Craft Notes
Art v. Politics: Not About Privilege
I’ve put my favorite Susan Sontag quotation in comment fields here, but I’m going to recall it again:
And the wisdom that becomes available over a deep, lifelong engagement with the aesthetic cannot, I venture to say, be duplicated by any other kind of seriousness. Indeed, the various definitions of beauty come at least as close to a plausible characterization of virtue, and of a fuller humanity, as the attempts to define goodness as such.
I believe this with every bit of me. And I am completely convinced that, as egregiously privileged as I am, this is not a privileged position. Susan Sontag had radical left politics, but she put the aesthetic first. She’s a lot smarter than me, but I’m still going to try to make some sense of that position here.
Politics are terminal. They are finite. We might say we are interested in raising questions when we talk about gender or race or other categories that are defined and upheld by politics. But politics is really about finding answers. This has its place, but its place is not in art.
Artists know that finding real answers is not possible in this world. The failure of politics to recognize this fact is why the lasting thing from any culture has been its expression. Desperate people turn to story, turn to verse, performance, art. When nothing is assured, when help doesn’t come, when standards aren’t met and good people suffer, the only thing left is to confront mystery, to confront tragedy and eternity.
The aesthetic means simply the representation of all this mystery, tragedy, eternity without the dissembling claim of wrapping them up neatly. Keying into the aesthetic instead of the political in a work of art is about asking what choices of form the art-maker made to best help the audience to access the mystery, the eternity. To help the audience feel human.
As Sontag puts it, “a fuller humanity.” That is what art is after. Art shouldn’t be a prettier journalism or history or sociology. Art is about reaching people through empathy, not data or facts or argument. And learning certain facts or believing in certain causes and wanting to win people over to them is not the impetus toward real art. There are causes I believe in, certainly–I am not politically apathetic, and I will tell you all about why you should donate your organs or support same-sex marriage. I will prove to you that the New York Times transmits really weird messages about gender, and I will get heated about it, and finally so will you. There are things that really must change, problems to which solutions must be applied even if there will always be injustice both cosmic and human-made.
But I won’t attempt to make art to get those messages across (I say attempt because art is not, cannot be and still be art, about messages, it is about representation, and the only value judgment is whether an artist is representing as truthfully as possible, which doesn’t mean as realistically or as faithfully to real or even possible events). I’m interested in the bigger things, more mysterious, more permanent things. A bigger thing is having empathy for someone you thought you had nothing in common with. A bigger thing is seeing the world through unshaded eyes. A bigger thing is realizing you are powerless to change any of it, but that you still have the will, courage, and stamina to muddle through, most likely for someone else’s sake. A bigger thing is realizing you are not alone. That you are not the only person built this way but that the world won’t stop calling you a freak.
That is radical indeed.
Tags: politics, susan sontag
Amazing words. Mind stretched.
There is art that hope you will feel empathy, and then there is ‘art’ that wants you to feel that the artist is intelligent/brilliant/cooler-than-you. Bravo!
that’s the most interesting argument I’ve heard yet.
Amy, I feel like you spend most of this (beautifully written) post talking about how art is expansive, is something bigger, is mystery, is more. Which I totally agree with. But then you make this very narrow, closed pronouncement about how politics has no place in art. I just don’t get that. Doesn’t everything have a place in art? Who’s to say what should or should not be a fit subject matter for art? Why can’t politics and the aesthetic co-exist? I could name countless films, paintings, pieces of music, books, etc where they do.
I think art should be made whenever and whyever someone is inspired to make it. And if they feel inspired politically, so be it. If not, awesome. I just don’t see why, when we have these expansive discussions about what art is and is not, that politics is the one thing that *has* to be excluded. Maybe that’s because I don’t think politics is just about looking for answers. I think it can also be about exposing a problem, making visible a people, shedding light on injustice. And art can do that beautifully, too, like you said, by creating empathy or just being a witness.
I like this comment, too, Amber.
Thanks for this, Amy. While I’m not sure that I agree with every point you make, it’s heartening to see that someone else values the lifelong study and creation of beauty.
A deep engagement with the aesthetic should ideally influence and inform all parts of one’s life, including the political. The deep consideration of beauty warps us in ways that are for our best.
My phrasing is slightly off, I think. Of course politics can be included; I did the thing where I argued against the inverse of what I believe. I am responding to the idea that politics is the one thing that HAS to be included or else the art is unserious or inconsequential. Merely aesthetic.
But I stand by the idea that the aesthetic comes first and that politics–even lovely things like shedding light on injustice–should not be the primary impetus. Obviously, sometimes it is, and the art and aesthetic power is still there. But I think that’s because the art did something different than what the artist intended, which is plenty common. My point is that the particular injustice is finite, and art should look at whatever is non-finite in the particular issue at stake. Of course artists confront politics, but if it is good art, people totally unconnected to that particular injustice can relate, and that is enough, even if they don’t do anything else about it. Great if they do! But that shouldn’t be the main goal of the art.
Subject matter can be anything. But subject matter is not the point, it is the vehicle. The most specific begets the most eternal by stimulating the imagination.
Amber, thank you. I’ve long felt alienated by the “politics do not belong in art” argument. I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand the limitation, I don’t understand the implication.
But I’m not sure everyone is talking about the same thing when they say “politics.” Or “art” for that matter. And I’m also not really sure it matters what other people say. Writers will always write what they want to write–or, maybe this is a better way of saying it, writers will always write what they need to write.
I agree completely. Coming from a privileged background in the South, I don’t think my views would be so progressive as they are if I hadn’t gotten a fuller view of humanity through encounters with art.
I’m with much of this transcendent aspiration of art, but I think it’s too radically abstracted. I think art can reach over distances and past personal/political barriers and thus widen our sense of experience and empathy, but it does this while grounded in a particular place/person/time. Paul Celan said of poetry, “A poem is not timeless. Certainly, it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time–through, not above and beyond it.”
I’m also not sure how I’m supposed to conceive of humanity with out regard to other values and commitments that are outside of art, including the necessity of empathy.
You can’t be saying this at face value? You say, “the lasting thing from any culture has been its expression.” What about technology? Religion? Law? Form of government? To name a few. Metallurgy and weaving, just to use two examples, predate written language. Elements of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism are over 5,000 years old. Our law is directly based on English Common Law, which dates back to Magna Carta (1215), which in turn is based on Ancient Roman law. Our constitution is based on “past” culture’s political experience, Athenian democracy and the Iroquois confederation, specifically. Everything that exists around us today, from clocks to cheese, is based something that survived from another culture.
You also say, “politics are terminal, they are finite.” I would argue that they are in fact the only “infinite” thing that exists. The political decision to conquer the Americas instead of agreeing on peaceful coexistence with the Natives affects the very nature of our world today. Its consequences affected human history more than any artistic creation ever will.
Unfortunately, you also say we must accept that “we are powerless to change any of it.” This is exactly what the powerful want us to believe, that we as artists must sit by like melancholy owls while the earth is ravaged by the ruthless. This is one of the reasons why our “experimental writing” is read by fewer people than those who read Bird Watcher’s Monthly or The Model Train Enthusiast. If you want to look at how political art can change the world, look at Sinclair Lewis, or Dreiser or Steinbeck or Upton Sinclair. Look at Guernica, or The Battle of Algiers. Not all art has to be political, but political art can be as “valid” as apolitical art and most importantly, can change things.
Thank you for this.
Do many people here actually argue that politics do not belong in art? I, like Amy, argue only for the aesthetic only as the primary lens we create or re-create (by reading) art within. Of course the good reader/writer/critic is like a pack-rat who uses anything she can use, regardless of critical perspective, but there is no “merely aesthetic.” Beauty is a powerful and complicated thing, with its own history and tradition, and its effects on the individual mind cannot be underrated. (Emerson understood this: in many ways the aesthetic is the best and only teacher.)
Ah, no, my phrasing wasn’t slightly off upon a re-read, perhaps simply my antecedent to “this” was unclear. I did not say politics has no place in art. I said finding answers has no place in art. I stand by it.
“I’m also not sure how I’m supposed to conceive of humanity with out regard to other values and commitments that are outside of art, including the necessity of empathy.”
Again, I’m not sure anyone has argued this. We who argue for the aesthetic are oftentimes strawmanned into beret-wearing “aesthetes,” I think, as if all we care about is “the sound of words on the page.” The aesthetic is so much larger than that.
I do think, David, that you say something very valuable when you say writers will always write what they need to write. That gets at what I think is one of the tensions in these discussions–not understanding, perhaps what it is that other writers feel they need to write.
I agree with you, demi-puppet. And your comment helped me digest a lot of what Amy is saying in her post, of which I’m not in total disagreement with. But yeah, I’ve seen the “politics have no place in art” argument voiced on this website several times by several different contributors. And I’ve always wondered what they were thinking of when they voiced it. I think even the finite has its place in any given day. Some of the biggest lessons on humanity I’ve ever learned came from “pretty journalism,” books like A Savage War of Peace.
Amy, you’re right, I misread that. On re-rereading it I see what you mean. I think, based on your above, that we’re more or less on the same page…I don’t dig art-as-hammer, where the purpose is all…i agree art is not a means to an end or answer, but the beginning of a thought-process and exploration. Like David says below, “writers will always write what they need to write.”
“Susan Sontag had radical left politics”
???
“-not understanding, perhaps what it is that writers feel they need to write.” Yes! This and what David says earlier about how we all define art/politics differently is what I think keeps these discussions somewhat circular and recurring. That’s why I really appreciate Amy’s attempt here to get at the heart of what she means.
Amy,
I enjoyed your post, and agree with others that it’s insightful and compelling, but do you think there’s a difference between “politics” and the “political”?
