Forms of the Implausible

On Frédéric Lordon’s Misreading of One Battle After Another

In a recent piece, Frédéric Lordon approaches Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film with his conclusions already in hand, a kind of a priori certainty that betrays an aesthetic traditionalism and prevents him from recognizing, in the very absurdities he mocks (such as the neo-Nazi headquarters of the “Christmas Adventurers”, with its minimalist design and built-in gas chamber), a form of deliberate exaggeration.

For these moments are not lapses of taste but strategies of critical hyperbole, the means by which Anderson renders the truth-content of a specific historical configuration. To demand realism here is to miss the point: the excess is part of the diagnosis. What Lordon condemns as implausible is, in fact, the necessary form of a critique attuned to its own time. His socialist-realist framework cannot register this.

More broadly, Lordon conflates a fragment of the bourgeois reception of the film with its own aesthetic and political project. He treats the enthusiasm of a particular audience as if it revealed the film’s inner meaning.

Yet One Battle After Another is not about “the Revolution” in the abstract; it is historically grounded – despite its temporal shifts between the militant legacies of the 70s-80s and the post-2008 landscape. Far from romanticizing armed activism, Anderson’s film criticizes precisely those vanguardist (mostly petty-bourgeois) formations – the Weather Underground, to be sure, the most caricatured of them all, but also their arguably more serious counterparts outside the U.S.: the RAF in Germany, the Brigate Rosse in Italy, the Action Directe in France, the CCC in Belgium, the JRA in Japan... – that sought to carry on a socialist revolution without any genuine popular base. To read the film as a mere celebration of such movements is to invert its meaning.

Even more revealing is Lordon’s silence on what is arguably the film’s most powerful dimension, both ethically and aesthetically: the clandestine network that protects undocumented immigrants (by several accounts, largely Benicio del Toro’s invention). This sequence embodies the very collective process he insists is missing: popular organization and mutual aid, but also the apprenticeship of revolution, the people in motion, mainly the youth, rendered with exquisite photographic care.

Ultimately, Lordon’s piece has little to do with One Battle After Another itself. His true object is its reception by a narrow cultural milieu – left-wing bourgeois-bohème – which he mistakes for the film’s message. In doing so, he abandons aesthetic analysis in favor of sociological caricature, reducing a complex cinematic experience to the projection surface of his own polemical habits.

Patchworks of the Possible

Reinvesting Meaning in 'Postmodern' Art

In contemporary discourse, postmodernism is frequently reduced to a catch-all for fragmented, ironic, or pastiche-driven art, a flattening that obscures how these same techniques can carry radically different aesthetic and political intentions. While irony, eclecticism, and the blurring of high and low culture define much postmodern art, not all works using these devices are cynically detached or nihilistic. 

Thomas Pynchon’s novels are dense, fragmented, and full with intertextual references – all hallmarks of postmodern fiction. Yet his stories are imbued with a deep concern for history, technology and power relations. The paranoia in Gravity's Rainbow or The Crying of Lot 49 is not merely stylistic; it reflects a sincere critique of systems of control and the erosion of personal agency. In Vineland, this preoccupation takes the form of a meditation on the legacy of 60s counterculture and its suppression by the increasingly ubiquitous state apparatus. The novel's apparent lightness of tone conceals a darker interrogation of how memory, media and surveillance overlap to neutralize dissent. Pynchon describes the transformation of resistance into nostalgia and the commodification of rebellion, while the omnipresent Tube echoes the broader postmodern condition of a reality thoroughly mediated by images. Vineland retains Pynchon's characteristic playfulness and humor, for sure, but it is also critical and profoundly human, revealing the tragic decline of utopian hopes in the context of corporate capitalism.

In films like Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius, Kléber Mendonça Filho blends realism with genre tropes – a postmodern trait – yet the result is neither hollow nor purely stylistic. Instead, these formal experiments are deeply rooted in Brazilian urban and social realities. The fragmentation in his storytelling mirrors the fractured nature of class structures and memory in contemporary Recife. His aesthetic is political, and his politics are aesthetic: each cinematic technique reinforces a lived experience of inequality (the tensions and clashes between classes), resistance, and identity.

Musically, Manu Chao is a collage artist par excellence. But while his songs span languages, genres, and geographies, this eclecticism does not amount to a playful anything-goes devoid of meaning; it reflects a politics of internationalism and solidarity (for years it was the main soundtrack of alter-globalism); it uses musical pastiche to elevate scattered voices, to protest borders, and to foreground the experiences of migrants and the marginalized. In contrast to the depoliticized, ironic pastiche often critiqued in postmodernism, his patchwork aesthetic is a joyous call to action.

