Materialist History

Materialist History, as it appears in Kornbluh's reading of Fight Club, names a specifically Marxist-dialectical orientation toward historical time: one that refuses to treat the present moment as a settled, closed formation and insists instead on its ongoing, open-ended character. Against teleological or idealist historiographies—which either render the present as the necessary outcome of prior causes or project it toward an inevitable future resolution—the materialist approach holds that history is contingent, meaning that its outcomes are not pre-given but remain genuinely in play. The present, on this account, is not a fixed datum but a site of unresolved tensions whose development is still in motion.

This has immediate formal and political corollaries. If the present is in-process, then contradiction—understood not as a defect to be overcome but as the motor of historical movement—cannot and should not be prematurely reconciled. Kornbluh maps this historiographical stance onto Fight Club's refusal of Hollywood closure: the film's open ending is not merely an aesthetic choice but a theoretically correct rendering of the Marxist-materialist insight that contradictions at the psychic, interpersonal, and political levels simultaneously remain unresolved. The concept therefore links a philosophy of history (contingency, the in-process present) to an aesthetics (open endings, irresolution) and an ideology-critique (resistance to the consolatory closure that Hollywood narrative conventionally delivers).

This concept appears in anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019 (p.179) as part of Kornbluh's argument that Fight Club's formal resistance to closure is underwritten by a Marxist materialist philosophy of history. The concept is not developed at length but functions as a theoretical hinge, connecting several of the page's cross-referenced canonicals. Its most direct articulation is through Contradiction: Kornbluh's materialist history is precisely a history in which contradiction remains active rather than sublated, aligning with the corpus's account of contradiction as "the motor of being and concept" that must not be prematurely resolved. Where Hollywood Narrative Closure performs exactly the foreclosure of contradiction that ideology requires—offering imaginary resolution to real social antagonisms—materialist history names the refusal of that foreclosure at the level of historical temporality itself.

The concept also bears on Ideology and Subjectivity as cross-referenced canonicals. If ideology (in the Lacanian-Žižekian frame operative in this corpus) depends on fantasy to paper over constitutive social antagonism, then materialist history's insistence on the in-process present is an anti-ideological move: it refuses the "naturalization" of the present that ideology requires. And if subjectivity is constitutively non-totalizable and structured around unresolved division, then the materialist-historical framework provides the macro-level correlate to that psychoanalytic insight — both the subject and history are formations that cannot be closed off into self-identical, finished wholes. Materialist History thus functions in Kornbluh's argument as an extension and politicization of the structural incompleteness that Lacanian theory posits at the level of the subject and the signifier.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight ClubAnna Kornbluh · 2019 (p.179)

For Marx, one benefit of the materialist approach to history as contingent rather than inevitable was a corollary approach to the present as in process rather than as fixed.

The quote's theoretical weight rests in its paired oppositions — "contingent rather than inevitable" and "in process rather than as fixed" — which together refuse both teleological determinism and ideological closure: if the present is "in process," then contradiction has not been resolved, the antagonisms that drive historical movement remain operative, and no premature synthesis (cinematic or political) can legitimately foreclose them.