Yes,the compulsion to art and creativity often has dark and fathomless sources:
"Now that my ladder's gone, I must go down where all ladders start In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart."
--Yeats
That isn't to say that crafting art and imposing form on those dark feelings cannot be a great source of personal satisfaction and growth. (Marx thoughts so!)
Decades ago I had a furious argument that I still remember with a callow Straussian undergrad from the U of C (I was a callow undergrad from Tigertown) who argued that injustice, suffering, and oppression were justified and desirable because they were the occasion for great creative work. I answered much as you did now, but I see now that I should have said I just did to you, that even without class and other oppression there will plenty of suffering insofar as that is necessary to inspire great creative work.
Death, conflict, and loss are forever, competitiveness and envy, adultery and jealousy, social conformity (probably to a high degree!), and alcoholism will be with us in a classless society, bet your boots -- starvation, racism, and oppression need not be, let's hope.
The list of things that will be with us even in a classless society probably are in great part the material of great art in the Western tradition as much as anything, more than the subject matter of oppression, alienation, racism, and poverty. But it will be possible to grasp things that are outside our experience, as even today we read Homer and Dante -- part of what great art does is to makes strange things comprehensible. Should of course something like war become totally mysterious, we may lose whatever general appeal that Homer or War and Peace may have (insofar as W&P is about War, it's only so in part!), but I guess that is a loss we could tolerate if it were to occur. It's not too likely to occur any time soon.
Of course some great creative work is inspired by laughter, joy, love, and lust as well as tragedy -- the lust tends to to better than the joy. People still read Donne's and Marvell's "love" (sex) poems, but Dante's Inferno wears better than his Paradiso -- my view.
As to what art would be "about" in a classless society, why speculate about things we cannot know -- except that it would include meditations on tragedy, limitation, diminishment, loss, and death. Among other things. The threat (?) that my Straussian acquaintance seemed to entertain, that great art would vanish if everyone were happy is idle, doubly so, first, there will be enough unhappiness, some of it the same kind, others new kinds, to go around; second, we could no more say what kind of art people would create if, per impossible, they were all happy all the time than we can say what kind they will create in a hundred or three hundred years under changed conditions whatever they might be. Michelangelo could not have imagined Robert Mapplethorpe, whatever their shared taste for pretty boys. So the question is pointless.
--- Robert Wrubel <bobwrubel at yahoo.com> wrote:
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> "Someone needs to reflect on the sources of human
> unhappiness and strife. The most basic of these --
> mortality -- is not likely to be affected by the
> advent of a classless society. Neither would
> classlessness cure broken hearts and failure in
> love,
> grief at loss of children, parents or other loved
> ones
> -- not just through death (I am struggling with the
> fact that my daughter has just left for college);
> illness and diminishment of physical and mental
> power,
> failure to accomplish one's own goals, frustration
> at
> dealing with people in cooperative situations --
> very
> far from always being a source of joy! And about ten
> million other things that make life hard. Mental
> illness -- depression, manic depression, the whole
> panoply of the DSM. It will not cure loneliness . ."
>
> Andie: I know all these things. I was
> questioning if they are the material of great art,
> as we know it in the western tradition I dont love
> art before everything else, and am not putting it
> ahead of social justice. And I am not calling into
> question the value of a classless society. I was
> merely responding to some what I felt to be bland
> statements about artists doing art just for the
> personal satisfaction of it. The compulsion to
> create seems to come from darker sources, and I was
> wondering whether people on this list thought those
> sources would wither away in a classless society.
> Over the years I have heard a lot of writers called
> "bourgeois writers", because they wrote about things
> like adultery, alcoholism, social conformity,
> competitiveness, as if these were peculiar to
> bourgeois society. I was just questioning whether
> people thought those kinds of things would go away
> in a classless society, and if so, what would art be
> about.
>
> I thought that among people who are prettty clear
> about their preference for a classless society, and
> not apt to have their beliefs shaken by a question
> about it, it would be ok to ask a question about it.
>
> BobW
> The following is childish:
>
> I can't imagine what the "other
> > scenarios" or motives of conflict would be in a
> > harmonious classless society. Would envy,
> > loneliness, vengefulness, insecurity, will to
> power,
> > still exist? If so, that would bring in question
> > the hope of a classless society, that a better
> human
> > being would result from it.
