> And a further footnote: nothing in this thread can say anything useful about
> individuals as individuals. There personal history and contingency rule, and
> psychological propositions are too abstract to grasp Mary Q or John H.
>
> Carrol
^^^^^^^ CB: On individuals as individuals, Caudwell in the essay from which this quotation comes is concerned that the bourgeois artist becomes totally focused on artist as individual:
"Thus bourgeois art disintegrates under the tension of two forces, both arising from the same feature of bourgeois culture. On the one hand there is production for the market – vulgarisation, commercialisation. On the other there is hypostatisation of the art work as the goal of the art process, and the relation between art work and individual as paramount. This necessarily leads to a dissolution of those social values which make the art in question a social relation, and therefore ultimately results in the art work’s ceasing to be an art work and becoming a mere private phantasy.
All bourgeois art during the last two centuries shows the steady development of this bifurcation. As long as the social values inherent in an art form are not disintegrated – e.g. up to say 1910 – the artist who hypostatises the art form and despises the market can produce good art. After that, it becomes steadily more difficult. Needless to say, the complete acceptance of the market, being a refusal to regard any part of the art process as a social process, is even more incompetent to produce great art. Anything which helps the artist to escape from the bourgeois trap and become conscious of social relations inherent in art, will help to delay the rot. For this reason the novel is the last surviving literary art form in bourgeois culture, for in it, for reasons explained elsewhere, the social relations inherent in the art process are overt. Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Proust, all in different ways are the last blossoms of the bourgeois novel, for with them the novel begins to disappear as an objective study of social relations and becomes a study of the subject’s experience in society. It is then only a step for the thing experienced to disappear and, as in Gertrude Stein, for complete ‘me-ness’ to reign."
and this theme of focus on the artist as individual is elaborated throughout the essay here:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/caudwell/1938/studies/ch03.htm
>
> P.S. Caudwell was a fascinating writer, particularly in Studies in a Dying
> Culture, but he was a Marxist only for a couple years and his theoretical
> guide was Joseph Stalin. For me, Stalin is not a bogey man, but still, as a
> theorist he didn't have a lot to say.
>
^^^^^^^^
CB; It's pretty clear that Caudwell reads Marx and Engels and Hegel directly,not mainly Stalin. Stalin didn't write anything on many of the principles Caudwell elaborates creatively, for example commodity fetishism, for example here, again in "D.H. Lawrence :A Study of the Bourgeois Artist"
"In bourgeois society social relations are denied in the form of relations between men, and take the form of a relation between man and a thing, a property relation, which, because it is a dominating relation, is believed to make man free. But this is an illusion. The property relation is only a disguise for relations which now become unconscious and therefore anarchic but are still between man and man and in particular between exploiter and exploited.
The artist in bourgeois culture is asked to do the same thing. He is asked to regard the art work as a finished commodity and the process of art as a relation between himself and the work, which then disappears into the market. There is a further relation between the art work and the buyer, but with this he can hardly be immediately concerned. The whole pressure of bourgeois society is to make him regard the art work as hypostatised and his relation to it as primarily that of a producer for the market."
"