Todd Cronan’s Red Aesthetics: Rodchenko, Brecht, Eisenstein intervenes in two registers at once. In one, it is a deep dive into the work of three towering figures in socialist art. It is by grappling with these artists on their own terms and in all of their complexity that Red Aesthetics makes the case for the relevance of these artists today. In doing so, it discovers its second major intervention by producing an account of political works of art that cuts across much of contemporary literary and aesthetic criticism. “Red aesthetics,” as Cronan describes it, “is a political form of modernism that aims to capture the complex and changing modernity with an equally complex and changing mode of representation” (2) — modernist forms equal to the task of representing without reproducing social relations under capital. Cronan demonstrates how this aesthetic and political ambition threads through the work of Rodchenko, Brecht, and Eisenstein across five more chapters, one each on Rodchenko and Eisenstein and three on Brecht.

Red Aesthetics begins with Brecht’s assertion that the aim of art is to provide “a correct representation of the world” (1), which is a reformulation of Marx’s “correct grasp of the present” (1). All three artists, writes Cronan, “seek a means to create a new realism, one that offers a correct picture of the world by breaking with conventional understandings of what that world looks like” (2). If this seems naive, as Cronan suggests it might, it is nonetheless crucial to formally and politically ambitious art: This “seemingly naive vision of the artist as offering an accurate picture of the world, one that will displace inaccurate ones, is both unfashionable and essential for any leftist account of art and politics” (1).

What makes the work of these artists unfashionable is baked into the very idea of a “correct representation” of the world: “nothing about the pervasive language of correctness, truth, rightness, and accuracy” that characterizes a Red aesthetics is “fashionable,” (2) writes Cronan. From Susan Sontag’s assertion in “Against Interpretation” that a critic’s role not to interpret the work but is instead to “show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is” to the post-critical turn inaugurated by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus in “Surface Reading,” major strands of critics have had a long-standing impulse to evade accounts of aesthetics that carry a socialist political charge.1 This political evasion, Cronan argues, cannot be disentangled from the evasion of questions of meaning, intention, and judgment about works of art as they are espoused and practiced by the authors here.

Cronan’s most forceful rebuke of the post-critical sensibility is his engagement with Jacques Rancière, whose “inaccurate picture of the world” depends on the “‘neutralization’ of ‘aesthetic hierarchy’” (3). Finding resonances with Walter Benn Michaels’s critique of both Rancière and certain kinds of art, Cronan argues that Rancière’s argument depends on a vision of the world and art where the primary problem is not exploitation or immiseration but a “‘hierarchical vision of the world,’ one that devalues the standing of the other and of the oppressed” (3). The reason Rancière opposes Brecht’s “dualist vision of art, one committed to surface and depth,” is because it is too polemical and too instructional — too bound up, that is, in the correct way of seeing the world. Indeed, what Rancière (mistakenly) likes about Eisenstein’s “affectively driven films” is that they are “predicated on the ‘direct communication of affects’” (4). One of Cronan’s central insights is to demonstrate that having a wrong view of art — one that privileges the direct communication of affects — and the wrong view of politics — one predicated on the elimination of hierarchies — entail one another and why the artists in this book are opposed to it. The opposite is also true: “The aim of any Red aesthetic is to retrieve the essential difference between redressing hierarchy (how we see one another, a problem of vision) and redressing inequality (how the capitalist exploits the worker)” (5). Thus, a Red aesthetic is committed to the view that art ought to help us “to understand the ‘real social forces’ of capitalism” (5).

As this gloss on Cronan’s engagement with Rancière suggests, there is no question that for Cronan and the artists he is discussing there is a right way and a wrong way to do art and criticism. The wrong way produces a world defined by how we see one another. The correct way addresses inequality as a structural problem. The correct picture of the world, in other words, is one that carries with it an assertion about how the world is and ought to be — “to make ‘simple’ a ‘vast and discouraging tangle’ of social and economic realities” (6). If none of this is popular in contemporary criticism, it is because critics — even some who are nominally committed to class politics — often fail to recognize that a particular view of art (and criticism) is bound up with a particular view of equality: “deconstruction, affect theory, new materialism and post critique share a disinterest” (6), whether intended or not, “in what Brecht calls the ‘dominant factor in the causal nexus’ of our lives, the ‘class struggle’” (6). Counter to dominant trends in criticism and art, then, Red Aesthetics makes the argument by way of these three artists — Rodchenko, Brecht, and Eisenstein — that the correct picture of the world is a picture that articulates the centrality of exploitation and class struggle in structuring our lives. All three, Cronan notes, share a similar but not entirely overlapping set of aesthetic commitments, highlighting the different ways these artists “share a commitment to a vision of artistic production...that both mirrors social realities and models a different one” (7). The first chapter thus reveals one of the great challenges of the book, which is the complexity of lining up precisely why these three authors, despite their disagreements (explicit and implicit in their work) ultimately share a view that meaning making in art shares a logical relationship with socialist politics. That difficulty is no less one of the book’s virtues: Red Aesthetics, in its willingness to sit inside the complexities of each of these artists’ works, discovers genuinely new insights into the relationship between art and politics refuting, for example, common critiques of workerism and the ideology of production that have become common critiques of Soviet art.

