations is a creative representation of the author’s “development and analysis of issues and contradictions” that are part of the reality of everyday life. The type that emerges is a synthesis of the writer’s evaluation and exposition of the objective possibilities of the context. The successful, “extreme” intensification is the writer’s understanding not only of the possibilities of addressing contradictions in everyday reality but of demonstrating the different approaches to those contradictions by characters at various levels of consciousness (Lukács 1971b, 159). Lukács embellishes his meaning in a comment on the average, something the typical is not. “The ‘average’ is a dead synthesis of the process of social development. An emphasis on the average transforms literature from a representation of life in motion into a description of more or less static conditions” 1971b, 164; cf. 1963, 122–23; Kiralyfalvi 1975, 80). Writing of this sort is only capable of observing and recording immediate relations of reality; it avoids “the depiction of decisive social problems.” It presents, therefore, a limited knowledge of reality, reducing social conflict to formulaic prescriptions for resolution, and providing no incentive to examine reality for the complexity of contradictions and alternative forms of resolution. The writer who does the “work” Lukács requires of the realist organizes a portrayal of reality that has the potential to become a source of a movement against a static vision of reality.
The moral and intellectual work of the reader
If the category of specialty is a space for movement within a field of mediations, it is relatively open to writer and reader alike. The content of specialty achieves its height in meaning only through the combination of a comparison with reality and as a guide for praxis. A literary method or style of narrative that does not realistically portray possible mediations of reality offers little invitation to the reader for reflection on reality. A reader’s reflection, of course, can generate many possibilities for thought and action. The question arises: With the range of possible responses, how can a reader’s contemplation and response to a novel be directed to encourage the investigation of possibilities for participating in socially transformative actions? The answer lies, in part, in the strength of mediating factors, such as political perspectives competing for the development of consciousness and knowledge. But the response to the field of mediations within the work of art also lies with the individual.
The typicality of literary characters must also, as noted above, be relevant to actual human beings. Very early in their development of historical materialism, Marx and Engels clarified the dialectical relation between the ideal of socialism and its objectively possible realization. Their argument in The Holy Family considered what, “in accordance with [its] being,” the proletariat “will historically be compelled to do” (1975, 37). Two conditions are necessary. The future of socialism is based on the correlation of the rise and entrenchment of certain forces and relations of capitalist production, and the opportunities and possibilities of individual development taken up on that economic ground. The second condition is their conception of the proletarian class as typical—that is, capable as a class of developing the universalizing elements of its social character that would bring about the conditions for socialism. The development of a proletarian consciousness amid these new relations (capitalism and class struggle) implied an increasing quantity and quality of knowledge available to historical subjects along with a greater relative autonomy for the individual and the working class itself. Hence, the qualitative development of knowledge had an objectively valid basis. It was from this realization that a concept of imputed class consciousness was derived, distinguishing Marx’s revolutionary theory by placing greater emphasis on class and individual responsibility for the development of knowledge capable of penetrating the enduring effects of capital’s domination. This is the greatest import of the concept of imputation.
In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács used “imputed class consciousness” as an organizational principle for the development of political cadre. Imputed class consciousness also has implications for the attitude required to assert a strategy of human progress that permeates the major institutions of socialization. Lukács affirmed Luxemburg’s position that the Communist Party was the form of the “class consciousness of the proletariat” (1971a, 41), but the argument was hardly the “ideological ground for a gnostic tyranny” as Cogdon has argued (1983, 181). Lukács’s initial point was to emphasize that the Communist Party did not itself constitute the proletariat’s body of knowledge; rather, it was the most important organizational means at that historical moment for developing the proletariat’s knowledge of reality into a strategy for socialist struggle. It was not the imposition of the Party’s knowledge upon the masses, but the Party’s active stressing that its political strategy was grounded in an understanding of historical necessity that could be known and understood by anyone. Thus, class consciousness is not merely something the party “ascribed” to the working class, as Arato and Breines (1979) transcribe the term “imputed.” Löwy’s emphasis on the “possible” in his discussion of “objective possibility” in History and Class Consciousness offers a more critical understanding of the term (1979, 175–76). Imputed class consciousness consists of the ideas and knowledge that can be discovered or created by people “if they [are] able to assess” their particular historically produced circumstance “and the interests arising from it in their impact on the immediate action and the whole structure of society” (Lukács 1971a, 51).
