Aesthetics and Politics Midterm

Curious to know what one of my mid-terms looks like? Here are the five questions I have provided students in my upper-division Berkeley course on postmarxist aesthetics. For the scene of the examination itself, I will select two questions for them to answer from these five. They will have had weeks to think them through by then. Sound fun?

1. Explain how Guy Debord's description of the Spectacle, Walter Benjamin's notion of the Aura, or Naomi Klein's treatment of the Logo (choose one of the three) re-stages Marx's account of the Fetish, then propose a way in which you think the formulation you have chosen extends or subverts Marx's account in some key respect.

2. How does the treatment of the figure of the Spectator differ in Wilde's "Soul of Man Under Socialism" from its treatment in Debord's Society of the Spectacle? What political significance attaches to these different treatments in their respective texts in your view?

3. How do the differing attitudes toward German Expressionism conveyed in Ernst Bloch's "Discussing Expressionism" and in Georg Lukacs's "Realism in the Balance" provide a window onto the larger stakes of their differing views on the relation of aesthetics and politics?

4. Describe the different ways in which Simon Frith and Iain Chambers discover possible forms of political commitment in popular art works, popular art practices, and popular culture. Highlight their differences by showing how their two accounts might be considered as an echo of the debate of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno which began with the publication of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and continued in the exchange of letters published in the volume Aesthetics and Politics.

5. What is appealing about the idea of "ambiguity" in William Empson's literary criticism for Terry Eagleton and in Max Raphael's art criticism for Michele Barrett? How do Eagleton's and Barrett's sympathetic treatments of the work of a key critic from an earlier generation of the Left provide each of them with an occasion to model a form of committed criticism that simultaneously overcomes some deep impasse they discern in traditional Marxist aesthetics (for example, tendencies toward elitism, reductionism, formalism, or the like) while also guarding against some troubling tendency they discern in the criticism of their contemporaries (for example, relativism, antihumanism, complacency, or the like). Does it matter that each seems to admit that the project of their model fails in some key respects?