Patchwork Retrotheorisation

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Karl Marx didn't have a theory of art. That didn't stop Mikhail Lifshitz writing a book on it.

It's not a difficult trick. If you want to find "the islamic theory of childhood", you trawl through the Q'uran and your favoured hadiths, picking out any passages that refer to children, put them in a list and treat them as notes for a book which the author(s) planned but never got around to writing.

If you want "the marxist theory of aesthetics", you assume as a matter of faith that
(1) there is such a theory,
(2) it's contained implicitly in available works on other subjects,
(3) it can be extracted from them, and
(4) it's well worked-out and coherent.

Four highly questionable assumptions. In effect, you assume the great marxists did unwittingly collaborate on a worthwhile theory of aesthetics...but they wrote it out of sequence, scattering it in fragments across works covering tangentially related topics.

If you're a scrupulous researcher, you'll remember the context the fragments came from and take that into account when interpreting them - and if you're not, well, that makes it easier to write the book.

None of this is to say such a work must be worthless, or that Marx, Lenin etc. had nothing interesting to say about art. But any project like "Buddha on family", "Hume on linguistics" or indeed "Lenin on music" should be regarded with great skepticism.

If I want to know something about geology, I ask a geologist. I don't ask a dozen haematologists, or read a dozen books by one astronomer.

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