The phrase “if they were able” may misdirect a reader to an undue emphasis on the structural constraints of capitalist society. Analyses of such structural barriers to development have become standard fare in sociological studies of differential educational opportunity among classes and ethnic groups, women’s position under capitalism, and so on. Because Lukács was concerned with consciousness as an organizational necessity, he brought the issue back to the problem of reification, the acquiescence by workers and others to the inward “barrier imposed by immediacy” (1971a, 164). The context in which he makes this statement is a methodological and organizational one, meant to negate bourgeois methodology that “arises directly from . . . social existence.” Such a methodological orientation adopted by the working class as a point of view suitable to its immediate interests is antithetical to what Marx and Engels argued the working class was historically “compelled to do.” What is only apparent and, therefore, underdeveloped in historical subjects, including the Party itself, must become objective knowledge—developed and analyzed—upon which action takes place, to complete one’s full experience of reality.
In Lukács’s Defence (2000), the meaning of imputation has to do with knowledge that is available in a society at any given historical moment and the level of consciousness capable of being developed from it. Its meaning was derived in part from its historic use in jurisprudence, where it referred to the objective and logical occurrence of events and their projected consequences.
For example, an object falls out of a window and kills a passerby on the street below. From a juristic perspective, who caused the death, and what did those concerned do wrong? In the first instance, what is important is not what the person concerned thought or intended, but whether he could or should have known that his action or failure to act in a normal way would have lead to these consequences. (Lukács 2000, 64)
Commenting on recent judicial decisions, Verdun-Jones points out, “Objective liability does not take into account what was actually going on in the head of the accused at the time of the alleged offence; rather, it is concerned with what the reasonable person would have known if placed in exactly the same circumstances as the accused (1999, 93).” Engels, too, referred to this juristic principle in The Condition of the Working Class in England, where he contrasted the existing legal determination of murder—“when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal”—with what ought to be included in the category of murder: the conscious construction by ruling powers of conditions that lead members of the working class to “a too early and an unnatural death” (Engels 1975, 393–94).
The meanings proposed by Lukács and Engels clarify the concept of imputation as one of consciousness integrated with the interrogation of social forces and relations. Given the extent of social development in Europe and North America, at least, this clarification offers an important contribution to the contemporary problem of reification. While Communist parties were among the few comprehensive and critical sources of knowledge for the masses in the revolutionary period, radical and progressive social movements are presently more justified in basing their efforts on a presumed body of critical knowledge of reality, the groundwork of which is widely available even in bourgeois institutions.
With regard to the historical subject, the concept of imputation is one that, more than implicitly, demands that the subject become knowledgeable by “experiencing” his or her social reality, and developing that experience through analysis. In Lukács’s original definition, imputed class consciousness included the necessity of going beyond “what men in fact thought, felt and wanted” as “merely the material of genuine historical analysis,” and he acknowledged the difficulty of generalizing such a level of consciousness. The character and quality of imputed consciousness, or what can be known of reality, is understood partially, through the concept of the typical, “whose characteristics are determined by the types of position available in the process of production” (Lukács 1971a, 51), and who, by implication, carry a heavier responsibility because of their proximity to the economic motor of capitalism. But responsibility of this kind is not confined to sites of economic production, for this would imply that the structure of labor itself spontaneously develops class consciousness. Neither does one’s position in the system of production need to be the dominant means by which knowledge about the total system is possible. In fact, in the contemporary period especially, it is increasingly possible to generalize a level of consciousness based upon the growth of institutionally based knowledge and access of the masses to it.
Until recently, Lukács’s most visible correction to his original discussion was found in the 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness, where he cites Lenin’s principle of bringing class consciousness to the proletariat from outside (1971a, xviii–xix). But he had made an earlier correction that set up the concept of imputation as important to issues of literature.
[A] mere analysis of the objective economic situation, even if theoretically correct, is not enough. The correct guidelines for action must be developed out of the analysis. If . . . the objective economic situation is not immediately apparent in its objective correctness, then the guidelines, and the slogans that follow from them, must be found deliberately. (2000, 71)
Immediate reality is a source within which these “guidelines” can be found. Reification of that reality is a significant but not insurmountable inhibitor of correct analysis. The “solution” to this dilemma for the working class is the self-development of its individual members. Thus, the other side of “if they were able” is, then, whether they are willing to fully experience reality and to explore the alternatives to make choices that may lead toward a fuller experience of reality and human betterment. It is in the characters of realist literature that we can find varied levels of tension between “willing” and “able” that has as its object the equally tension-filled complex of what can be and what ought to be known about reality.
In the face of the normative and unproblematic appearance of reality, it requires little energy and thought to be drawn into the reductionist clutches of everyday life. Its negative character and the unreflective consent to oppressive social forces are what typical characters, as we have seen with O’Brien, expose as important social contradictions, or the conditions they are able to transcend. For example, when another of Seghers’s characters, Frau Feidler, runs an errand as a cover to obtain information about Heisler’s situation, she returns home feeling suddenly liberated from the fascist repression of political activity. The same inanimate objects of the city are now seen in the aura of their old meanings.