The “politics” that you reference in your post seem to be the kind of politics that are practiced in Washington; in other words, the discourse of “politicians.”
I don’t think this is necessarily the same as a work of art that is “political,” because any political aspects or elements still exist within the framework of the artistic text.
Politicians don’t argue for bills by writing novels or poems.
“The aesthetic is so much larger than that.”
Then I think this mostly a semantic dispute, since I’d say the political sphere is larger (though not so expansive that it encompasses everything–that would make it meaningless).
if ive ever said politics has no place in art, it was meant in the manner amy is describing much more beautifullier. you cant get away from politics. there is no such thing as absolute apoliticità. but dont consciously agenda-ize your art would be my stance. if political issues are in you its going to subtly seep into your art.
as a reader, i think i dont like the idea of someone trying to persuade me of something, even if im in agreement. nonfic and other political realms are for that. art should be a distance from that, should approach open-mindedness. should be big enough to contain a multitude of opinions and room for empathy across positions, nothing answered, mystery, re: amy’s post.
“there is no such thing as absolute apoliticità. but dont consciously agenda-ize your art would be my stance. if political issues are in you its going to subtly seep into your art.”
damn. this is well-said.
i got a rejection last week that–very nicely and constructively–let me know i was doing this. i re-read the story and was sort of horrified, and have been re-working it, learning more about it in the process. it can be difficult not to “agenda-ize” something, to let it seep, and not hammer. and that’s where the role of the artist comes in. to shape. to verb.
I’m saying that the aesthetic is larger than a superficial analysis of sounds on a page.
Michael, I think I’m talking about both kinds of politics–it is a hard to define word, though, and every time I tried to come up with examples it seemed too limiting. But if it helps, one thing I am responding to is the idea of the merely aesethetic. Like, if an artist isn’t obviously engaged with issues of race/poverty/gender/large-scale inequality, then the work is inconsequential. Where does this leave dance, or non-representative art? There are problems that exist outside of power structures. Horrors beyond these. But it’s always these identity politics that are seen as necessary to engage with. By all means, engage them if you are also, and moreover, looking at something deep and beyond. But there are questions beyond these even for non-privileged people. Questions about life, death, the soul, our place in this world, the way individuals treat each other apart from power-wielding institutions.
-one of the most aesthetically beautiful 30 seconds of film comes about 50 minutes into Barbara Kopple’s highly politicized Harlan County USA.
-robert bresson was ostensibly a jansenist catholic looking for transcendence via the repetition of movements and actions, politically charged narratives
-bataille’s most acute moments of poetry (his most beautiful words and language) come in the midst of guilty, which is written in the middle of his somme atheologique, written during and in response to the second world war
-john duncan fucked a corpse and recorded the sound and what remains is one of the most harrowing and beautiful documents of sound in the world
-goya painted a man in front of a firing squad
i am glad to know that all of these items, listed above, are not are in the “right way”
It’s not a bad thing. There’s your answer.
[…] vs. Politics Amy McDaniel over at HTMLGIANT is talking about the aesthetic versus the political in art, and she uses this as part of the basis of her argument. Politics are terminal. They are finite. We […]
Sure, I agree with that; anyone who limits the aesthetic to “sounds on a page” has a fairly anemic conception of aesthetics.
Amy,
Perhaps “politics” is now code for the kind of “identity politics” practiced in the 80’s and 90’s? Because questions about “life, death, and the soul” are still political, and impacted by politics, unless one is living in a utopian oasis. I just don’t see how one can separate these “questions” from the political in today’s world.
I think some contemporary writers are still steeped in modernist ways of thinking minus the historical reality of Modernism; that is, writers back then were thinking “aesthetic first” during a period of momentous change that, to this day, is basically unprecedented in modern history–the recent shift to industry, two World Wars, Jim Crow, women’s suffrage, the atom bomb, and the extermination of millions of Jews. These writers “made it new” for political reasons, and even though they emphasized “aesthetics,” they did so within a momentous period in history, a period that is linked to the earliest MFA programs (at the tail end). Many workshop practices seem to be more in line with modernist approaches to literature than can be found elsewhere in the humanities, and even if you didn’t attend an MFA program, chances are, your notions of “creative writing” are likely influenced by the MFA model, whether you admit it or not. I don’t think this is a bad thing, per se; I’m certainly wary of the practice of only reading literary texts like a sociologist or historian, but the consequences of one approach don’t change the consequences of approaching literature like a modernist, a period that has since passed for most people.
So whenever I hear writers today basically reecho modernist ideas about art outside of the historical reality of Modernism, it can feel empty, and hollow.
Also, I don’t see how a writer today can pretend to focus “only on the aesthetic” in an age where political information is disseminated at a higher rate than ever before; it would seem, then, that “political” elements would inform one’s aesthetic today regardless of whether or not the writer wanted them to. In today’s mass media culture, all of those big ideas about “empathy” can’t occur in an apolitical vacuum, can they? Is this even possible?
I enjoyed reading this. I do think however that politics v aesthetics is a false binary. You write, “Politics are terminal. They are finite”, but couldn’t you just as easily say, “Aesthetics are terminal. They are finite”? Perhaps you associate aesthetic concerns with unlimited potential, but it would be useful to rememeber that part of the neoliberal project of the last 30 years has been to limit the idea of the political, to limit political potential: There Is No Alternative. I think perhaps the problem is that, collectively, our political imagination has been crushed. The solution might be to break down the artificial barriers between the aethetic and the political and discover something very powerful.
Bravo, Amy! Bravo!
I agree. However, the idea that the realm of the political is endless is in fashion right now, as is the idea that “aesthetics” is some kind of silly lonely game-playing. This post, I believe, is framed in reaction to those ideas.
I must admit that I do tend to think of everything as political, in the sense that human social relations are political. What I agree with in this post is the idea that tying things up neatly in a bow is not useful and art should be fluid enough to be open to interpretation. Or is that against interpretation?
“A bigger thing is having empathy for someone you thought you had nothing in common with.” I call this love.
“A bigger thing is seeing the world through unshaded eyes.” I call this impossible.
“A bigger thing is realizing you are powerless to change any of it …” I totally disagree. What you wrote here changed some of it, even if just a few atoms or nanoseconds or skittles.
“… but that you still have the will, courage, and stamina to muddle through, most likely for someone else’s sake.” I call this love again.
Isn’t this all about love?
Whiskey from a jug is nice.
Summary:
1. The goal of art is to “represent” “mystery,” “tragedy,” and “eternity” as “truthfully” as possible (which does not mean as “realistically” as possible). This “representation” is meant to help people “access” “mystery,” “tragedy,” and “eternity,” which will make people feel “human.” Art helps people “access” these things through “empathy,” not through “facts,” “arguments,” and “messages.” The “value” of art is measured by how “truthfully” the artist “represents” “mystery,” “tragedy,” and “eternity.” This is the only measure of “value” that can be made about art.
2. Politics is about “facts,” “arguments,” and “messages.” Things about “facts,” “arguments,” and “messages” are not art.
3. Politics is important and supporting leftist political causes is good.
4. Politics is about finding “answers.” Artists know that finding “answers” is not possible. Art is not about finding “answers.”
5. “Mystery,” “tragedy,” and “eternity” are more important than “facts,” “arguments,” and “messages.” Art is more important than politics.
6. These are not “privileged” beliefs. That is, the ability to have these beliefs is not an entitlement of high social, political, and/or economic status.
Thank you, Amy.
Amazing words. Mind stretched.
There is art that hope you will feel empathy, and then there is ‘art’ that wants you to feel that the artist is intelligent/brilliant/cooler-than-you. Bravo!
that’s the most interesting argument I’ve heard yet.
Amy, I feel like you spend most of this (beautifully written) post talking about how art is expansive, is something bigger, is mystery, is more. Which I totally agree with. But then you make this very narrow, closed pronouncement about how politics has no place in art. I just don’t get that. Doesn’t everything have a place in art? Who’s to say what should or should not be a fit subject matter for art? Why can’t politics and the aesthetic co-exist? I could name countless films, paintings, pieces of music, books, etc where they do.
I think art should be made whenever and whyever someone is inspired to make it. And if they feel inspired politically, so be it. If not, awesome. I just don’t see why, when we have these expansive discussions about what art is and is not, that politics is the one thing that *has* to be excluded. Maybe that’s because I don’t think politics is just about looking for answers. I think it can also be about exposing a problem, making visible a people, shedding light on injustice. And art can do that beautifully, too, like you said, by creating empathy or just being a witness.
I like this comment, too, Amber.
Thanks for this, Amy. While I’m not sure that I agree with every point you make, it’s heartening to see that someone else values the lifelong study and creation of beauty.
A deep engagement with the aesthetic should ideally influence and inform all parts of one’s life, including the political. The deep consideration of beauty warps us in ways that are for our best.
My phrasing is slightly off, I think. Of course politics can be included; I did the thing where I argued against the inverse of what I believe. I am responding to the idea that politics is the one thing that HAS to be included or else the art is unserious or inconsequential. Merely aesthetic.
But I stand by the idea that the aesthetic comes first and that politics–even lovely things like shedding light on injustice–should not be the primary impetus. Obviously, sometimes it is, and the art and aesthetic power is still there. But I think that’s because the art did something different than what the artist intended, which is plenty common. My point is that the particular injustice is finite, and art should look at whatever is non-finite in the particular issue at stake. Of course artists confront politics, but if it is good art, people totally unconnected to that particular injustice can relate, and that is enough, even if they don’t do anything else about it. Great if they do! But that shouldn’t be the main goal of the art.
Subject matter can be anything. But subject matter is not the point, it is the vehicle. The most specific begets the most eternal by stimulating the imagination.
Amber, thank you. I’ve long felt alienated by the “politics do not belong in art” argument. I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand the limitation, I don’t understand the implication.
