Lucien Goldmann, Genetic Structuralism and Cultural Creation in the Capitalist World : Genetic Structuralism and Cultural Creation in the Capitalist World

In 1975, Marc Zimmerman completed his dissertation on Lucien Goldmann and began to convert that dissertation into a book, drafting a series of revised chapters as articles, writing material that would constitute two new chapters, developing bibliographical studies and dispersing his results in a variety of journals and other publications venues in India as well as the U.S. and finally, giving up on his larger project, publishing a condensed Spanish-language version of the revised materials in a small book geared to Latin Americanist preoccupations based on notes drafted for his seminar on Marxist theory with university professors in Sandinista Nicaragua, Lucien Goldmann: El estructuralismo genetico y la creacion cultural (1985). Now more than two decades later, Zimmerman has finally rescued his varied published articles and drafts, and culled his past notes and reflections to produce something close to an updated version of the original large-scale volume on Goldmann that he had initially conceived. Lucien Goldmanns Marxism accented the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the young Lukacs, stressing totality, reification and potential consciousness, but hardly accepting any of the economic and political aspects of Lukacs work. His two year apprenticeship with Jean Piaget in Zurich gave him a theory for the way consciousness assimilates and adapts to material conditions, and enabled his Marxism to enter into dialogue and confrontation with Levi-Strauss structuralism, which came to the fore in the 1960s and led to poststructuralist and postmodern theory. Indeed at least one aspect of the work for contemporary radical thought may still involve finding a means to go beyond the very positions for and against which Goldmann argued. If we have not yet reached a full understanding of Goldmanns thought, it may be that we do not yet understand our own situation. Thus there still seem to be pressing reasons for a further study of Goldmann - reasons which are far from academic. What were Goldmanns achievements? What from the perspective of his own time were his major limitations? What can we say of his pre-post positions and of our post-positions with respect to him and his time? Zimmerman seeks to answer these questions in a book presenting a thinker who was crucial in the period prior to the poststructuralist/postmodernist and post-Marxist revolutions, and hence in any effort mapping Pre-Post Positions and their subsequent career.