Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Gillian Rose. Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Ed. Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson. New York: Verso, 2024. 176 pp.

Review by Thomas Waller

10 April 2025

Gillian Rose relished her reputation for being a difficult writer. The fact that the subtitle to her first book is a misnomer has often been remarked upon. More than “an introduction to the thought of Theodor W. Adorno,” The Melancholy Science (1978) expounded on the concept of reification in a way that made few concessions to first-time readers. The prose of her next book, Hegel Contra Sociology (1981), was even more laborious. As she silently shuffles back and forth between expository and argumentative forms of writing, the reader often struggles to differentiate those moments at which Rose is simply re-presenting Hegel from those at which she is essaying original interpretations of her own. In The Broken Middle (1992)—in many ways her magnum opus—she revels in what she calls the “agon of authorship”: an encounter, a battle, a face-off, a challenge.[1]

Originally delivered as a series of introductory lectures on Frankfurt School critical theory at the University of Sussex in 1979, Marxist Modernism presents us with a new, dynamic Rose—more of a pedagogue than a philosopher, not demotic but not exactly difficult either. In his cautious afterword, Martin Jay argues that these lectures were “clearly not intended to be preserved for posterity,” contrasting their conversational and informal approach with the notorious complexity of Rose’s written works (p. 133). Yet, stylistic differences notwithstanding, Rose’s piercing intelligence is on full display in these pages. She comes across as erudite but not alienating, refusing to sacrifice skepticism and critique in the name of simplification. This searching attitude does not always shine through in her writings, which are heavier and more measured, less animated and ranging.

The purpose of the lecture course is to genealogically situate the work of Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer within the tradition of critical theory. While there were ample and sometimes explosive disagreements between these “Marxist modernists,” Rose argues that what links them together is the fact that their “commitment to renewal in art is inseparable from their commitment to renewal in theory” (p. 93). The umbrella term modernism is, however, only ever used in a provisional way, for Rose is wary of the contradictions between the various artists and objects that it struggles to unify. Lukács, for example, comes in for particular criticism for bundling together modernisms such as expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Proletkult, and surrealism—movements which “he jolly well knew were quite different from each other,” as Rose puts it in her quaint, genteel English (p. 35).

The central claim of Marxist Modernism is that the theory of commodity fetishism enabled the Frankfurt School to develop a new, sociological account of culture’s relative autonomy. According to this argument, not only are exchange relations of the same order as cultural forms like literature and art, but knowledge about society is as un-self-evident as knowledge about aesthetics. If this meant keeping a wide berth from base-and-superstructure reductionism, the critical theorists did not throw the baby out with bathwater by giving up on social determination altogether. As in Karl Marx’s analysis of the topsy-turvy character of capitalist exchange, illusion is here grasped as both a necessary and real element of social reproduction, but one that does not for this reason cease to be deceptive.[2]  

A recurring theme of the lectures is the fraught relationship between the production and reception of works of art. The Expressionismusdebatte between Lukács and Bloch, for example, is compellingly reframed as a dispute over intentionality and reception. Insights such as these—of which there are many—are swept up in the explorative, more or less extemporaneous style of Marxist Modernism. While Rose’s written texts are pitched at a level of density that makes for a sometimes-breathless reading experience, the lectures are marked by a contrapuntal rhythm that moves freely between summary and analysis, exegesis and interpretation. As a result, they have a pedagogical value that is absent from the majority of Rose’s published works, and are poised to become an important companion volume to the 1977 collection Aesthetics and Politics, which anthologises much of the material covered in Marxist Modernism.

Nevertheless, this gain in accessibility means arrogating the kind of knowledge that we are made to labor for in works like Hegel Contra Sociology. Rather than de-yoke Rose’s style from the supposedly more straightforward content of her thought, we should recognise that difficulty is an ineluctable aspect of all speculative experience. (Aporia was, appropriately, one of Rose’s favourite words.)[3] By cultivating puzzlement and impasse at the level of style, she was able to refuse withdrawal yet persevere in uncertainty. Although there is much to be gleaned from the transcripts collected in Marxist Modernism, it is Rose’s written works that best embody this ethical attitude, enjoining us not to succumb to despair even in the face of the most broken mediations.

[1] Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 151.

[2] See Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 trans. Paul Reitter, ed. Paul North and Reitter (Princeton, N.J., 2024), p. 49.

[3] Gillian Rose, Paradiso (Bristol, 2015), p. 37.