But I’m not sure everyone is talking about the same thing when they say “politics.” Or “art” for that matter. And I’m also not really sure it matters what other people say. Writers will always write what they want to write–or, maybe this is a better way of saying it, writers will always write what they need to write.
I agree completely. Coming from a privileged background in the South, I don’t think my views would be so progressive as they are if I hadn’t gotten a fuller view of humanity through encounters with art.
I’m with much of this transcendent aspiration of art, but I think it’s too radically abstracted. I think art can reach over distances and past personal/political barriers and thus widen our sense of experience and empathy, but it does this while grounded in a particular place/person/time. Paul Celan said of poetry, “A poem is not timeless. Certainly, it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time–through, not above and beyond it.”
I’m also not sure how I’m supposed to conceive of humanity with out regard to other values and commitments that are outside of art, including the necessity of empathy.
You can’t be saying this at face value? You say, “the lasting thing from any culture has been its expression.” What about technology? Religion? Law? Form of government? To name a few. Metallurgy and weaving, just to use two examples, predate written language. Elements of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism are over 5,000 years old. Our law is directly based on English Common Law, which dates back to Magna Carta (1215), which in turn is based on Ancient Roman law. Our constitution is based on “past” culture’s political experience, Athenian democracy and the Iroquois confederation, specifically. Everything that exists around us today, from clocks to cheese, is based something that survived from another culture.
You also say, “politics are terminal, they are finite.” I would argue that they are in fact the only “infinite” thing that exists. The political decision to conquer the Americas instead of agreeing on peaceful coexistence with the Natives affects the very nature of our world today. Its consequences affected human history more than any artistic creation ever will.
Unfortunately, you also say we must accept that “we are powerless to change any of it.” This is exactly what the powerful want us to believe, that we as artists must sit by like melancholy owls while the earth is ravaged by the ruthless. This is one of the reasons why our “experimental writing” is read by fewer people than those who read Bird Watcher’s Monthly or The Model Train Enthusiast. If you want to look at how political art can change the world, look at Sinclair Lewis, or Dreiser or Steinbeck or Upton Sinclair. Look at Guernica, or The Battle of Algiers. Not all art has to be political, but political art can be as “valid” as apolitical art and most importantly, can change things.
Thank you for this.
Do many people here actually argue that politics do not belong in art? I, like Amy, argue only for the aesthetic only as the primary lens we create or re-create (by reading) art within. Of course the good reader/writer/critic is like a pack-rat who uses anything she can use, regardless of critical perspective, but there is no “merely aesthetic.” Beauty is a powerful and complicated thing, with its own history and tradition, and its effects on the individual mind cannot be underrated. (Emerson understood this: in many ways the aesthetic is the best and only teacher.)
Ah, no, my phrasing wasn’t slightly off upon a re-read, perhaps simply my antecedent to “this” was unclear. I did not say politics has no place in art. I said finding answers has no place in art. I stand by it.
“I’m also not sure how I’m supposed to conceive of humanity with out regard to other values and commitments that are outside of art, including the necessity of empathy.”
Again, I’m not sure anyone has argued this. We who argue for the aesthetic are oftentimes strawmanned into beret-wearing “aesthetes,” I think, as if all we care about is “the sound of words on the page.” The aesthetic is so much larger than that.
I do think, David, that you say something very valuable when you say writers will always write what they need to write. That gets at what I think is one of the tensions in these discussions–not understanding, perhaps what it is that other writers feel they need to write.
I agree with you, demi-puppet. And your comment helped me digest a lot of what Amy is saying in her post, of which I’m not in total disagreement with. But yeah, I’ve seen the “politics have no place in art” argument voiced on this website several times by several different contributors. And I’ve always wondered what they were thinking of when they voiced it. I think even the finite has its place in any given day. Some of the biggest lessons on humanity I’ve ever learned came from “pretty journalism,” books like A Savage War of Peace.
Amy, you’re right, I misread that. On re-rereading it I see what you mean. I think, based on your above, that we’re more or less on the same page…I don’t dig art-as-hammer, where the purpose is all…i agree art is not a means to an end or answer, but the beginning of a thought-process and exploration. Like David says below, “writers will always write what they need to write.”
“Susan Sontag had radical left politics”
???
“-not understanding, perhaps what it is that writers feel they need to write.” Yes! This and what David says earlier about how we all define art/politics differently is what I think keeps these discussions somewhat circular and recurring. That’s why I really appreciate Amy’s attempt here to get at the heart of what she means.
Amy, this was really wonderful, as deftly written as ever and really powerfully conveyed, thank you. I’m with you on aesthetics as first philosophy, but I really think the consequences of putting aesthetics depends on what we mean by aesthetics. If you notice, for Sontag, aesthetics need to be qualified as “a plausible characterization of virtue”. Oddly, enough, because of that, I’d argue that ethics are what Sontag is implicitly saying is first philosophy – for what would happen if aesthetics were not virtuous? By dodging that question, the problem of a compatibility between ethics and aesthetics does not arise. Aesthetics only counts in for her as for beyond politics because of its ability to be beautiful variously, because she’s basically assigned it an ethics that doubles for her politics. To some extent, I find this approach that eschews politics even as it presents itself as so universal it must pass all tests of political commitment to be disingenuous. And I can’t help but think that the same gesture is made by you when you write: “The aesthetic means simply the representation of all this mystery, tragedy, eternity without the dissembling claim of wrapping them up neatly. Keying into the aesthetic instead of the political in a work of art is about asking what choices of form the art-maker made to best help the audience to access the mystery, the eternity. To help the audience feel human.” To be honest, art has solved a lot of things for me. I’m not worried I might be misconceived to say that. Part of a lifelong commitment to art is surely the ability to not only envision but revision many things. If art does anything for me, it informs my critical judgement not of any particular worth in a thing (which beauty is always implicitly tied to, as a notion, for better or worse) but of the principle of quality or value that informs the manifestation of things, how they come to be what they are and may yet be.
You write, “Art shouldn’t be a prettier journalism or history or sociology. Art is about reaching people through empathy, not data or facts or argument.” I can think of a massively aesthetic work of fiction that is proof that art can be just as arty when it is all of those things: Robert Coover’s The Public Burning. Still, if art reaches people through empathy, it qualifies aesthetics as an ethical enterprise of embrace. What if I were to turn around and challenge that by saying I only want the aesthetics of white people? I certainly could do that. They have many aesthetics. I’d still be loyal to the aesthetic in doing so. The ethical quandary returns again. Traditionally, aesthetics is understood as a theory or science of critical judgments on sensory or emotional values or taste but people abbreviate that definition to the second part and leave out the first: it becomes about justifications for feelings and sensations and tastes, not judgments. And it’s misconceived because aesthetics is a theoretical enterprise – an intellectual study, as spurned as being an intellectual is, in our age of ressentiment – that deals not only with sensation, with affect, and with new ways of perceiving the universe but, more forcefully, seeks to understand the ways why the universe has the uncanny capacity to be able to architecturalise such affective possibilities in the first place – in other words, to make sense of the way reality itself depends on conceptualising things (and this applies to non-humans as much as humans) in shapes or styles of being.
To me, everything you say in the last paragraph about the community of aesthetics – “A bigger thing is realizing you are not alone. That you are not the only person built this way but that the world won’t stop calling you a freak.” – is absolutely true but aesthetics may also tell you the exact opposite, that you are indeed alone and a freak. It has no morals. Because aesthetics is first philosophy only, it contains no additional steps toward the guarantees we look to ethics for – and this is exactly why ethics is a political matter. People can embrace the aesthetic over the political if they like but they can’t claim to eschew ethics and just be ethical effortlessly and naturally because aesthetics lets them. It’s an excuse, at best, and a deliberately pernicious attempt to take control of the definition of aesthetics so as to debunk the claim of ethics, at worse.
Ethics does require signing up to certain values in relation to aesthetics but so does signing up to aesthetics insist on certain values in relation to ethics. Aesthetics is not the valueless freedom of everything. It’s not the next world. It’s the principle of worlding. Ethics is the effort to comprehend multiple worlds in their integrity. Technically, you can be an aesthete and never leave the one aesthetic codex – or world – for the rest of your life. You are not less an aesthete for doing so. And even one aesthetics is large enough to spend a life in. There are books enough for you to explore it until death and feel like it was the only universe around to explore. In my long comment yesterday about the conversation between Roxane, Amy, Kate and Blake, I said, “A book is still a book. It is not everything. It is still only one door to the all that it wishes to maintain lies within it, for the time of its duration. To me, the all is no less all for this necessity of an entrance, but nor is the entrance less the way in simply because infinity lies beyond the door.” To me, the politics of representation are about the doors we can step through, and also about keeping clearly in view the understanding that it’s not all the same infinity on the other side of the door, to put off the sense aesthetics can instill that it doesn’t matter what door you step through. There are many infinities, essentially: that’s what aesthetics gives us. But the problem is even one infinity can be deceptive and feel like the only infinity, since it goes on forever. Ethics insists we step into the many. It says we do have time to do this impossible thing. It says only going through the best-fitting doors for you is never ever enough.
Amy,
I enjoyed your post, and agree with others that it’s insightful and compelling, but do you think there’s a difference between “politics” and the “political”?
The “politics” that you reference in your post seem to be the kind of politics that are practiced in Washington; in other words, the discourse of “politicians.”
I don’t think this is necessarily the same as a work of art that is “political,” because any political aspects or elements still exist within the framework of the artistic text.
Politicians don’t argue for bills by writing novels or poems.
“The aesthetic is so much larger than that.”