The first chapter takes up critiques of Brecht by way of Adorno and Barthes, demonstrating a surprising affinity in the theoretical mistakes made by the two critics when it comes to Brecht. Adorno is famously critical of Brecht in “On Commitment” and elsewhere, writing, “Brecht taught nothing that could not have been understood apart from his didactic plays, indeed, that could not have been understood more concretely through theory.”2 Cronan argues that “Adorno is strangely dense when it comes to Brecht’s procedures, as though the plays were transparent or insufficiently mediated vehicles for obvious meanings” (23). He is quick to point out, however, that Adorno’s critique of Brecht leads to the defense of him: “By virtue of the very literalism of Brecht’s ‘engagement’ with reality, the meaning of his plays reverses their didactic intention and becomes autonomous art” (23). Thus, in Adorno’s view, “Brecht’s irrepressible artistry collides with his political aims” (23). Cronan’s argument, however, is that this is a mistake of Adorno’s view of art because it insists on separating the work from its meaning before suturing it back together by way of the dialectic rather than seeing that the politics inhere in the work itself. Surprisingly, Adorno’s point shares a “remarkably similar conclusion” (33) to that of Barthes. Cronan goes on to argue that “to be political for Adorno is to mark one’s distance from intending to be so” and similarly “Barthes imagines the power of the Text to consist in its displacement of any particular — that is, political/intentional — point of view” (34).

For this reason, Brecht and Eisenstein both are “ultimately censured for their political didacticism” (33). Cronan summarizes the overlap between the two artists this way: “Because Brecht and Eisenstein intend to convey political meaning, they foreclose the capacity for free audience response” (33), which is a problem for both Adorno and Barthes. The view espoused by Adorno and Barthes cuts across what Cronan finds particularly powerful about Rodchenko, Brecht, and Eisenstein: for these three artists, Cronan argues, “there is no sense in which the aesthetic and the political are inherent opposition to one another, as though art and politics follow separate laws and logics. There was no necessity, as they saw it, for a conflictual relation between either form and content or form and subject matter, just as there is no assumed identity between progressive politics and progressive art” (35).

As Cronan notes, “all three [of the artists in the book] worked for the state in some capacity, and certainly provided ideological support for the state, even of an increasingly complex and unreliable kind” (41). But rather than exonerating their work from this complicity or focusing on the propagandistic uses toward which it was put — which “at times matches the intent of the artist” and “at other times does not” (41) — Cronan emphasizes the formal qualities and capacities of each of these artists’ works. In the chapter dedicated to Rochenko, for example, Cronan argues that one of the most “striking features of Rodchenko’s career is the unmistakable sense of artistic, and indeed, human, failure that haunts the last twenty-five years of his practice” (37). Photography is, crucially, tethered to the world in a physical way that other mediums are not. This has made it a particularly interesting site for working out aesthetic problems across the twentieth century. Rodchenko’s photography is no exception. To give an account of his failure, suggests Cronan, is “also to give an account of photography’s failure, of what the medium seemed capable of representing, and what it could not” (37). Put another way, “if the referent [world] was dead, so was photography” (41). One implication of this is that the abandonment of the utopian promises comes to occupy a central place in his work.

Cronan’s emphasis on the formal qualities of Rodchenko’s work is not only a point about photography — countering the idea that photographs are “transparently open to their subject matter” (41) — but about the “structuring intentions” of Rodchenko’s work, which emphasize the moment “when Rodchenko felt the photographic medium fell decisively out of contact with the world” (42). Through patient working through of Rodchenko’s practice, particularly the absorptive states of the subjects of his photograph, Cronan astutely demonstrates the way his photography projects “a complex vision of communist order” (77). Rather than one of mastery and domination, his photography often “provides a kind of standing counter to the whole notion of Communism as a kind of fixed order that leaves nothing live or dead of account” (77). For Rochenko, “when the USSR began to define itself by the mastery of nature, both human and environmental — not by its temporary, and always fragile, coming to terms with it — the USSR’s mastery became synonymous with its failure” (80). Photography was, Cronan argues, incapable of coming to terms with this view, not because it could not be captured but because it was antithetical to Rodchenko’s view of photography as art. In a sense, then, Rodchenko’s art stands as a corrective or counter to the politics of the Communist state and embodies instead the contingency associated with Socialist political formations.