To this list we might also add the work of Judy Baca and the broader tradition of L.A. muralism. Far from embracing postmodern detachment, Baca’s monumental community murals – such as The Great Wall of Los Angeles – reimagine public space as a canvas for collective memory and historical redress. These visual narratives, built collaboratively with hundreds of young people from marginalized communities, defy commodification through their scale, permanence, and rootedness in place. They turn postmodern plurality into an act of solidarity rather than dispersion, and in doing so, exemplify an aesthetics of resistance grounded in class and grassroots political practice. 

To group all these artists under a monolithic view of postmodernism is to misread their work. Yes, they use techniques usually associated with postmodernism, but with radically different intentions. Their art is not a celebration of surface, but a dive into structure, systemic logic, and soul rebellion. In an era where cultural production is increasingly remix-based, they demonstrate that not all collage is kitsch, not all pastiche is empty; that some patchworks are maps of survival, and some fragments carry the charge of a future still in formation.

Though stylistically diverse, they share a refusal to treat aesthetic form as mere ornament, operating at the crossroads of artistic invention and political intervention. In this, they align more closely with the modernists, resisting accommodation with capitalism, eschewing production tailored simply to the demands of mass media. Style does not dissolve into spectacle; rather, it becomes a way of tracing the fractures of subjectivity under neoliberalism without conceding to fatalism. The subject in their work may be wounded, dispersed, surveilled, but never entirely crushed. Even in fragmentation a voice persists, asking what it means to live, to love, to resist, to remember...  

Through a class-conscious lens, they illuminate rather than obscure the contours of social reality. Aesthetic value arises not in retreat of social struggle, but in its articulation – even when that struggle appears stalled. By reclaiming explicit social themes often dismissed or treated with suspicion in postmodern discourse, they reinvest critique with emotional content and historical force. They gain in acuity: their art does not simply reflect the world as it is; it exposes everything that should not be, and gestures toward what might yet come. It opens space for counter-histories, ways of seeing uncolonized by the dominant imaginaries. Meaning – or its pursuit – endures; and from the cracks, alternative visions of the future may still emerge.

Deception Theory

Adorno vs. Jauss: Aesthetic Value in the Face of Commodification

Explicitly or implicitly, reception theories of literature often position themselves against Marxist aesthetics, which they claim reduces art to a mere epiphenomenon of the superstructure – a passive reflection of society’s underlying economic forces. 

Hans Robert Jauss has engaged explicitly and willingly in that dispute. Already in his famous German inaugural address of 1967, titled "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory", he generalizes what he imagines the above mentioned aesthetics to be by hand-picking some of the worse pieces written by Lukács (while pretending they were not already thoroughly contested by other renowned ambassadors of that same critical tradition, such as Brecht and Adorno), which he mixes up with concepts taken from Goldmann, whom he misreads, and ends up highlighting a major contradiction in that line of thought. The "contradiction" he identifies is the following: if there really is, as Marxists claim, a homology between a pre-existing basic social structure and artistic phenomena, then the result can only be the complete identity of form and content, which is impossible given that their reciprocal influence is denied once one posits, as Marxists themselves generally do, economics as the determinant factor (cf. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005, pp. 13-14). 

A literary critic should pay more carefully attention to the words he uses. "Homology", for a start, does not mean "identity". Secondly, what in preeminent Marxist criticism is structurally homologous are not form and content; it is on the contrary the form of the social and the fundamental forms worked out by the artist in order to organize the material he chooses to work upon that are homologous, which is completely different from what Jauss is making out of the position he elected to bout by identifying all Marxist critique with the infamous "theory of reflection". But who really in the Marxist camp sustained such a rudimentary model at the end of the sixties apart from some (to employ a Joycean expression) "reptrograd leanins"? 

Now let’s shift, for a contrast, to the position put forward by Adorno in his philosophical testament, published posthumously three years later. Already in the very first pages of Aesthetic Theory (London/New York: Continuum, 2004, pp. 6-7), it becomes clear that, in the best versions of Marxist aesthetics, things are not as black and white as Jauss had claimed (and it is not as if the ideas of the Frankfurt School philosopher on art and society were unknown at the time he made his public address, notably in Germany). It is worth quoting:

If art opposes the empirical through the element of form – and the mediation of form and content is not to be grasped without their differentiation – the mediation is to be sought in the recognition of aesthetic form as sedimented content. [...] They [artworks] are real as answers to the puzzle externally posed to them. Their own tension is binding in relation to the tension external to them. The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil. The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society. The complex of tensions in artworks crystallizes undisturbed in these problems of form and through emancipation from the external world’s factual façade converges with the real essence. [...] The moment a limit is posited [resuming Hegel’s argument against Kant], it is overstepped and that against which the limit was established is absorbed. Only this, not moralizing, is the critique of l’art pour l’art, which by abstract negation posits the χωρισμός of art as absolute. [trans. R. Hullot-Kentor]