Then I think this mostly a semantic dispute, since I’d say the political sphere is larger (though not so expansive that it encompasses everything–that would make it meaningless).
if ive ever said politics has no place in art, it was meant in the manner amy is describing much more beautifullier. you cant get away from politics. there is no such thing as absolute apoliticità. but dont consciously agenda-ize your art would be my stance. if political issues are in you its going to subtly seep into your art.
as a reader, i think i dont like the idea of someone trying to persuade me of something, even if im in agreement. nonfic and other political realms are for that. art should be a distance from that, should approach open-mindedness. should be big enough to contain a multitude of opinions and room for empathy across positions, nothing answered, mystery, re: amy’s post.
“there is no such thing as absolute apoliticità. but dont consciously agenda-ize your art would be my stance. if political issues are in you its going to subtly seep into your art.”
damn. this is well-said.
i got a rejection last week that–very nicely and constructively–let me know i was doing this. i re-read the story and was sort of horrified, and have been re-working it, learning more about it in the process. it can be difficult not to “agenda-ize” something, to let it seep, and not hammer. and that’s where the role of the artist comes in. to shape. to verb.
I’m saying that the aesthetic is larger than a superficial analysis of sounds on a page.
Michael, I think I’m talking about both kinds of politics–it is a hard to define word, though, and every time I tried to come up with examples it seemed too limiting. But if it helps, one thing I am responding to is the idea of the merely aesethetic. Like, if an artist isn’t obviously engaged with issues of race/poverty/gender/large-scale inequality, then the work is inconsequential. Where does this leave dance, or non-representative art? There are problems that exist outside of power structures. Horrors beyond these. But it’s always these identity politics that are seen as necessary to engage with. By all means, engage them if you are also, and moreover, looking at something deep and beyond. But there are questions beyond these even for non-privileged people. Questions about life, death, the soul, our place in this world, the way individuals treat each other apart from power-wielding institutions.
-one of the most aesthetically beautiful 30 seconds of film comes about 50 minutes into Barbara Kopple’s highly politicized Harlan County USA.
-robert bresson was ostensibly a jansenist catholic looking for transcendence via the repetition of movements and actions, politically charged narratives
-bataille’s most acute moments of poetry (his most beautiful words and language) come in the midst of guilty, which is written in the middle of his somme atheologique, written during and in response to the second world war
-john duncan fucked a corpse and recorded the sound and what remains is one of the most harrowing and beautiful documents of sound in the world
-goya painted a man in front of a firing squad
i am glad to know that all of these items, listed above, are not are in the “right way”
This is such an articulate, passionate argument, Amy. I want to know the impetus. You said above: “I am responding to the idea that politics is the one thing that HAS to be included or else the art is unserious or inconsequential. Merely aesthetic.” Was your post just an intellectual response to other ideas floating around recently or… something else? Your post is so tuned-in… I want to know more about what compelled you to write it. Care to share?
It’s not a bad thing. There’s your answer.
Sure, I agree with that; anyone who limits the aesthetic to “sounds on a page” has a fairly anemic conception of aesthetics.
Wow, this is a terrific post. Standing ovation! I love this.
I do think that there’s a sort of relation between the ethic and the aesthetic, but certainly, yes, many people erroneously conflate the two in an effort to defend the aesthetic. (This is part of why I sided with the spirit of Amy’s post, and not necessarily the particulars.)
The beautiful must be free to be completely un-virtuous. Many of the most beautiful things that I’ve read or seen may indeed have made me a “worse” person.
But the true relation between the ethic and aesthetic is very very hard to tease out, I think. I feel intuitively that it has something to do with a certain kind of spiritual experience, and with way of intensifying your general powers of perception (both interior and exterior), but I haven’t hashed any of this in a clear-cut way.
Amy,
Perhaps “politics” is now code for the kind of “identity politics” practiced in the 80’s and 90’s? Because questions about “life, death, and the soul” are still political, and impacted by politics, unless one is living in a utopian oasis. I just don’t see how one can separate these “questions” from the political in today’s world.
I think some contemporary writers are still steeped in modernist ways of thinking minus the historical reality of Modernism; that is, writers back then were thinking “aesthetic first” during a period of momentous change that, to this day, is basically unprecedented in modern history–the recent shift to industry, two World Wars, Jim Crow, women’s suffrage, the atom bomb, and the extermination of millions of Jews. These writers “made it new” for political reasons, and even though they emphasized “aesthetics,” they did so within a momentous period in history, a period that is linked to the earliest MFA programs (at the tail end). Many workshop practices seem to be more in line with modernist approaches to literature than can be found elsewhere in the humanities, and even if you didn’t attend an MFA program, chances are, your notions of “creative writing” are likely influenced by the MFA model, whether you admit it or not. I don’t think this is a bad thing, per se; I’m certainly wary of the practice of only reading literary texts like a sociologist or historian, but the consequences of one approach don’t change the consequences of approaching literature like a modernist, a period that has since passed for most people.
So whenever I hear writers today basically reecho modernist ideas about art outside of the historical reality of Modernism, it can feel empty, and hollow.
Also, I don’t see how a writer today can pretend to focus “only on the aesthetic” in an age where political information is disseminated at a higher rate than ever before; it would seem, then, that “political” elements would inform one’s aesthetic today regardless of whether or not the writer wanted them to. In today’s mass media culture, all of those big ideas about “empathy” can’t occur in an apolitical vacuum, can they? Is this even possible?
I know it has been said–but *yes*, Amy. Thank you. A new, resonant, nutrient-dense piece of the ongoing conversation. I’m chewing happily.
I enjoyed reading this. I do think however that politics v aesthetics is a false binary. You write, “Politics are terminal. They are finite”, but couldn’t you just as easily say, “Aesthetics are terminal. They are finite”? Perhaps you associate aesthetic concerns with unlimited potential, but it would be useful to rememeber that part of the neoliberal project of the last 30 years has been to limit the idea of the political, to limit political potential: There Is No Alternative. I think perhaps the problem is that, collectively, our political imagination has been crushed. The solution might be to break down the artificial barriers between the aethetic and the political and discover something very powerful.
I’m sorry to be the nay-sayer here, but I think the understanding that you, Amy, have conveyed of politics and privilege is, to be nice, incomplete. Consider for a moment, who pays for your art supplies? Who was the first person to encourage you in your creative process? What was the context? What form are you pursuing? How do you express yourself when talking about your art? All of these decisions and moments and opportunities for change and advancement and growth, every single one of them is political. Politics isn’t about what party you support or what sign you’re holding, it’s about understanding the underlying system to our lives: how money moves and how that relates to power, how culture and class can be bred into people–in a way and to the extent that they become exclusionary by default.
Your approach is too simplistic. Anecdotal metaphor: A while back, the French took race and religion off the census. The idea was to appear to be color blind and egalitarian. The actual result was that there simply were no statistics to support people’s claims and to track racism and prejudice as it played out in people’s lives.
Just the same, painting a purely aesthetically beautiful picture doesn’t make the creative process non-political (or beautiful). You can’t transcend politics by pretending that aesthetics are the ultimate transcendence from and through the human experience. Ultimately, we are still bound to our condition. Here, I may have misunderstood because you didn’t speak extensively on how you perceive political art, bu my impression was that your understanding of political art was as limited as your understanding of politics. Political art is not just propaganda. The best political art is art that is willing to face the world and defy the system it exists in, and defy the modes of creation. That would be true transcendence.
I think there would be a strong argument for your case for the pure aesthetic if we were living in an egalitarian world. If everyone could express their condition as they needed to and chose (or IF they needed to and chose to), without repression (or even simply, without direct repression) the entire concept of the aesthetic would make more sense.
Until then, art and artists, by choice or not, have a role to play which experience they choose to represent. You made a reference to “art as pure expression.” I think that’s true… in the incompleteness of that statement, that is what art should be. But who and what we choose to express is nonetheless a choice, and as a choice, it will always be political. I don’t think it’s fair to judge artists on a purely political platform, but it would be ridiculous to pretend that politics doesn’t play a part.
Bravo, Amy! Bravo!
I agree. However, the idea that the realm of the political is endless is in fashion right now, as is the idea that “aesthetics” is some kind of silly lonely game-playing. This post, I believe, is framed in reaction to those ideas.
I must admit that I do tend to think of everything as political, in the sense that human social relations are political. What I agree with in this post is the idea that tying things up neatly in a bow is not useful and art should be fluid enough to be open to interpretation. Or is that against interpretation?
A very fine post indeed. But I wonder if politics can achieve the very things you set aside for art. Must politics be always about solutions? Why not about empathy…why not about acting in the face of the absurd, the tragic, the primordially unjust as well as the contingently so? Our best politicians, it seems to me, occasionally seek what some of the greatest art does–to connect, to inscribe the world with nuance, with passion, to set into motion, to confer significance upon our actions, to reinvent what we already know…and our worst appeal to what shitty art does–to manipulate, to simplify, to lull and sell, to recycle tired myths and create need on the cheap.
excellent point, and well articulated!! Thanks.
@voorface: Yes!! I think this is why street art can be so incredibly powerful–not just as a form of political expressing, but because it challenges our assumptions of what is POSSIBLE, and forces us to consider what we do expect and challenge the limits of that. I also wholeheartedly agree that she has created a false binary, and that politics are only as finite as you choose to go with your exploration of them.
this is an interesting aspect of this. i dont know though, it feels too theoretical, not really applicable to what amy is talking about. if theres a conenction between aesthetic and political, it feels like the thread can be so thin as to be negligable, or to fall into a space of a reader can take it or leave it depending on who they are. maybe there is such a thing as a significant and insignificant ethic. you can’t consider *everything* ethically, you’ll go crazy. but there are things that trip our ethical-meters and it is those things that we talk about when we talk about ethics. an author can intend to be purely aesthetic and a reader can read the work as purely aesthetic if its delivered that way, neither aware of whatever residual ethical parasites rode along with it because they were insignificant. The discussion should not be so much 100% aesthetic cannot be separated from 100% ethic, rather simply what an artist chooses to convey, that a focus on aesthetic is what art should *strive* for, regardless of whether it can be it in totality.