>
> Someone needs to reflect on the sources of human
> unhappiness and strife. The most basic of these --
> mortality -- is not likely to be affected by the
> advent of a classless society. Neither would
> classlessness cure broken hearts and failure in
> love,
> grief at loss of children, parents or other loved
> ones
> -- not just through death (I am struggling with the
> fact that my daughter has just left for college);
> illness and diminishment of physical and mental
> power,
> failure to accomplish one's own goals, frustration
> at
> dealing with people in cooperative situations --
> very
> far from always being a source of joy! And about ten
> million other things that make life hard. Mental
> illness -- depression, manic depression, the whole
> panoply of the DSM. It will not cure loneliness for
> those who find it hard to make friends and it
> willnot
> cure the oppression of enforced socializing. It will
> not cure envy: it will sharpen it, like as not, less
> envy for things but for accomplishments, since one's
> failures cannot be not be excused by the unfairness
> of
> class. And it's not clear that it would affect
> vengefulness, or that it would be a good thing to
> attempt to root out that basic impulse to justice
> rather than to channel it, but we can disagree about
> retribution some other time.
>
> Abolition of classes would get rid of several major
> sources of suffering -- inequality of a degree that
> allows a few in power to ignore even the basic needs
> of the many; inequality to a degree that produces
> disparities of power and wealth that are damaging to
> self-esteem and self respect; to some degree it
> would
> reduce alienation and meaninglessness labor, insofar
> as necessary labor might be reduced or made or
> pleasant (some empirical research on coops suggests
> that we should not be overoptimistic about this); it
> would do lots of good things. Even the on the very
> narrowest construction, where ll it would do is
> enhance democratic control over the economy and
> reduce
> absolute poverty, it would be worth having and
> fighting for.
>
> But to say that if the abolition of classes does not
> put us on cloud nine, in the Big Rock Candy Mountain
> or the Land of Cockaigne where all contradictions
> are
> resolved and the skies are not cloudy all day, and
> that it's not worth having or not real if it does do
> that -- that's childish. It's utopian in the very
> worst sense.
>
> It's politically destructive to say such a thing,
> it's
> shows a certain shallowness of sensibility to even
> think it. Our lives are determined by luck and
> randomness, limited by the frail and temporary
> physical embodiments that give them shape and
> meaning,
> and grownups learn the truth in a tragic sense of
> life. "Call no man happy until he is dead," says
> Aristotle, and he doesn't mean it's better not to be
> born.
>
> One would have hoped we might have learned that
> class
> oppression is not the only even or the only source
> of
> evil, and that some sources of unhappiness and
> suffering -- whether you can them evils or not --
> are
> just part of the framework of human existence. Read
> Sophocles and Thucydides and learn. In the Marxist
> tradition, Sebastiano Timpanario, not coincidentally
> a
> classical philologist like Nietzsche (another good
> source on this) is quite good about these questions.
> See his On Materialism.
>
> If I seem impatient, it's because I am. We are
> running
> out of time to be idiots.
>
>
>
>
>
> --- Robert Wrubel wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > John Thornton wrote:
> >
> > "to imagine that class conflict inspires greater
> > artistic passion than personal conflict seems
> > to me to miss what makes an artist make art. '
> >
> > (and)
> >
> > "In a classless society we would then call upon a
> > host of other scenarios
> > nearly unimaginable to our mind today."
> >
> > Precisely, John. I can't imagine what the "other
> > scenarios" or motives of conflict would be in a
> > harmonious classless society. Would envy,
> > loneliness, vengefulness, insecurity, will to
> power,
> > still exist? If so, that would bring in question
> > the hope of a classless society, that a better
> human
> > being would result from it. The issue here seems
> to
> > be whether human drives and conflicts, as
> indicated
> > in Freud, for example, are more fundamental than
> > class relations in forming character.
> >
> > I havent really thought this through at all. An
> > answer to me might be "yes, human beings would
> still
> > be "fallen", misguided, the source of laughter and
> > tragedy, but there would be an overall air of
> > justice and reasonableness which would soften
> > conflict. But that too seems rather abstract. A
> > lot of art arises out of feelings of alienation
> from
> > the majority culture (e.g. Joyce and Ireland;
> Kafka;
> > James Baldwin.) Will there be feelings of
> > alienation in the harmonious classless society?
>
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