Well, a moralizing alternative solution to Adorno’s "somber" approach is exactly what Jauss preached a couple of years after the publication of Aesthetic Theory, except that, to put it mildly, he completely misses the bull’s eye in his discussion of the latter. Artworks according to his normative aesthetic of reception must lead to symbolic practices geared towards solidarity, reason why he attacks the Frankfurt School thinker, for not searching to build a bridge between the solitary contemplative artistic experience and engagement in dialogical practices; instead of focusing on negation, art should seek to create an objective binding meaning (cf. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008, pp. 13-21). To say the least, the whole question is poorly formulated, since such a bridge, the adequacy of artistic products to an ideal would mean sacrificing quality from the start (not to mention the fact that nothing guarantees that dialogical practices in the present conditions, in which social language is constantly penetrated by commoditized mediations that ossify and devitalize significations, would by themselves lead to qualitative social change or even to solidarity). 

Taking the reasoning to the end, a work such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin would stand, according to such highly noble criterion, as superior to, say, The Castle, for, even though literarily speaking Stowe’s novel is awful, it "communicates better" and usually rouse empathetic feelings, whereas Kafka’s book might lead to incomprehension and eventually leave the reader indifferent, if not more confused than ever. In that optic, if I’m allowed to caricaturize a bit, we would be better off without books like Finnegans Wake or The Unnamable, as they do not contribute an inch in creating the objective binding meaning Jauss nostalgically dreams of, whereas a cheesy Paulo Coelho novel might just fit in perfectly. Jokes aside, and to state it plainly, the problem is not in the moral intention itself, as intentions are not the decisive factor in the composition (or, for that matter, the reception) of a work of art. What is crucial is the work’s formal coherence and the truth content it expresses (Flaubert already, in a famous letter to Louise Colet, sustains exactly the same). As Terry Eagleton puts it in The Event of Literature (New Haven/London: Yale University, 2012, p. 69): "Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not an embarrassingly second-rate novel because it has a specific moral purpose – so does Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Tolstoy’s Resurrection and Orwell’s Animal Farm – but because of the way it executes it. One might contrast it in this respect with The Grapes of Wrath, The Crucible or Ibsen’s Pillars of Community." 

Moreover, let’s not forget that for Adorno art cannot move within the circle of mutual understanding rooted in the ordinary uses of language in everyday communication, for the simple reason that the kernel of our most significant experiences – personal as well as social – cannot be apprehended except as the very inadequacy between language (not only ordinary language, but also in its theoretical or scientific uses) and that which it intends to designate or describe. There is where the mimetic language of art, operating at the objective level of form, may express that which cannot be expressed in direct dialogical or communicative fashion: "Though discursive knowledge is adequate to reality, and even to its irrationalities, which originate in its laws of motion, something in reality rebuffs rational knowledge. [...] Suffering conceptualized remains mute." (Aesthetic Theory, p. 24) 

That’s what distinguishes consequent works of art from most pop narcotics, what separates, let’s say, Spielberg’s maudlin Schindler’s List, the multiple Oscar awarded worldwide box office success, from a generally execrated movie like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. By sticking to historical reality (or to what we know of it) and pretending to portray the events as faithfully as possible from the point of view of those who took part in them, the former ultimately falsifies the whole thing by turning the barely imaginable horror of the holocaust into a commodity fit to the Hollywood melodramatic frame (which comprises blind sympathetic identification, heroic exemplarity, clear consensus over what is good and what is evil) and its over-stereotyping standards (the Jew is but a grotesque caricature of the Jew, and the same goes for the Nazi), with its cheap symbolism and implausible moral absolutes (so that you can watch it in the evening after work, eventually get moved by the story, and go right back to your ordinary life, which in any case gets away confirmed and legitimized). As dreadful as it really is, Pasolini’s last movie, on the other hand, by being almost unbearable (even if one manages to watch it to the end, it is a considerably indigestive experience), to the point of being to this day and age still banned in several countries (not much for its extremely graphic scenes of violence, I suspect, but above all for depicting fascism as the latest flower of the enlightened and highly refined European civilization), does way more justice to the intolerable truth of what took place during WWII, as well as to actual victims of fascism anywhere. 

All that is not to say, as some rather poor reading of Adorno might suggest, that only nearly excruciating works are legitimate – reading Huckleberry Finn remains a very pleasant experience, which does not change the fact that it is a novel way superior to the much less amusing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as it articulates incomparably better than this latter the deep truth of Antebellum American society –, for what is decisive is precisely the "feeling of truth" (as Antonio Candido would have it) conveyed by the work, wherein resides its true moral dimension.