I think you have an incomplete understanding of her post. She acknowledged her own privilege, and as far as I can see she did not argue for an aesthetics-exclusive perspective. True, her assertion that the “aesthetics first” position is privilegeless is pretty much wrong, but I think a charitable reader can interpret that as saying that the fact that the aesthetic position is privileged is not at all what’s most fascinating about it. I mean, duh, anyone with the time and money to loafe around and contemplate beauty inevitably enjoys a fair amount of privilege. But you can only bemoan your own privilege for so long, and the question of what best to do with it is a valid one. The deep solitary engagement with written beauty seems like a decent way for one to spend one’s privileged spare time. . . . and I think your understanding of artistic representation is also fairly incomplete, but your explanation of it is just vague enough that I can’t find a proper foothold for a critique.
If we use politics in the general “all power relations between social beings” definition that is in vogue (though I think this is nearly meaningless), then the realms of the aesthetic and the political are in many ways coextensive, and deciding between them is not an exclusive question, but one of purpose and focus. I believe that their is some value to a material political analysis of literary art, but it seems to take you only so far before you either run out of steam, or by necessity begin discussing something other than your reading of the art. Aesthetic or “literary” analysis, in my opinion, is far richer, as it usually addresses creatively art creatively, which is the best match.
[I say that aesthetic/political is coextensive because any sole creator of beauty is inevitably responding to prior incarnations of beauty [because to mere duplicate or repeat is not beautiful], which because it involves a kind of social relation would thus be “political.”]
Yea I totally support you here. I think this piece makes some claims that are quite simply unfounded.
To those who suggest politics is infinite: explain how.
how does it involve a social relation to create beauty? im not following that. Unless we are saying *beauty* is a humanly universal concept. Can’t something only be beautiful to me?
…So you’re basically encouraging me to appreciate the aesthetic position/power of the post, ignore her false assertions, and quash my own argument, just because, duh, we all must be privileged, and therefore, fuck it???
filibuster!
If we’re talking about artistic beauty that is positioned with some overarching tradition, then there is always a (usually intuitive) social relation involved. For example, say I naively write a poem that starts with the line “My life had stood a loaded gun” (ie I’m not writing parody): that is not beautiful, it’s going to look silly and people are going to groan. They are going to say that “Man, someone’s already been there; try again.” For whatever reason, a certain degree of originality is always a part of the apprehension of literary beauty.
Now, if you’re sprawled on the lawn admiring the beauty of an oak tree (as I love to do), this may not be the case. I dunno. The laws of figurative language imply a certain kind of social relation. Solitarily admiring an oak does not necessarily involve language, so maybe the apprehension is wholly private.
Um, no. I assumed you were interested in not misreading her, in contributing positively to the discussion. Looks like I assumed wrong.
I always find discussions of “the infinite” sort of confounding, honestly. I think I am too literally minded. The only thing infinite is everything plus the rest. And what’s that? Everything, and then some.
gotcha. language beauty. language as communication. communication as social relation.
Haha, yeah, discussions of infinity are kind of mind-bending. At BU there was a class where we spent a little time studying transfinite numbers. Things got pretty kooky.
But it -is- a very real concept, and useful in certain contexts. I read an incredible explication of it once, I believe from some mathematician who frequently in class had to explain the usefulness of the concept. . . have no idea where I read that, though. Might have been something Morris Kline wrote?
“A bigger thing is having empathy for someone you thought you had nothing in common with.” I call this love.
“A bigger thing is seeing the world through unshaded eyes.” I call this impossible.
“A bigger thing is realizing you are powerless to change any of it …” I totally disagree. What you wrote here changed some of it, even if just a few atoms or nanoseconds or skittles.
“… but that you still have the will, courage, and stamina to muddle through, most likely for someone else’s sake.” I call this love again.
Isn’t this all about love?
Whiskey from a jug is nice.
Summary:
1. The goal of art is to “represent” “mystery,” “tragedy,” and “eternity” as “truthfully” as possible (which does not mean as “realistically” as possible). This “representation” is meant to help people “access” “mystery,” “tragedy,” and “eternity,” which will make people feel “human.” Art helps people “access” these things through “empathy,” not through “facts,” “arguments,” and “messages.” The “value” of art is measured by how “truthfully” the artist “represents” “mystery,” “tragedy,” and “eternity.” This is the only measure of “value” that can be made about art.
2. Politics is about “facts,” “arguments,” and “messages.” Things about “facts,” “arguments,” and “messages” are not art.
3. Politics is important and supporting leftist political causes is good.
4. Politics is about finding “answers.” Artists know that finding “answers” is not possible. Art is not about finding “answers.”
5. “Mystery,” “tragedy,” and “eternity” are more important than “facts,” “arguments,” and “messages.” Art is more important than politics.
6. These are not “privileged” beliefs. That is, the ability to have these beliefs is not an entitlement of high social, political, and/or economic status.
Thank you, Amy.
Rachel, you do seem to be misunderstanding me. I never argue here for any kind of purity, aesthetic or otherwise. I’m talking about primacy, not purity. I argue that it is not only the privileged for whom beauty is often the only thing left, the only thing possible.
There are of course systems of power and oppression and injustice and these should be examined, and they needn’t be ignored by artists or by art. But there are also things that make us fundamentally human. I will acknowledge again that I am privileged, but I have also been very close to total despair and it is in those moments that I have the most need for beauty. I would argue that not just art-making but also art-consuming is borne of desperation, NOT of privilege. Yes, I am privileged to be able to make art and to have access to lots of art, but plenty of downtrodden peoples have turned to art, to beauty, when they really couldn’t afford to.
a tangent might be the aesthetic of religion, paricularly catholicism. something the downtrodden turn to out of desperation i mean. but is it the aesthetic thats being turned to or what’s behind it?
i dont know if i agree. if you’re turning to beauty in a time of despair, isnt it because you are remembering how beauty made you feel during a time of priviledge?
Amy, this was really wonderful, as deftly written as ever and really powerfully conveyed, thank you. I’m with you on aesthetics as first philosophy, but I really think the consequences of putting aesthetics depends on what we mean by aesthetics. If you notice, for Sontag, aesthetics need to be qualified as “a plausible characterization of virtue”. Oddly, enough, because of that, I’d argue that ethics are what Sontag is implicitly saying is first philosophy – for what would happen if aesthetics were not virtuous? By dodging that question, the problem of a compatibility between ethics and aesthetics does not arise. Aesthetics only counts in for her as for beyond politics because of its ability to be beautiful variously, because she’s basically assigned it an ethics that doubles for her politics. To some extent, I find this approach that eschews politics even as it presents itself as so universal it must pass all tests of political commitment to be disingenuous. And I can’t help but think that the same gesture is made by you when you write: “The aesthetic means simply the representation of all this mystery, tragedy, eternity without the dissembling claim of wrapping them up neatly. Keying into the aesthetic instead of the political in a work of art is about asking what choices of form the art-maker made to best help the audience to access the mystery, the eternity. To help the audience feel human.” To be honest, art has solved a lot of things for me. I’m not worried I might be misconceived to say that. Part of a lifelong commitment to art is surely the ability to not only envision but revision many things. If art does anything for me, it informs my critical judgement not of any particular worth in a thing (which beauty is always implicitly tied to, as a notion, for better or worse) but of the principle of quality or value that informs the manifestation of things, how they come to be what they are and may yet be.
You write, “Art shouldn’t be a prettier journalism or history or sociology. Art is about reaching people through empathy, not data or facts or argument.” I can think of a massively aesthetic work of fiction that is proof that art can be just as arty when it is all of those things: Robert Coover’s The Public Burning. Still, if art reaches people through empathy, it qualifies aesthetics as an ethical enterprise of embrace. What if I were to turn around and challenge that by saying I only want the aesthetics of white people? I certainly could do that. They have many aesthetics. I’d still be loyal to the aesthetic in doing so. The ethical quandary returns again. Traditionally, aesthetics is understood as a theory or science of critical judgments on sensory or emotional values or taste but people abbreviate that definition to the second part and leave out the first: it becomes about justifications for feelings and sensations and tastes, not judgments. And it’s misconceived because aesthetics is a theoretical enterprise – an intellectual study, as spurned as being an intellectual is, in our age of ressentiment – that deals not only with sensation, with affect, and with new ways of perceiving the universe but, more forcefully, seeks to understand the ways why the universe has the uncanny capacity to be able to architecturalise such affective possibilities in the first place – in other words, to make sense of the way reality itself depends on conceptualising things (and this applies to non-humans as much as humans) in shapes or styles of being.
To me, everything you say in the last paragraph about the community of aesthetics – “A bigger thing is realizing you are not alone. That you are not the only person built this way but that the world won’t stop calling you a freak.” – is absolutely true but aesthetics may also tell you the exact opposite, that you are indeed alone and a freak. It has no morals. Because aesthetics is first philosophy only, it contains no additional steps toward the guarantees we look to ethics for – and this is exactly why ethics is a political matter. People can embrace the aesthetic over the political if they like but they can’t claim to eschew ethics and just be ethical effortlessly and naturally because aesthetics lets them. It’s an excuse, at best, and a deliberately pernicious attempt to take control of the definition of aesthetics so as to debunk the claim of ethics, at worse.
