Literature and Art as Ideological Form

N TWO PREVIOUS theoretical essays I have endeavored to situate the concept of aesthetic at the center of an attempt to conceive the theory of art more concretely on the basis of reflection theory than has hitherto been the case.1 The essays seek to define aesthetic as unified process which includes the producer, the art product, and the recipient; to work out the dialectical, that is, the processive, dynamic character of artistic production and reception as well as the specific form of cognition articulated in this process. The basic question of the theory of aesthetic is: what kind of knowledge, or cognition does art mediate? It is question concerned with the cognitive (in the widest sense) function of art, but which does not thereby mean that the theory of art should be simply identified with the theory of aesthetic or that art should be reduced to knowledge or even scientific knowledge. The theory of aesthetic explores specific aspect of materialist aesthetics. Its questions are developed within the framework of the subsuming question of the function and significance of art, its place in the social and historical process. Its starting point is the fact that certain knowledge, certain contents of certain view of the world, certain attitudes, values, and norms-whatever they are, however right or wrong-are articulated in and mediated by art. What then is the nature of this mediated by art? What are the criteria of its truth and untruth? Under what conditions and in what form is this formulated and mediated? How are we to understand the relation to reality, the quality and scope, the genesis and function of this cognition? What does it actually mean when we speak of art as a form of social consciousness, as ideology or ideological form? This epistemological dimension of the theory of art reveals itself,