Cronan’s argument that the standpoint of the artists he is invested in here might do more than reflect the mistakes of the Communist state is most fully realized in his discussion of Brecht, which ranges over three chapters on Brecht’s critique of affect, political abstraction, and the collision between class and race in his work. In the chapter on affect, Cronan wades into Brecht’s at times conflicting sentiments on the relationship between his work and his audience so that what emerges in Brecht’s work is a tension between “estrangement” or the distancing effect of his work and his own aim to produce plays that would have an “intended effect” that could bring the audience to see the world “correctly.” The artist’s task, in Brecht’s view, is “to control effect; to attempt to foresee the result” (85). That is, the “to intend one’s effects on an audience, even if that prediction might fail...is the aim of Brecht’s aesthetics” (85). This, Cronan argues, is precisely why Adorno sees Brecht as authoritarian — “because of his prioritizing of political effect over artistic autonomy” (85). Cronan, as I have already suggested, points out that Adorno’s sense of artistic autonomy is a strange one, as the work’s political significance is “of an indirect sort” (85). Wading through Adorno and Brecht’s views on art and objecthood, Cronan notes, that while both Adorno and Brecht are committed to an idea of aesthetic autonomy that hinges on distancing and negation, he notes a crucial difference between the two: Where “Brecht is forthright in his claims about effects.... Adorno’s putative ‘defense’ of Brecht is that Brecht’s didactic ‘theses took on an entirely different function from the one their content intended” (85).

The argument here rehearses one early in the book about the inseparability between intention and meaning and between meaning and the political aims of the work and it is here that Cronan also distinguishes between what Brecht means by intended effects and affect. Affect, understood as an “unintentional or precognitive response to stimuli” (88), is too easily undone to be politically effective. Almost always one of empathy (though the same would be true of disgust), techniques aimed at producing such responses produce the wrong kind of effect. “‘It is not enough to produce empathy with the proletarian rather than the bourgeois,’ [Brecht] insists, ‘the entire technique of empathy has become dubious (in principle, it’s entirely conceivable that you could have a bourgeois novel with encourages empathy with a proletarian)’” (89). Indeed, this describes not only Rancière’s politics but the politics of so much that passes for ambitious art in the contemporary moment. Over a wide-ranging and technical discussion of Brecht’s practice in dialogue with that of Eisenstein and Eisler, Cronan at once notes the shared concern with effects and affects and also differences (indifferences) to audience response, noting that “Brecht sharply distinguished between the artwork and its reception” (101). In other words, art, if it is to have a desired effect, does not concern itself with individualized responses, but with the construction of the work and its capacity to produce an intended effect.

Being committed to “the framework” and to the construction of the work thus means being committed to making works that are invested in producing a vision of the world which is not assimilable into our experience of it. Taking up what it means to see “correctly,” Cronan returns to debates over expressionism taking place in the late thirties in the pages of Das Wort to highlight Brecht’s contributions, especially, by way of his engagement with Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch. Rather than simply retread this familiar territory, however, Cronan draws on Brecht’s other writings at the time to shed new insight on Brecht’s thinking: “To steer a dialectical course beyond the Scylla of formalist realism and the Charybdis of formless expressionism was Brecht’s contribution to the debates of 1937-1939” (108). If Brecht’s aim was to render an a “abstract world abstractly without losing a grip on its causes” (104), a naive realism would be insufficient . The “situation [of contemporary capitalism],” Brecht says, “has become so complicated because the simple ‘reproduction of reality’ says less than ever about that reality” (105). For Brecht, Bloch’s “Expressionist ‘master’ was just as ideological as Lukács’s formalized realism” (108). The task at hand, then, was to find a new form up to the task of representing abstract social relations. If, in Brecht’s view, Lukács is overly deterministic in his commitment to realism, Bloch’s expressionism is guilty of distorting and obscuring reality. “Any legitimate realism must ‘make abstraction possible,’” writes Brecht, in order to move “beyond the ‘immediately visible surface’ of reality to get a ‘more exact representation of the real social forces’” (110) at play — forces that are themselves abstract. Not all abstraction is up to the task, Cronan argues. Brecht’s aim was to “produce a form of theater that ‘enabled abstraction’ for the viewer, that encouraged viewers to step outside of their subject position to see the world in the right way, beyond the limited feelings that blind then to the complex, abstract reality around them” (121). In other words, the aim of art is not to concretize any particular experience of it — experiences that are definitionally personal — but to render abstract social relations visible.3 If Lukács couldn’t quite see that expressionism was capable of this just as he argues realism was in “Narrate or Describe,” Bloch couldn’t quite see that expressionism’s risk was to appeal to the sensibility of the beholder at cost of rendering these abstract social forces. Cronan’s account of Brecht, then, highlights just how important his contributions to socialist modernism are.