Ethics does require signing up to certain values in relation to aesthetics but so does signing up to aesthetics insist on certain values in relation to ethics. Aesthetics is not the valueless freedom of everything. It’s not the next world. It’s the principle of worlding. Ethics is the effort to comprehend multiple worlds in their integrity. Technically, you can be an aesthete and never leave the one aesthetic codex – or world – for the rest of your life. You are not less an aesthete for doing so. And even one aesthetics is large enough to spend a life in. There are books enough for you to explore it until death and feel like it was the only universe around to explore. In my long comment yesterday about the conversation between Roxane, Amy, Kate and Blake, I said, “A book is still a book. It is not everything. It is still only one door to the all that it wishes to maintain lies within it, for the time of its duration. To me, the all is no less all for this necessity of an entrance, but nor is the entrance less the way in simply because infinity lies beyond the door.” To me, the politics of representation are about the doors we can step through, and also about keeping clearly in view the understanding that it’s not all the same infinity on the other side of the door, to put off the sense aesthetics can instill that it doesn’t matter what door you step through. There are many infinities, essentially: that’s what aesthetics gives us. But the problem is even one infinity can be deceptive and feel like the only infinity, since it goes on forever. Ethics insists we step into the many. It says we do have time to do this impossible thing. It says only going through the best-fitting doors for you is never ever enough.
This is such an articulate, passionate argument, Amy. I want to know the impetus. You said above: “I am responding to the idea that politics is the one thing that HAS to be included or else the art is unserious or inconsequential. Merely aesthetic.” Was your post just an intellectual response to other ideas floating around recently or… something else? Your post is so tuned-in… I want to know more about what compelled you to write it. Care to share?
Wow, this is a terrific post. Standing ovation! I love this.
I do think that there’s a sort of relation between the ethic and the aesthetic, but certainly, yes, many people erroneously conflate the two in an effort to defend the aesthetic. (This is part of why I sided with the spirit of Amy’s post, and not necessarily the particulars.)
The beautiful must be free to be completely un-virtuous. Many of the most beautiful things that I’ve read or seen may indeed have made me a “worse” person.
But the true relation between the ethic and aesthetic is very very hard to tease out, I think. I feel intuitively that it has something to do with a certain kind of spiritual experience, and with way of intensifying your general powers of perception (both interior and exterior), but I haven’t hashed any of this in a clear-cut way.
I know it has been said–but *yes*, Amy. Thank you. A new, resonant, nutrient-dense piece of the ongoing conversation. I’m chewing happily.
I’m sorry to be the nay-sayer here, but I think the understanding that you, Amy, have conveyed of politics and privilege is, to be nice, incomplete. Consider for a moment, who pays for your art supplies? Who was the first person to encourage you in your creative process? What was the context? What form are you pursuing? How do you express yourself when talking about your art? All of these decisions and moments and opportunities for change and advancement and growth, every single one of them is political. Politics isn’t about what party you support or what sign you’re holding, it’s about understanding the underlying system to our lives: how money moves and how that relates to power, how culture and class can be bred into people–in a way and to the extent that they become exclusionary by default.
Your approach is too simplistic. Anecdotal metaphor: A while back, the French took race and religion off the census. The idea was to appear to be color blind and egalitarian. The actual result was that there simply were no statistics to support people’s claims and to track racism and prejudice as it played out in people’s lives.
Just the same, painting a purely aesthetically beautiful picture doesn’t make the creative process non-political (or beautiful). You can’t transcend politics by pretending that aesthetics are the ultimate transcendence from and through the human experience. Ultimately, we are still bound to our condition. Here, I may have misunderstood because you didn’t speak extensively on how you perceive political art, bu my impression was that your understanding of political art was as limited as your understanding of politics. Political art is not just propaganda. The best political art is art that is willing to face the world and defy the system it exists in, and defy the modes of creation. That would be true transcendence.
I think there would be a strong argument for your case for the pure aesthetic if we were living in an egalitarian world. If everyone could express their condition as they needed to and chose (or IF they needed to and chose to), without repression (or even simply, without direct repression) the entire concept of the aesthetic would make more sense.
Until then, art and artists, by choice or not, have a role to play which experience they choose to represent. You made a reference to “art as pure expression.” I think that’s true… in the incompleteness of that statement, that is what art should be. But who and what we choose to express is nonetheless a choice, and as a choice, it will always be political. I don’t think it’s fair to judge artists on a purely political platform, but it would be ridiculous to pretend that politics doesn’t play a part.
A very fine post indeed. But I wonder if politics can achieve the very things you set aside for art. Must politics be always about solutions? Why not about empathy…why not about acting in the face of the absurd, the tragic, the primordially unjust as well as the contingently so? Our best politicians, it seems to me, occasionally seek what some of the greatest art does–to connect, to inscribe the world with nuance, with passion, to set into motion, to confer significance upon our actions, to reinvent what we already know…and our worst appeal to what shitty art does–to manipulate, to simplify, to lull and sell, to recycle tired myths and create need on the cheap.
excellent point, and well articulated!! Thanks.
@voorface: Yes!! I think this is why street art can be so incredibly powerful–not just as a form of political expressing, but because it challenges our assumptions of what is POSSIBLE, and forces us to consider what we do expect and challenge the limits of that. I also wholeheartedly agree that she has created a false binary, and that politics are only as finite as you choose to go with your exploration of them.
this is an interesting aspect of this. i dont know though, it feels too theoretical, not really applicable to what amy is talking about. if theres a conenction between aesthetic and political, it feels like the thread can be so thin as to be negligable, or to fall into a space of a reader can take it or leave it depending on who they are. maybe there is such a thing as a significant and insignificant ethic. you can’t consider *everything* ethically, you’ll go crazy. but there are things that trip our ethical-meters and it is those things that we talk about when we talk about ethics. an author can intend to be purely aesthetic and a reader can read the work as purely aesthetic if its delivered that way, neither aware of whatever residual ethical parasites rode along with it because they were insignificant. The discussion should not be so much 100% aesthetic cannot be separated from 100% ethic, rather simply what an artist chooses to convey, that a focus on aesthetic is what art should *strive* for, regardless of whether it can be it in totality.
I think you have an incomplete understanding of her post. She acknowledged her own privilege, and as far as I can see she did not argue for an aesthetics-exclusive perspective. True, her assertion that the “aesthetics first” position is privilegeless is pretty much wrong, but I think a charitable reader can interpret that as saying that the fact that the aesthetic position is privileged is not at all what’s most fascinating about it. I mean, duh, anyone with the time and money to loafe around and contemplate beauty inevitably enjoys a fair amount of privilege. But you can only bemoan your own privilege for so long, and the question of what best to do with it is a valid one. The deep solitary engagement with written beauty seems like a decent way for one to spend one’s privileged spare time. . . . and I think your understanding of artistic representation is also fairly incomplete, but your explanation of it is just vague enough that I can’t find a proper foothold for a critique.
If we use politics in the general “all power relations between social beings” definition that is in vogue (though I think this is nearly meaningless), then the realms of the aesthetic and the political are in many ways coextensive, and deciding between them is not an exclusive question, but one of purpose and focus. I believe that their is some value to a material political analysis of literary art, but it seems to take you only so far before you either run out of steam, or by necessity begin discussing something other than your reading of the art. Aesthetic or “literary” analysis, in my opinion, is far richer, as it usually addresses creatively art creatively, which is the best match.
[I say that aesthetic/political is coextensive because any sole creator of beauty is inevitably responding to prior incarnations of beauty [because to mere duplicate or repeat is not beautiful], which because it involves a kind of social relation would thus be “political.”]
Yea I totally support you here. I think this piece makes some claims that are quite simply unfounded.
To those who suggest politics is infinite: explain how.
how does it involve a social relation to create beauty? im not following that. Unless we are saying *beauty* is a humanly universal concept. Can’t something only be beautiful to me?
…So you’re basically encouraging me to appreciate the aesthetic position/power of the post, ignore her false assertions, and quash my own argument, just because, duh, we all must be privileged, and therefore, fuck it???
filibuster!
If we’re talking about artistic beauty that is positioned with some overarching tradition, then there is always a (usually intuitive) social relation involved. For example, say I naively write a poem that starts with the line “My life had stood a loaded gun” (ie I’m not writing parody): that is not beautiful, it’s going to look silly and people are going to groan. They are going to say that “Man, someone’s already been there; try again.” For whatever reason, a certain degree of originality is always a part of the apprehension of literary beauty.
Now, if you’re sprawled on the lawn admiring the beauty of an oak tree (as I love to do), this may not be the case. I dunno. The laws of figurative language imply a certain kind of social relation. Solitarily admiring an oak does not necessarily involve language, so maybe the apprehension is wholly private.
Um, no. I assumed you were interested in not misreading her, in contributing positively to the discussion. Looks like I assumed wrong.
I always find discussions of “the infinite” sort of confounding, honestly. I think I am too literally minded. The only thing infinite is everything plus the rest. And what’s that? Everything, and then some.
gotcha. language beauty. language as communication. communication as social relation.
Haha, yeah, discussions of infinity are kind of mind-bending. At BU there was a class where we spent a little time studying transfinite numbers. Things got pretty kooky.
But it -is- a very real concept, and useful in certain contexts. I read an incredible explication of it once, I believe from some mathematician who frequently in class had to explain the usefulness of the concept. . . have no idea where I read that, though. Might have been something Morris Kline wrote?
Rachel, you do seem to be misunderstanding me. I never argue here for any kind of purity, aesthetic or otherwise. I’m talking about primacy, not purity. I argue that it is not only the privileged for whom beauty is often the only thing left, the only thing possible.
There are of course systems of power and oppression and injustice and these should be examined, and they needn’t be ignored by artists or by art. But there are also things that make us fundamentally human. I will acknowledge again that I am privileged, but I have also been very close to total despair and it is in those moments that I have the most need for beauty. I would argue that not just art-making but also art-consuming is borne of desperation, NOT of privilege. Yes, I am privileged to be able to make art and to have access to lots of art, but plenty of downtrodden peoples have turned to art, to beauty, when they really couldn’t afford to.
a tangent might be the aesthetic of religion, paricularly catholicism. something the downtrodden turn to out of desperation i mean. but is it the aesthetic thats being turned to or what’s behind it?
i dont know if i agree. if you’re turning to beauty in a time of despair, isnt it because you are remembering how beauty made you feel during a time of priviledge?
