The Utopian Motif Is Suspended

suddenly seized by melancholy and said: We should throw out a bottle with a message in it. Eisler remarked dryly that he already knew how the message should read: I feel so lousy. This kind of resignation, however, is not at all characteristic of Lowenthal. His sentences are marked by sober objectivity: they aim to destroy possible illusions in order to promote political action. To be sure, Lowenthal's thinking is deeply rooted in the framework of critical theory, which he helped establish and develop, but pragmatic tendencies are also evident: an inclination to redirect speculative flights of intellectual fancy back to the path of existing conditions. For him, thinking the possible has always meant thinking within the bounds of present conditions, without, of course, reducing it to that alone. Perhaps his humor also plays a role in this. For the first issue of the Zeitschrififiir Sozialforschung Lowenthal wrote the progmatic essay, On the Social Situation of Literature (Zur sozialen Lage der Literatur), an essay which is now recognized as a milestone in the history of the sociology of literature. His attempt in this essay to develop a social conception of literature necessarily takes

Aesthetics · Art · Conversation · Literature · Motif (music) · Communication · German Literature and Culture Studies · Psychology

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