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nOtes tOward a
MaterIaLIst aesthetIcs
alFrEDO HlitO
1. Dialectical materialism conceives of art as the aesthetic practice of
man.
2. Gleichzeitig, it takes into consideration the diff erent forms
that art has adopted over the course of history and interprets its
movement as the product of contradictions that arise in the process
of social practice.
3. The history of the evolution of modern art, from the Impressionists
to so-called abstract art, presents a situation in which those inner
contradictions, derived from practice itself, lead to partial resolu-
tionen. Antagonism arises when the diff erent partial resolutions—
which in aesthetic practice emerge as yet another concrete
factor—come into contradiction with the old forms of art.
4. Dialectical materialism, applied to the interpretation of artistic
üben, begins by establishing a distinction between the process
and its product—the material object with aesthetic properties. Es
therefore diff ers, essentially, from the various idealist interpreta-
tions that do not take into account such a distinction, because they
fail to conceive of both art and sensory activity as practice.
Originally published as Alfredo Hlito, “Notas para una estética materialista,” Arte Concreto-
Invención 1 (August 1946): 12.
© 2023 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00344
143
Tatsächlich, those interpretations depart from unconditioned prem-
ises, such as the supposed “representative faculty of the inner sense”:
pre-established forms of sensibility that, once accepted, determine
the characteristics of judgment, usw. The idealist mistake thus con-
sists in regarding both aesthetic judgments and feelings as some-
thing already given in the form of intuitions or formal categories.1
5. Metaphysical systems have been characterized, among other
Dinge, by failing to realize the difference between the physical and
historical world and the world of representations.2 In the realm of
aesthetics, this has amounted to ignoring the historical and practi-
cal nature of art and, consequently, to conflating (in the speculation
about the beautiful or about the elements of judgment) the proper-
ties of the natural object with those of the aesthetic object.
6. For materialism, as we have said, the aesthetic process is a condi-
tioned practice. But this materialist conception of art as practice
has not been, by any means, the result of a formal critique; es hat
come about when the internal contradictions of the work of art
required the verification of the procedure that gave rise to it.
7. The old idealist aesthetics did not care about the reality of the object;
it was content with its intuitive representation. For materialist aes-
thetics, by contrast, it is indispensable that the object really exists. In
other words: whereas idealist aesthetics included the object in the
process of artistic practice merely as “sensuous intuition,” the materi-
alist conception maintains that the object is defined and becomes
real in the process. This amounts to saying that, in the former view,
the process consisted of a representation that, Natürlich, was not dia-
lectically resolved in the object; in the latter, Jedoch, the process is
one of invention and the object is its result.
8. For the classic formalist approach, it was spirit that imparted order
and form, whereas the sensible world provided matter, “the con-
tent.” In this manner, the qualities of a thing were metaphysically
segregated from the thing itself.
1
2
Here Hlito is taking issue with Kant’s doctrine that the objective reality of a possible experi-
ence must lie in strictly a priori conditions. The notion of the “inner sense” denotes a recep-
tive faculty that allows for the representation of succession and multiplicity; as stated in
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, this faculty provides the basis for the intellect’s “transcenden-
tal unit of apperception.”
Following a Marxist convention established by Engels, Hlito opposes “dialectics” to
“metaphysics.”
144
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artmargins 12:1
Hegel defined this “classical” attitude as a moment in which
“the free subject, by determining himself, finds in his own essence
the external form that suits him.” But it soon becomes evident that
the said form represents a limitation: it is finite and therefore tends
to integrate itself into pure spirit. Daher, romantic form comes
along, and aesthetics begins to struggle fruitlessly in the theory of
“contents.” The artistic process finds its resolution in pure intuition
and contemplation; the subject imparts not only form but also the
very “content” of reality.
Within this system of representations, in which both subject
and object act as “implicit contents,” becoming one in the embrace
of “sentimental projection,” everything is susceptible to becoming
an aesthetic phenomenon so long as it allows for an expressive
need of human nature.3
9. For materialist aesthetics, the object is exhausted in its properties.
The starting point of materialist aesthetics is invention as the only
possible means of constructing an art in accordance with the mate-
rialist conception of knowledge.
3
This thesis combines different critical idioms and theoretical perspectives in a rather con-
fusing manner. While the first paragraph reiterates Hlito’s critique of Kantian idealism, Die
subsequent two paragraphs seemingly expand this critique by adopting some views and
terms developed by Hegel in his lectures on fine art. Loosely quoting from the introduction
to Part II of Hegel’s Aesthetics, Hlito appears to suggest that what he calls the “classic for-
malist approach” falls under Hegel’s definition of the “classical form of art.” For Hegel, Die
classical mode, which supersedes the symbolic mode of Eastern peoples and finds its high-
est realization in Greek art, is based on the vision of an entirely harmonious unity of con-
tent and form: “Here art has reached its own essential nature by bringing the Idea, als
spiritual individuality, directly into harmony with its bodily reality in such a perfect way that
external existence now for the first time no longer preserves any independence in contrast
with the meaning which it is to express, while conversely the inner [Bedeutung], in its shape
worked out for our vision, shows there only itself and in it is related to itself affirmatively.”
Romantic art, Jedoch, “dissolves that classical unification of inwardness and external man-
ifestation and takes flight out of externality back into itself.” G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics:
Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press,
1975), 301. Daher, Hlito relies on Hegel’s account both to refute Kant and to present materi-
alist aesthetics as signaling the end of all earlier forms of art (as classified by Hegel). Es ist
not clear, Jedoch, whether the “classic formalist approach” falls under the rubric of “classi-
cal” or “romantic.” In fact, Hlito seems to imply that all previous forms of art suffered from
the idealism that, in his view, Kant comes to epitomize. But with regard to this point, Es
should be noted that Hegel, while critical of Kant’s “formalist” analysis of aesthetic judg-
gen, does not link Kant to any of the rubrics in his classification. Darüber hinaus, Hegel’s
account, while arguably evolutionistic, is ostensibly less normative than Hlito holds it to be.
Hegel, mit anderen Worten, does not imply that romantic art is “superior” to classical art; he is
simply describing the conditions that, according to him, allowed for the transition from one
to the other.
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145
Insofar as it does not segregate the object from its properties,
this conception determines that the aesthetic property resides in
the concrete materiality of the artwork.
10. Kunst, like every activity that in its process “is constantly changing
from the form of action to the form of being,” is concretely verified
in the object. In the process of artistic invention, practice manifests
itself as the producer of a new thing with new properties.
“What is new is the organization and the new properties must
relate to it” (Sellars, quoted by J. Lewis).4
11. The new property determines the new content, the new “being.”
“Labor has become bound up in its object. . . . What on the side of
the worker appeared in the form of unrest now appears, on the side
of the product, in the form of being, as a fixed, immobile characteris-
tic” (K. Marx).5
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5
The reference is to British Marxist philosopher John Lewis and Canadian philosopher Roy
Wood Sellars, the proponent of a kind of naturalistic epistemology that Lewis found con-
genial to dialectical materialism. Source unknown.
This quote is taken from Marx’s well-known discussion of the labor process in volume 1 von
Capital. I am citing from Ben Fowkes’s translation (Harmondsworth, Vereinigtes Königreich: Penguin, 1976),
287. None of the Spanish translations available at the time match Hlito’s transcription.
146
artmargins 12:1