@Amy, fair enough if I misspoke: primacy instead of purity. I think your argument is still fundamentally an uncritical post modern one, and I don’t agree. My point is that suffering (and on the flip side, power and its abuse) is fundamentally human, and those things are political.
I think we agree on the importance of art production and consumption–the need to express is a fundamental one. But like Darby says below, how can you imply that your chance to consume art was NOT borne out of privilege? If you live in the ghetto, you can’t enjoy the beauty of the countryside (let alone get into an art museum); if you can’t read, you can’t enjoy a book (let alone write your own).
Maybe, as Amber says above, this is simply “what I need to write.” My argument is that you can make art and consume art on a primal level, but the choices you make are still political. All choices, whether you acknowledge them or not are affected by money, by the influence of your peers, by the subjectivity of opportunity. I’ve been particularly bent on this topic because I feel like this overly simplistic argument has become an inherent part of post modernism. There are other forms of thought out there, and I think it’s our duty as artists to acknowledge criticism–in any form–as a necessary part of creating. I think there is an enormous need for artists in this era to understand how post modernism can be damaging in the way it fragments a reality, and how that fragmentation disenfranchises people of their right to express their experience and suffering. Like voorface said above, “part of the neoliberal project of the last 30 years has been to limit the idea of the political, to limit political potential: There Is No Alternative.” The End of History. Those political policies increasingly work in conjunction with post modern philosophy and how it plays out in our lives through arguments like this one. Obviously, we can’t sit here and point to every single influence in our lives, but my point is that there are always political influences. Choosing to be passive and believe “that you are powerless to change any of it,” is a political decision. You can’t opt out. If you’re not fighting to share your privilege, you’re supporting the system that created your privilege.
All that said, I respect that you’re standing by your argument, and I very much appreciate that you’ve provided the forum for this discussion, even though I still wholeheartedly disagree.
Beautiful post, Amy, thanks. I remember the first day of high school when I was a freshman. I went to each of my classes and as the teacher introduced their various subjects, each of them said something like, “you can’t get away from math. Everything we do as humans is math. Math defines who we are!” It was odd and eye opening to me that each teacher–biology, English, political science–said the same thing, except of course substituting his or her own discipline. The world is defined by politics, yes! The world is defined by aesthetics, yes! Being more interested in aesthetics than politics, I particularly agree with you, Amy.
@rachel
I’m beginning to think you are willfully misunderstanding me, and that you simply have a problem with anyone saying that anything is not privilege. For I said above that I knew my privilege gave me access to art. My point is that other less-privileged people also seek out art not just as a way to change their situation but because beauty is something humans need.
“Choosing to be passive and believe “that you are powerless to change any of it,” is a political decision. You can’t opt out. If you’re not fighting to share your privilege, you’re supporting the system that created your privilege.”
Again, if you’d taken into account the whole of my argument, you will see that I think we have a responsibility to try to change things, that plenty of things need changing. I just don’t think art can be managed that way–that you can input what you want it to “do” and expect to get it. You can only make the most truthful thing you can, and then hope. I’m arguing that making art is NOT apathetic, NOT passive.
Sometimes we are powerless. This can be liberating. Like: A person I love was trying to destroy himself. Encountering art reminded me that I don’t have complete control, that there’s not always something I can DO to take the pain away, that sometimes there is just pain. Recognizing that allows me to put my energy into changing what is changeable. I really believe this could be good for anyone. Yes, we should make it so more people can access and make art–this seems ridiculously obvious. Same with food! There are all sorts of politics tangled up in art and food–but food must stave off hunger and keep us alive first and foremost. So must art.
I am interested in the argument or the overall agreement of what is written here, it seems there is no argument just a lot of agreement. I only want to react to an early phrase – and to paraphrase – ‘Art without politics is inconsequential.’ I think that statement is huge and wholly incorrect. I believe art can only be about beauty and the reader/viewer/listener can apply whatever they wish to a piece. All good art renders some consequence and art about beauty or the bystander witness to anything certainly has importance, impact and other ‘i’ words but is by no means inconsequential. Once you make the definition of a word like politics so full of breadth it loses any potential meaning and is rendered useless but the poet.
If you’ve never seen beauty rendered so perfectly to your eyes/ears than I would suggest obtaining new eyes/ears.
I agree with Rachel that this probably all comes down to what the OP needs to write.
This is one of the problems that often arises when writers discuss aesthetic–what’s good for them is somehow the way it’s supposed to be for everyone else; aesthetic discussions then become more about the writer working out his or her own aesthetic in language that seems to be discussing what aesthetic “should be” for everyone else, either implied directly or indirectly.
@Amy, fair enough if I misspoke: primacy instead of purity. I think your argument is still fundamentally an uncritical post modern one, and I don’t agree. My point is that suffering (and on the flip side, power and its abuse) is fundamentally human, and those things are political.
I think we agree on the importance of art production and consumption–the need to express is a fundamental one. But like Darby says below, how can you imply that your chance to consume art was NOT borne out of privilege? If you live in the ghetto, you can’t enjoy the beauty of the countryside (let alone get into an art museum); if you can’t read, you can’t enjoy a book (let alone write your own).
Maybe, as Amber says above, this is simply “what I need to write.” My argument is that you can make art and consume art on a primal level, but the choices you make are still political. All choices, whether you acknowledge them or not are affected by money, by the influence of your peers, by the subjectivity of opportunity. I’ve been particularly bent on this topic because I feel like this overly simplistic argument has become an inherent part of post modernism. There are other forms of thought out there, and I think it’s our duty as artists to acknowledge criticism–in any form–as a necessary part of creating. I think there is an enormous need for artists in this era to understand how post modernism can be damaging in the way it fragments a reality, and how that fragmentation disenfranchises people of their right to express their experience and suffering. Like voorface said above, “part of the neoliberal project of the last 30 years has been to limit the idea of the political, to limit political potential: There Is No Alternative.” The End of History. Those political policies increasingly work in conjunction with post modern philosophy and how it plays out in our lives through arguments like this one. Obviously, we can’t sit here and point to every single influence in our lives, but my point is that there are always political influences. Choosing to be passive and believe “that you are powerless to change any of it,” is a political decision. You can’t opt out. If you’re not fighting to share your privilege, you’re supporting the system that created your privilege.
All that said, I respect that you’re standing by your argument, and I very much appreciate that you’ve provided the forum for this discussion, even though I still wholeheartedly disagree.
[…] who cares? I mean, what is the “range of our address,” if we’re to follow Amy’s post about art v. politics? Are we chasing our own “elite” tails? (Here, I ought to clarify that Ngai argues that […]
Beautiful post, Amy, thanks. I remember the first day of high school when I was a freshman. I went to each of my classes and as the teacher introduced their various subjects, each of them said something like, “you can’t get away from math. Everything we do as humans is math. Math defines who we are!” It was odd and eye opening to me that each teacher–biology, English, political science–said the same thing, except of course substituting his or her own discipline. The world is defined by politics, yes! The world is defined by aesthetics, yes! Being more interested in aesthetics than politics, I particularly agree with you, Amy.
Who do you think is agreeing? I think the comments have gotten rather tense actually.
this post absolutely reeks of your privelige. (takes one to know one.) every time someone tries to define “art” i cringe. it’s almost as bad as trying to define “god” — both need to heavily protected with quotations. you’ve been studying too much “art” and not enough politics. they’re catch-all terms used to obscure anything resembling reality. politics is a process, and cannot be finite by definition. if you want a fuller humanity, sign up for teach for america or go to medical school.
@rachel
I’m beginning to think you are willfully misunderstanding me, and that you simply have a problem with anyone saying that anything is not privilege. For I said above that I knew my privilege gave me access to art. My point is that other less-privileged people also seek out art not just as a way to change their situation but because beauty is something humans need.
“Choosing to be passive and believe “that you are powerless to change any of it,” is a political decision. You can’t opt out. If you’re not fighting to share your privilege, you’re supporting the system that created your privilege.”
Again, if you’d taken into account the whole of my argument, you will see that I think we have a responsibility to try to change things, that plenty of things need changing. I just don’t think art can be managed that way–that you can input what you want it to “do” and expect to get it. You can only make the most truthful thing you can, and then hope. I’m arguing that making art is NOT apathetic, NOT passive.
Sometimes we are powerless. This can be liberating. Like: A person I love was trying to destroy himself. Encountering art reminded me that I don’t have complete control, that there’s not always something I can DO to take the pain away, that sometimes there is just pain. Recognizing that allows me to put my energy into changing what is changeable. I really believe this could be good for anyone. Yes, we should make it so more people can access and make art–this seems ridiculously obvious. Same with food! There are all sorts of politics tangled up in art and food–but food must stave off hunger and keep us alive first and foremost. So must art.
I am interested in the argument or the overall agreement of what is written here, it seems there is no argument just a lot of agreement. I only want to react to an early phrase – and to paraphrase – ‘Art without politics is inconsequential.’ I think that statement is huge and wholly incorrect. I believe art can only be about beauty and the reader/viewer/listener can apply whatever they wish to a piece. All good art renders some consequence and art about beauty or the bystander witness to anything certainly has importance, impact and other ‘i’ words but is by no means inconsequential. Once you make the definition of a word like politics so full of breadth it loses any potential meaning and is rendered useless but the poet.
If you’ve never seen beauty rendered so perfectly to your eyes/ears than I would suggest obtaining new eyes/ears.
