>So what if Lynch is a Reaganite? What bearing does that have on
>whether he makes good movies? >Doug
>
>But I want to ask , and I am not being snotty, what are the standards that
>make Pound's or Stevens' poetry good ? I know that's a whopper, but
>whoppers are allowed here, right ? Let me not ask this totally naively.
>They have accurate perceptions about human emotions and life in some way.
>They evoke emotions in some way.
That's a good start. By theway, this is deeply relevant to the issue of freedom we are debating in another context. There are two broad kinds of defense of free expression of even reactionary speech. One is that freedom is intrinsically good, not that it trumps, but other things being equal the more of it the better. Marx clearly held this view, btw.
The other is that freedom has good consequences. This was Mills' view. Cian, Tahir, and myself have been pushing the other side of this, that unfreedom has bad consequences. But Mill emphasizes the the notion that free speech involves a sort of experimental, testing out ideas that we can't be sure of or arguments that we can't be sure of, and creating opportunities to come up with new stuff that would be good but that might seem shocking to recieved sensibilities.
Mill gave a special role to art in this respect, because he thought that vividly representing the consequences of various kinds of life and feelings that artists represent and create would inspire people to live in new and sometimes better ways, and we can't know in advance, in many cases, which these are. Also, art offers powerful (often critical) representations of the lives we lead regardless of the official politics of the artist. That is why Marx liked Balzac (a reactionary monarchist and Shakespeare (whose political opinions seem to have been staunchly conventional, so far as one can tell from the plays).
I note, btw, that Brecht loved (and hated) Kipling, Trotsky correctly regarded Celine (an antisemitic pig, later a Nazi collaborator) as a great artist, Lukacs respected Dosteyevsky (a reactionary crank). One might go on. The roster of great rightwing and antirevolutionary artists is long: in the last century it includes, in addition to those named, Conrad, Eliot, Yeats, Philip Larkin, Flannery O'Connor, Zora Neal Thurston, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and Ralph Ellison, Ignazio Silone . . . . and those are just a few. Would the world be a better place if their great works had been suppressed?
>But I still think of "politics" broadly as the many social issues, not
>narrowly as who controls the state. Doesn't a notion that extends
>examination of power relations to personal relations, the personal as
>political, extend a political test of some type to the areas of poetry and
>movies ? ( and yea I probably asked this the last time this came up) .
Absolutely. But great artists often penetrate deeply into what they hate and love in ways that don't line up neatly with their politics. Conrad's exploration of the "revolutionary" psyche and the manipulations of power politics in the Secret Agent and Nostromo is unparalleled; every revolutionry should learn from these books even if he rejects the conclusion that revolutions must be corrupt and ill-fated. The things about bourgeois society that drove Yeats and Pound ro fascism and Eliot to ultramontane Catholicism push others to become socialists. Flannery O'Connor may have hhad pretty conventional racist opinions for the white South of her day, but she was unsparingly accurate and bitterly funny about everyone, racist and antiracist. Read the story Everything That Rises Must Converge, and tell me it doesn't hit home and hurt, no matter who you are. Etc.
I find it hard to separate Pound's aesthetic theory and opinions about
Western civilization from his decision to become a fascist.
>
Sure, but you don't have to accept any of his choices to learn from his work.
jks
_________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com