She drew a deep breath. This was the old air again, cool with danger, that touches one’s brow as if it were laden with frost. The old darkness, too, under whose protection bills were posted, slogans painted on board fences, handbills slipped under doors. . . . Everything was possible in the time that had just now begun; a change in all relations, her own included, quicker than anyone dared to hope, while one was still young enough jointly to partake of some happiness after so much bitter suffering. (Seghers 1987, 305–6)
None of Seghers’s characters engages in heroics; their reflections are of actions that make social relations transparent and in some measure transform them. Her narrative exhibits a space for possible alternatives that may be developed outside the novel but framed by its realist inquiry. If the essence of a solution to a social problem exists within a work of literature, it should be there only to the extent that a reader is willing to explore the range of possibilities somehow related to social reality that can be drawn from it. The possibilities for transformative knowledge that Seghers constructs are what Lukács had seen in the way imputation was “continually being used in the humanities.”
That is to say, from the facts that are presented to us, the attempt is made to reconstruct the objective situation and “subjective” moments are explained from this (and not the other way round). By leaving out the inessential details of an objective situation, one can distinguish what people acting according to normal and correct knowledge of their situation were able to do or to allow. (Lukács 2000, 64)
This can be achieved in literature in a number of ways, of course. In the indirect approach of realism, the posing of historical circumstances and individual dilemmas is intended to move readers to question reality as it appears to them. The approach is no less indirect and legitimate when it is evident what moral lesson the writer wishes to achieve. For example, in Arthur Miller’s novel Focus, when Lawrence Newman is confronted with anti-Semitism, his reactions are ambivalent. It is not Newman, but Mr. Finkelstein who frames the problem as one for Newman’s own interrogation, and that of any ill-informed reader.
First, I’m asking you to understand me; to you I ain’t pleading for anything. I’m out for information. What’ll happen is going to happen, and I myself can’t stop it. I am a man who reads every day several newspapers. All kinds, from the Communist to the utmost reactionary. It’s my nature I shouldn’t be happy unlest I shall understand what is going on. (Miller 2001, 165–66)
Finkelstein does not proceed to tell Newman what he should know about Jews to change Newman’s anti-Semitism. Rather, he asks Newman to explain his personal dislike of Jews. His questions and imperatives are not meant to shape precisely how Newman should think, but to get him to question his appropriation of a body of knowledge founded on falsehoods. Thus, Newman cannot answer Finkelstein’s questions, except to drag out timeworn accusations that signify his narrowness of experience, vision, and will. Newman is typical of the person with too much comfort and too little knowledge, a commonality perhaps shared with the men with whom Miller worked at the Brooklyn Naval Yard during World War II (2001, v). In his acts of apparent courage at the end of the novel, Newman evokes an interest in justice that is more important for the reader to consider than for Miller’s character to complete.
Conclusion
Miller, Semprun, and Seghers have done their work as writers; they have portrayed the historical ground upon which social conflicts take place. As realists they illustrate what they believe they are required to know about the central issues of their sociohistorical circumstances; in their work they impute what possibilities for knowledge and action readers might search out in their own reality. The ethical influence of literature may be delayed, but it may still draw the interested individual gradually toward a consciousness of what it means to be a typical human being. The ethical effect of the aesthetic experience “is a sociohistorical effect of awakening man’s consciousness to the fact that he ‘makes himself’ and to the broadening of the concept of the individual man as a member of ongoing humanity” (Kiralyfalvi 1975, 116; cf. 82).
If we accept that literature should not be simply illustrative or prescriptive, and yet have argued that realist literature imputes a knowledge of reality that ought to be taken up by the reader, how is this imputation of knowledge to be managed? There is no way around the difficult passage between these two problems of realism. The knowledge the writer uses to construct a work of art contains a suggestive guide to issues in everyday life. Individual readers may develop that knowledge for themselves, more or less strongly mediated (developed and analyzed), whether through established, normative institutions or oppositional organizations. The public sphere is where the tensions and perspectives first revealed in a narrative continue to be a subject of dialogue. It is such public debate that directs, pressures, influences, and encourages the fuller development of the social and the personal that are the subject of realist literature.
The underlying argument here has been that realist literature is a means of political socialization, that its basis in historical reality illuminates much about the contradictions and collisions of powerful and minor social forces that influence the formation of a critical self-consciousness. If literature is as much political as other issues of capitalist society that require the analysis and programmatic attention of historical materialism, then literature can also be seen as an organizational problem within the class struggle. The task is to delineate the space for realism in which the work of the writer and reader alike can be discussed in relation to the requirements of the struggle for human betterment.
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