I agree with Rachel that this probably all comes down to what the OP needs to write.
This is one of the problems that often arises when writers discuss aesthetic–what’s good for them is somehow the way it’s supposed to be for everyone else; aesthetic discussions then become more about the writer working out his or her own aesthetic in language that seems to be discussing what aesthetic “should be” for everyone else, either implied directly or indirectly.
[…] I wrote about my unwavering belief in the power of a serious engagement with the aesthetic to bring us closer to, […]
Who do you think is agreeing? I think the comments have gotten rather tense actually.
this post absolutely reeks of your privelige. (takes one to know one.) every time someone tries to define “art” i cringe. it’s almost as bad as trying to define “god” — both need to heavily protected with quotations. you’ve been studying too much “art” and not enough politics. they’re catch-all terms used to obscure anything resembling reality. politics is a process, and cannot be finite by definition. if you want a fuller humanity, sign up for teach for america or go to medical school.
I think that over all it is an agreement between pretty much everyone who is reading more than half of what another is writing. I find there is no tenseness in the argument or the presentation of slightly different ideas – just a whole lot of semantic good times.
I think that over all it is an agreement between pretty much everyone who is reading more than half of what another is writing. I find there is no tenseness in the argument or the presentation of slightly different ideas – just a whole lot of semantic good times.
I appreciate the ambition of the original post. My difficulty with almost all of it, though, is that I kind of prefer to go about my daily business (I hope that doesn’t sound rude) with the inverse position, the position that art maybe is on many occasions about finding “answers” (and maybe you find some maybe you don’t). I prefer to think this rather than think that art is always about ‘the bigger things, more mysterious, more permanent things’. I prefer to think it’s about concreteness and dailyness and maybe answers, i.e. less big things, less permanent things because I don’t believe in this transcendent mysterious magical stuff, it’s too big, too easy. I think art can often be about finding answers to questions like “how can i make the political point that i feel disenfranchised?” more often maybe it’s about finding answers to questions like “what happens if i shout from my parents’s bedroom window to unsuspecting passersby, then as their faces upturn i trickle paint onto them and rush downstairs to take a print onto a big piece of thick (artists’s quality) paper?” or “what happens if i put silver pillow-like balloons in a room?”
I also think that you say art isn’t about ‘finding answers’ but then you make a statement like “A bigger thing [in the context of your argument, something, art can be concerned with] is seeing the world through unshaded eyes.” This seems to be like an answer, a very easy, misguided one. Since when could be see the world through unshaded eyes? through art? not in my experience. Saying something this hyperbolic about art smacks me (i hope that doesn’t sound rude) of a much more self-serving easy feel-good answer than the ‘answers’ of straightforwardly political art you are criticizing.
The sentence “The aesthetic means simply the representation of all this mystery, tragedy, eternity without the dissembling claim of wrapping them up neatly.” is brilliant; it wraps everything up so neatly.
I genuinely enjoy the piece (it’s good to raise these things and bravely articulate a position. I for one would only ever raise my stakes (I hope that doesn’t sound rude) to pick holes and groan and complain.) I just disagree with some it.
I appreciate the ambition of the original post. My difficulty with almost all of it, though, is that I kind of prefer to go about my daily business (I hope that doesn’t sound rude) with the inverse position, the position that art maybe is on many occasions about finding “answers” (and maybe you find some maybe you don’t). I prefer to think this rather than think that art is always about ‘the bigger things, more mysterious, more permanent things’. I prefer to think it’s about concreteness and dailyness and maybe answers, i.e. less big things, less permanent things because I don’t believe in this transcendent mysterious magical stuff, it’s too big, too easy. I think art can often be about finding answers to questions like “how can i make the political point that i feel disenfranchised?” more often maybe it’s about finding answers to questions like “what happens if i shout from my parents’s bedroom window to unsuspecting passersby, then as their faces upturn i trickle paint onto them and rush downstairs to take a print onto a big piece of thick (artists’s quality) paper?” or “what happens if i put silver pillow-like balloons in a room?”
I also think that you say art isn’t about ‘finding answers’ but then you make a statement like “A bigger thing [in the context of your argument, something, art can be concerned with] is seeing the world through unshaded eyes.” This seems to be like an answer, a very easy, misguided one. Since when could be see the world through unshaded eyes? through art? not in my experience. Saying something this hyperbolic about art smacks me (i hope that doesn’t sound rude) of a much more self-serving easy feel-good answer than the ‘answers’ of straightforwardly political art you are criticizing.
The sentence “The aesthetic means simply the representation of all this mystery, tragedy, eternity without the dissembling claim of wrapping them up neatly.” is brilliant; it wraps everything up so neatly.
I genuinely enjoy the piece (it’s good to raise these things and bravely articulate a position. I for one would only ever raise my stakes (I hope that doesn’t sound rude) to pick holes and groan and complain.) I just disagree with some it.
You’re really a terrible person.
stop.
You’re really a terrible person.
stop.
I think the only best “political” writing comes during periods of upheaval. Examples might be 1984 or the works of Arlo Guthrie (though he was a songwriter). Really using Guthrie is just a cop-out because I haven’t read enough literature from his period. I have a suspicion that, in times of great change, artists and writers who ignore the world around them–Dali, anyone?–might become more successful because the status quo will always more greatly reward those who help to maintain it, but perhaps one could say they are irresponsible and morally bankrupt. Could you really demand that Orwell write about anything else? The cause of an egalitarian society was the closest thing to his heart, and so to ask that he write about something else simply to remain apolitical might be asking too much. It might have the opposite effect.
So, I think that people who find political writing to be a huge priority right now are either news junkies or really dedicated to whatever cause and just can’t see how immobile society’s collective brain has become. If you really get down to it, though, it might be impossible to actually write something which is truly apolitical unless it’s boiled down or blown out of proportion so that it is to ridiculous to be taken as a comment on anything at all. Especially when people read your lines and internalize them, they take on certain political meanings–just by virtue of writing about an impoverished or wealthy person (and to do so from experience), one could be called a political writer. Just be objectively illustrating the riches of the poor, one might be labeled an agent for social change.
I do know that it’s impossible for me write a decent story with solely political motivations. The best I’ve done are scenes, like “Political Posturing,” which was meant to be funny but is mostly taken a different way.
So, my conclusion right now is that you must live in an extremely politicized climate in order to accurately and passionately write or create something with a political bent, and I’m pretty sure that if it’s going to be good, you can’t have those intentions when you first start. Stephen King, I think, said that if you want there to be meaning in your writing then it has to come in the revision process, not the initial process, or you’ll never get the work done. I think our culture might have moved beyond the point where we can focus on any one thing for too long. Patrick Kennedy went off like a madman not long ago because the media sent a total of three correspondents to cover the talks about Afghanistan, meanwhile you couldn’t find a seat for miles when the HCR debates were on. And he’s right, of course: both issues are important, but one costs lives and that’s the one the media choose to ignore.
In the last Great Depression, the economy, in a political sense, was all that was on anyone’s mind. Yes, that is a generalization. But far too much great “politicized” fiction came out of that period to deny my hypothesis’ grounds: that during times of great change and upheaval, the best writers will be those responding to the situation, even if they are not rewarded as being the best for several decades.
Does this make sense, Amy? I had to think about it for awhile. I think politicized passion has to be genuine in order to be effective.
*too ridiculous
*just by objectively
I think the only best “political” writing comes during periods of upheaval. Examples might be 1984 or the works of Arlo Guthrie (though he was a songwriter). Really using Guthrie is just a cop-out because I haven’t read enough literature from his period. I have a suspicion that, in times of great change, artists and writers who ignore the world around them–Dali, anyone?–might become more successful because the status quo will always more greatly reward those who help to maintain it, but perhaps one could say they are irresponsible and morally bankrupt. Could you really demand that Orwell write about anything else? The cause of an egalitarian society was the closest thing to his heart, and so to ask that he write about something else simply to remain apolitical might be asking too much. It might have the opposite effect.
So, I think that people who find political writing to be a huge priority right now are either news junkies or really dedicated to whatever cause and just can’t see how immobile society’s collective brain has become. If you really get down to it, though, it might be impossible to actually write something which is truly apolitical unless it’s boiled down or blown out of proportion so that it is to ridiculous to be taken as a comment on anything at all. Especially when people read your lines and internalize them, they take on certain political meanings–just by virtue of writing about an impoverished or wealthy person (and to do so from experience), one could be called a political writer. Just be objectively illustrating the riches of the poor, one might be labeled an agent for social change.
I do know that it’s impossible for me write a decent story with solely political motivations. The best I’ve done are scenes, like “Political Posturing,” which was meant to be funny but is mostly taken a different way.
So, my conclusion right now is that you must live in an extremely politicized climate in order to accurately and passionately write or create something with a political bent, and I’m pretty sure that if it’s going to be good, you can’t have those intentions when you first start. Stephen King, I think, said that if you want there to be meaning in your writing then it has to come in the revision process, not the initial process, or you’ll never get the work done. I think our culture might have moved beyond the point where we can focus on any one thing for too long. Patrick Kennedy went off like a madman not long ago because the media sent a total of three correspondents to cover the talks about Afghanistan, meanwhile you couldn’t find a seat for miles when the HCR debates were on. And he’s right, of course: both issues are important, but one costs lives and that’s the one the media choose to ignore.
In the last Great Depression, the economy, in a political sense, was all that was on anyone’s mind. Yes, that is a generalization. But far too much great “politicized” fiction came out of that period to deny my hypothesis’ grounds: that during times of great change and upheaval, the best writers will be those responding to the situation, even if they are not rewarded as being the best for several decades.
Does this make sense, Amy? I had to think about it for awhile. I think politicized passion has to be genuine in order to be effective.
*too ridiculous
*just by objectively