andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> I think you have to distinguish between propagandistic
> art, didactic art, and art that may express underlying
> positions or tendencies.
Before the word got spoiled by Goebbels & others, "propaganda" would have been the word for what you here call "didactic art," and that kind of art (or rhetoric) presupposes _some_ degree of already established unity between artist/writer and audience. It expands and deepens the audience's understanding but does not effectuate a _change_ of position. Pope had it down pat long before Kautsky (followed by Lenin) formalized it:
True wit is nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd, Something, whose truth convinc'd at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind. As shades more sweetly recommend the light, So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit. For works may have more wit than does 'em good, As bodies perish through excess of blood.
> A really crude example of
> propaganistic art, what Dylan calls "finger pointing
> songs" is something like "Which Side Are You On?" (the
> song)
Here, in Kautsky's vocabulary, you mean agitation, not propaganda. But your example isn't even agitation. This is a marching song, a way to express achieved solidarity at a particular time and particular occasion. The performers are the audience, the audience are the performers. Tolstoi sees the shouting of such things at the right time by some soldier as the turning point in great battles. Such things can make slight changes in the preformed attitudes of the singers, chanters themselves. I saw it happen to some of the people in an Ann Arbor bar with me at the 1968 Peace&Freedom national convention: we got to singing variations on "We'll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree, and by the end of the evening it was "We'll hang the capitalist system to a sour apple tree." But note, we were all left activists who took the trouble to drive or fly to Ann Arbor for the convention. So the change was merely a change of emphasis.
AND, I'm not sure but what you call didadactic art (e.g., Brecht) often operates, if it operates at all, as such marching music. I think that is in part how both you and I use To Those Born Later; it reminds us where we are and why we are there.
> or a political cartoon.
A political cartoon _may_ operate as agitation -- that is, reaching out to an audience and urging them to take cognizance of a position.
> Or Dylan's own "Masters
> of War." Didactic art, like most of Brechts, has a
> point to make, but there's more to it than just the
> point. Brecht's ThreePenny Opera expresses lots of
> sides of bourgeois (and other) relations and emotions
> as well as exposing the essential parallelism of the
> criminal organization and the capitalist state. And
> then then art like Tolstoi or Beethoven, which embody
> political tendencies but mostly don't teach them --
> when Tolstoi goes preachy you see the artist turn off.
> When he _shows_ you the randomness of war, he's much
> more effective at undercutting the myth of the Great
> Man.
Now you are getting to what I sometimes call the _indexing_ power of reasonably good literature. And here the artist doesn't even have to be remotely on the right side. An epic is among other things an enormous index to cultural positions, questions, etc., and the index is powerful even when the reader takes a contrary attitude to the writer's attitudes.
> Now, are people persuaded by art? W, you have
> practically the entire weight of Western though
> against you -- high and low. That's why Plato wanted
> to ban the poets,
So far as I know, Plato had no desire to ban the poets _from Athens_, the world in which he actually lived, but only from his 'ideal' Republic. And I think what he feared was what I call the indexing power of literature. It raises possibilities.
But while all this is both interesting and important, it really doesn't touch on the issue I have raised over and over again: how do you write agitational material for an audience that doesn't know you exist; doesn't even know that the publications you work for exist. What replaces the leaflet at the factory gate?
Carrol
P.S. Max's "nasty joke" may well constitute a really powerful agitational "work of art." Jan discovered today at work that asking where the Louisiana National Guard was really evoked interest among those not usually interested. But again, it works mostly in word-of-mouth situations.