Summary

Between 10 and 13 May 2012, the University of Amsterdam hosted the conference ‘Marx and the Aesthetic’. As the name implies, the conference was aimed at analysing the role of the aesthetic in the writings of Marx, as well as exploring works of visual art and literature which are based on, or have been directly inspired by Marx’s writings. At the core of the conference was an attempt to scrutinise the imminent relation between the aesthetic and emancipatory conceptions of Marxist politics.

 Previous attempts at making sense of Marx and Engels in terms of aesthetics have either been Marxist in a very broad sense – writing as productive force, aesthetic autonomy as critique of the commodity form, the critique of aesthetic ideologies, etc. – or Marxological in a naïve sense, i.e., merely assembling in one volume the stray comments on art and literature that pepper Marx’s and Engels’ writings.

Recent debates concerning the aesthetic (to be distinguished from aesthetics as a philosophical discipline), however, have allowed for a different and broader understanding of the field. The aesthetic crosses disciplinary boundaries and cannot be restricted to specific subjects. The aesthetic is a form of thought in which a range of complex and interrelated issues are at stake: the orders of mind and matter; the disruptive dynamics of sense perception, of expression, and of metaphor; the logics of innovation and of the 'event'; the indeterminate character of semiotic systems; and so on. Aesthetics cannot, therefore, be restricted to art alone and does not even necessarily coincide with it.

The texts of Marx himself have not yet been sufficiently interpreted and reconstructed in these terms. And yet, in these writings innumerable figures of the aesthetic are, so to speak, at work. From notions of an “aesthetics of production” to the “poetry of the future,” from the radical modernism of bourgeois development to the very idea of free association, from references to Shakespeare and Dante in the original texts as well as in important translations, the aesthetic has an undeniably prominent place in Marx’s thought. 

The conference Marx and the Aesthetic examined these questions and how Marx’s political and aesthetical body of work informs the notion of the aesthetic, as well as the artistic practice of many contemporary artists.

Speakers

Some of the speakers at the conference included:

• Prof. Josef Früchtl (University of Amsterdam)

• Prof. Terrell Carver (University of Bristol)

• Olive McKeon (University of California)

• Thijs Lijster (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)

• Clint Burnham (Simon Fraser University)

• Gary Teeple (Simon Fraser University)

• Joseph Luna (University of Sussex)

• Yasemin Sari (University of Alberta)

• Fusheng Wang (Jilin University)

 

For a complete list of speakers, please see the link below. 

Contact details

For more information about the ‘Marx and the Aesthetic’ conference, please contact:

The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
Spuistraat 210 (room 113)
1012 VT Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Email: asca-fgw@uva.nl