40
PARTISAN REVIEW
basic principle of this esthetic: "Zweckmassigkeit ohne Zweck," the exclu-
sion of all "interest" from one's approach to art, is obviously a theory of
"pure art." Schiller's extension of this theory: "the extirpation of content
by form" (which Mehring adopted), merely accentuates this subjective-
idealist tendency.
Hence it was wholly consistent for the declining
bourgeoisie's theory of art to use these views as weapons in the battle
against "propaganda." [or "tendency"].
Its success was all the greater
since the advocates of "propaganda art," who combatted this deduction,
themselves accepted the underlying theory (with the exception of the
proponents of an over-simplified mechanical materialism).
They could
make only inconsistent and eclectic efforts to refute the conclusions neces-
sarily and inescapably deduced from this theory.
This failure is most strikingly evident in Mehring,
the greatest
German literary critic of the past generation, who towered far above his
bourgeois contemporaries.
Mehring's eclecticism was very clearly mani-
fested in his inability to find any but an "either-or" solution to the central
problem of form and content.
Mehring felt that unconditional acceptance
of the Kant-Schiller (subjective-idealist) solution necessarily led to acknowl-
edgment of the "timelessness" of art, and hence to the primacy of form and
the rejection of all "propaganda." Refusing to accept this conclusion
(without criticizing its antecedent assumptions), he wrote: " ...
therefore
taste
also
depends on content and not upon form
alone"
(Collected Works,
Vol. It p. 264, italics ours).
This eclecticism, which gives an absolutely
meaningless answer to the really fundamental question, shows how little
Mehring had progressed beyond the Kant-Schiller statement of the under-
lying problem or beyond bourgeois esthetics in general.
The limitations of this viewpoint are evidenced when the problem of
"propaganda" is posited as a problem of the relationship between art and
morals.
In other words, the subjective idealist nature of "propaganda"
comes to the surface: "tendency" becomes a
demand,
a
summons,
an
ideal-
which the writer
contrasts
with reality.
It is not the tendency of social
development itself, made conscious (in Marx's sense) by the writer, but
a (subjectively conceived) commandment, whose fulfilment is
demanded
of reality.
Back of this statement of the problem we have the following
considerations:
1. A rigid, circumscribed separation of the various fields of human
activity, i.e. the ideological reflection of capitalistic division of
labor, which is not analyzed and criticized Marxistically as an
actuality, as the result of this same division of lahor.
On the con-
trary, it is conceived of (purely ideologically) as the "eternal" law
