REALISM AND MODERNISM 93 and expressionism) involving Lukacs on the one side and Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno on the other.3 Lukacs's theory of mediation which allowed him to decode the distinction between realism and naturalism from the actual technique of narration is still relevant to contemporary art, not only in that the distinction emphasizes the dynamic world view, but also in that it carries forward the literary judgements of Marx and Engels insofar as they make the form of a work of art. Only thus can the mediating agency of the imagination perform the amazing task of correcting political ambiguities of an author (the frequently quoted instances arc Balzac and Tolstoy) making him serve radical social purposes even against his conscious intention. Lukacs's concept of potential consciousness, even in its more rigid versions which appeared later, serves to reveal that the present figurative art is a simple description, or inversion through parody of the world believed to be given in a positivist sense. This pertains not only to pop art and photo-realism but also to what is sometimes called, after Lukacs, critical realism^for the way it indulges itself in grotesqueries of violence for immediate effect. Alienation Effect Engaged in a polemic with Lukacs from the very start, Brecht gave an alternative definition for realism: Realistic means: discovering the causal complexes of society/ unmasking the prevailing view of things/writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions ... emphasising the element of development/making possible the concrete and making possible abstractions from it.4 Rather than following Lukacs in bis ideal of restituting a harmonious realationship between the components of the social whole, Brecht cleaves the world further apart^along its lines of contradiction so as to reveal what appears to be a historical reality and the object of revolutionary change. On the question of formal method, he introduces a variety of dramatic approaches-playful, experimental, subversive and didactic—bringing realism and modernism close to an overlapping position. Specifically, he turns all these devices to account for his famous alienation effect. Thus he introduces the possibility of praxis through art, making the aesthetic option work like a revolutionary strategy that preempts the historical processes. As Frederic Jameson calls it, this is ^'a triumphant reappropriation and materialist re-grounding of the dominant idelogy of modernism from the ends of a revolutionary politics.'96