> 'd say the prevailing ideology is that the Artist should be able to
> articulate the True Meaning of the Work. For me, this assumption
> reflects the capitalist concept of the person as an autonomous,
> personally responsible individual. However, no work of art is the
> isolated product of a single person; it is in fact the result of a
> complex constellation of social relations (Marx's cherry trees in German
> Ideology come to mind, if that reference helps). Thus it makes no sense
> to ask the artist what the work "means", because the work is a product
> of more than the artist's individual intent.
In the Grundrisse, Marx points to "composing" as an example of what he means by "really free working," i.e. by the activity that defines "the true realm of freedom" of an ideal community.
Works of art created in this way objectify the universal, e.g. "the laws of beauty," in the individual. Fully developed individual "powers" are required both to create and to appropriate them.
Interpreted in terms of what's claimed in the manuscripts "Private Property and Communism" and "Comments on James Mill," such activity is "social" in three senses. First, its material is given to the individual artist as a social product. Second, the individual "powers" it requires are "social" in the sense that they require the specific "ensemble of the social relations" constitutive of the ideal community for their full development and actualization. Third, the activity is social in the sense that its products are the content of such ideal relations, relations of mutual recognition, i.e. "my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being."
The actual "capitalist concept of the person" is the "materialist" one having no logical space for this idea of the "autonomous, personally responsible individual" as the individual with these fully developed powers engaged in "really free working."
Ted