Red Aesthetics begins with the idea that the aim of art is to produce the correct picture of the world; it ends with the ways Eisenstein’s art — the “saturation of the frame” — does that by giving “expression to the classless society” (182). Eisenstein is emblematic of socialist art not by way of a democratic appeal to the viewer of his films as critics such as David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Andrei Tarkovsky argue, but by asserting that the work’s meaning is inherent to its composition. When these critics argue that the saturated Eisensteinian image necessarily “expands beyond the author’s intent” (176), the image, Cronan argues, collapses into real life and like real life “everyone feels life and art at every moment ‘in his own way’” (176). As Tarkovsky puts it, “once in contact with the individual who sees it, it separates from its author” in a way that leaves it open to undergoing “changes of form and meaning.”4 In other words, the moment the work of art is imagined to be separated from its intended meaning is the moment it loses its political force. Thus, in Cronan’s argument, Bordwell and Tarkovsky make clear what is only implied in Adorno’s effort to separate the meaning of the work from its intended meaning. (What they like about Eisenstein is what Adorno likes about Brecht.) When the work of art is imagined to be subject to the responses of the spectator, no meaning could plausibly be said to be any more or less valid than another and in this state of affairs the problem of what a work of art represents about the world is displaced by how different people respond to the work differently. This, as readers of Mediations are no doubt familiar, is the world of market capitalism where meanings are replaced with differences and desires. Rather than view Eisenstein’s work as “the simple accumulation of associational imagery, digression without conflict” (179), Cronan argues it should be understood as an effort to “discover a path...to meaning, to drawing the dissimilar together to create a more inclusive whole” (179).

It is this totalizing and inclusive work that defines Eisenstein’s project and its effort to produce a vision of a classless society. Cronan ends the book with a compelling reading of the final scene of Ivan the Terrible, Part III — the “Apotheosis of Ivan” — in which Ivan traverses the waves and calms them, as he calms the people who storm the palace, at once uniting the people and conquering nature. The scene has largely been read either as an apology for Stalin insofar as it represents a singular figure unifying the people and mastering nature or a subversive critique of him and a reflection on the failure of the revolution. Against either of these views, Cronan argues that while Ivan has unified the nation and the people “from Eisentstein’s perspective, it could not possibly be the case that a tsar could give expression to the classless society” (181). Rather, the scene treats Ivan as a “progressive force” (182) of history, but at a lower stage of political evolution than full communism because the “people do not yet recognize themselves in their role as leaders” (181-2). The scene, in this sense, represents the coming into being of class consciousness, one that under the current mode of capitalist production is only legible through the work of art that can assert its autonomy from it.

Where Brecht’s ambition, which begins the book, is to produce “a correct representation of the world” as it is, Eisenstein’s project, which concludes it, is an effort to represent the world as might be, or could become. In tracing these shared commitments, Cronan’s book offers a compelling reason to believe that if the work of art is to give “expression to a classless society” (182) it must assert its autonomy from the society as it is given, such that it is neither collapsible into the capitalist market, nor reducible to the spectator’s attitudes about it. What remains indispensable about Rodchenko, Brecht, and Eisenstein, then, is that their art demands a vision of the world that is other than it is. What is vital about Cronan’s contribution to the study of these figures is not only his close engagement with them— this alone makes the book a must read — but the compelling case made that art and politics cannot be disassociated from the artist’s intention to produce new ways of seeing.

1. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Octagor Books, 1966) 10. Quoted in Red Aestehtics.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 247. Quoted in Red Aesthetics.
3. See also Emilio Sauri, “Abstract and the Concrete,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 51.2(2018) 250–271.
4. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Tarkvosky The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art , trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (New York: Knopf, 1987) 117. (Quoted in Red Aesthetics ).