Chuck Grimes wrote:
>I've thought about this large v. small truth business most of the
>week. The problem really comes down to the failure of the present
>intellectual class to articulate and develop the larger cultural
>truths of the age. After all that is their class function, and their
>inability to generate such a conceptual world with its deep links to
>the ebb and flow of events in the current period seems to me more like
>the result of a starvation diet, a loss of creative will in its
>largest sense. This kind of anorexia of the soul appears in writing,
>music, film, visual arts, theater, all across the cultural
>spectrum.
>
I reached for my thirty-year-old, dog-eared copy of John Donne's poetry
after I read this. In his second Satire, Donne describes the poet as a
pitiful fellow:
"One, (like a wretch, which at Barre judg'd as dead, Yet prompts him which stands next, and cannot reade, And saves his life) gives ideot actors meanes (Starving himselfe) to live by'his labored scenes.
And, yes, that definition did it for me: that artists, intellectuals, poets are those who give ordinary people the means, the vision, the access to a world worth having. That they make the world comprehensible; that they make the beauty and truth of the world manifest; that they expose our conceit and foolishness; that they enable the mute to speak and the blind to see. Insofar as that goes, we've certainly been on a starvation diet.
But so far as the "class" function invoked by Chuck above, they have certainly done their bit. They just haven't been working for us. They have been working for capital. The neocons have articulated great cultural truths that do reflect the reality that we are forced to live. The hollywood dream machine continues to grind, constantly reminding us that nothing succeeds like success, that only fools work for the general good, that there is no general good, and so on.
Intellectuals/artists are not a class. They are individuals who decide to throw their lot with one side or the other. All of the artists/intellectuals I know who are actually pursuing their art (outside of institutions or without serving capital) are either one paycheck away from the sidewalk or they have a day job. The ones in Academia or in Hollywood or in the music industry are serving those gods and have been effectively silenced in one way or another--so far as the unarticulated consciousness of the race goes, anyway.
Everything conspires to silence art. I have been mulling ever since that artsy/fartsy thread about the way "modern art" seems to have been defined mostly to convince people that art is an arbitrary realm whose value cannot be apprehended except in a critically mediated way. It basically says that the upper class will decide what's valuable. Just like they make that decision about everything else: how much money a worker should ear; how much should be spent on war; how much on education; etc. They know.
>For generations the most advanced arts depended on a certain limited
>class of disaffected bourgeoisie who had the money to keep such larger
>projects going either indirectly through informal financial support
>for their own salons, or in more public ways for theaters, publishing
>houses, film making, galleries, museums and so forth---or less common,
>as artists, writers, film makers, and cultural producers
>themselves. Most of that class support has disappeared, and has not
>been replaced.
>
Yes, most of it has disappeared. My twelve year old daughter and I were
marooned in Nevada City last week (dead fuel pump) and, to kill time, we
were playing various games. At one point I asked her what she would wish
for if she had three wishes. She said:
1. world peace
2. everyone more equal
3. more money for education and the arts
But in an obverse way this supports something you were saying a while ago, that the arts are immanently revolutionary. This is why we must be starved of them.
>It's very tempting for me to assign a series of images, or works that
>represent this void, and my favorite for that purpose are Antonioni's
>films, L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse. The people in these films
>are people from the class that should be creating the larger truths of
>their time, and they have none to offer.
>
There were two reasons for that 1) WW II and the reconstruction of
Europe; everybody was fucking exhausted 2) History militates against
intellectuals making common cause with the workers and after the war on
both sides of the iron curtain, intellectuals/artists were courted and
rewarded for toeing the line.
>And then there is Blowup which is a lot more attractive, but it
>ultimately devolves into the same void. David Hennings, a high art
>photographer discovers he has accidently photographed a murder, tries
>to unravel its meaning by tracking down or being tracked down by
>Vanessa Redgrave (I forget which). Again this thin pretext of a plot,
>a potential larger truth just dissolves---only this time into the wild
>60s London for the rich and famous. Much prettier than the other
>three.
>
Blowup is a movie about how nobody actually cares about the truth, about
"what actually happened," which the photograph documents. Everybody just
wants to get on and the mimed tennis match that ends the movie is a
perfect image of life after WWII: we go through the motions pretending
we are doing something when in fact we are doing nothing. Every time I
see Blowup, I like it more. It has weathered the passage of time
amazingly well and it says a lot that it is still as relevant today as
it was in the sixties.
>Like Joanna's missing larger truths, Mills' indifference and silent
>hollowing out, or Orwell's ``...nothing left but quietism--robbing
>reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it..'', Antonioni
>follows a related trajectory.
>
But the quietism is driving everyone mad. For what is there to do except
erect your little bubble and live in it until you trade it for a coffin?
How many times can you redecorate your house? Can humanity really
thrive by looking forward to new color schemes?
Joanna