grandhotelabyss:Yes, but it’s a calculated evasion of the art appreciator’s actual opini

grandhotelabyss:

Yes, but it’s a calculated evasion of the art appreciator’s actual opinion, which has been rendered unspeakable: if the art’s good, nobody cares if it’s right-wing. Furthermore, and yet more unspeakable, the art might be better the more right-wing it is, because the left-wing worldview is too utopian and puritanical to reflect the actual height and depth of experience that art at its best can touch—and, in touching, convey actual psychological and social intelligence. 

Once more, the Marxist theory of aesthetics is three words long: base determines superstructure. The rest is epicycles. Get your base in order and leave artists and their audiences alone. If you still can’t fix the base going on two centuries after the theory was formulated, it might be because the theory is wrong and doesn’t apply in art criticism anymore than it applies elsewhere. 

The above is a crass internet polemic, I know, but I’m not merely (only partially) trying to shock or offend. As longtime readers are aware but newer ones may not be, I once explained this with infinite patience at exhausting length in polite and proper scholarly form and even got four left-wing (sort of, maybe) academics to sign off on it and call me doctor, for which, if you’re interested, please click here. If you’re still unpersuaded hearing it come from me, you might take it instead from the most famous British Marxist literary critic, in a passage that goes even further than I would (I like E. M. Forster): 

There are those who imagine that to criticize a writer’s politics is necessarily to impugn his or her art. With Yeats and the other great modernists, almost the contrary is true. What helped to produce much of the major art of the early twentieth century was political reaction. It is not accidental that Conrad, Yeats, Eliot, Pound and Lawrence were all on the radical right, or that Heidegger is among the most original of modern philosophers. The radical right finds conventional middle-class society supremely distasteful, and confronts it with a critique far more searching and fundamental, if also a good deal more wrong-headed, than anything a liberal realism can muster. In the absence of a revolutionary aesthetic, it is the great reactionaries who stand askew to a degraded present, invoking spiritual values whose political implications are occasionally odious, but whose artistic depth and intricacy resonate far beyond the workaday decencies of an E. M. Forster. Yeats is the supremely fine poet he is, not despite his politics but in some measure because of them—a truth which offers little comfort to either liberal aesthete or reductive leftist.

—Terry Eagleton, “The Archaic Avant-Garde,” Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture(1995)

Reblogging this to add a few observations. As I was tending the garden of American ideology yesterday—i.e., choosing which podcast to listen to on my daily promenade—I saw that those Chapo boys (whatever happened to Amber Frost?) were discussing the controversy over the putative “fascism” of recent films. For non-political reasons, I didn’t like The Witch, I didn’t like The Lighthouse, and I haven’t seen The Northman, so I have no horse in the “is Robert Eggers ‘fascist’?” race. Perhaps the best Tweet associating Eggers with fascism puts it this way:

robert eggers films are highly aestheticized depictions of revelatory limit-experiences produced by specific historical conditions that no longer exist. if youre evola-pilled enough the possibility of these experiences justifies “retvrn” even if it’s to a nightmare

But “highly aestheticized depictions of revelatory limit-experiences produced by specific historical conditions that no longer exist” have been a crucial means of metabolizing accelerated technological change since the Romantic movement (and on through its successors, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Aesthetes and Decadents, half the high modernists, the Beats, the hippies, etc.). Anti-modern aesthetics is not mere ornament; it is a load-bearing pillar of modern culture. 

When things (economics, politics) are going badly, anti-modernity may become one prop of fascism, though it’s hardly the only one, and fascism draws just as much from anti-modernity’s anti-type in techno-utopianism or bio-progressivism, from the Social Darwinists among the Late Victorians to the Futurists in the modernist moment to NRx today. Political movements are syncretic and take whatever is to hand culturally, but because of that very opportunism are best criticized on a political level, not a cultural one. It’s a crude, simplistic style of Marxist polemic to stigmatize “highly aestheticized” etc., which usually just boils down to stigmatizing the aesthetic tout court, as tantamount to fascism, when in fact aestheticism developed as an immunoresponse allowing modernity to stably subsist without carcinogenically overgrowing the entirety of culture and provoking its own demise. 

(For a brief explanation of this, please see my recent essayandpodcast on Fukuyama’s End of History, as well as my earlier essay on Boris Groys’s The Total Art of Stalinism. For the full intellectual armature, except assembled immanently from the history of modern literature and literary criticism without reference to political science, please see here, especially Part I. Or just read Portraits and Ashes—it’s a lot more fun.) 

Anyway, one of the Chapos, I think Cushman, suggested that cinema is an inherently fascist art form, a totalizing Gesamtkunstwerk that overwhelms the audience’s critical intelligence. (I wonder if he knows who he’s echoing, who called film “an alienating, totalitarian medium which forces the viewing subject to adopt the apparatus’ point of view as his own.”) Except for the polemical use of “fascism” as an all-purpose synonym for hierarchy, I do agree with this and have long thought it. By contrast, literature, given the obvious arbitrariness and inherent polysemy of language, stimulates criticism and self-consciousness as a very condition of its being. All cinema is fascist, even liberal cinema; all literature is liberal, even fascist literature. Or, as I digressed in my essay on Kipling, with “imperialism” rather than “fascism” as the villain:

(A brief aside: while I grant that the visual motif is Kipling’s, I do deny that literature achieves the objectifying, surveilling control that marks film and photography, and I worry that literary theories developed after the advent of photography and film too often forget that literature is both more critically distant and more transformatively intimate than these “transparent” representational technologies. Because literature is made of words, which have an arbitrary relation to the real, readers never forget that they are encountering a subjective representation and articulation when they encounter a work of literary art, in contrast to viewers of photography and film who may feel they are simply looking through a window. On the other hand, literature is made of words that sound in our minds and our mouths, transformed by us as they were formed by the writer; we do not receive them passively. Film and photography may be endemically imperialist, as Viet Thanh Nguyen persuasively suggests, whereas literature is always more subtle, protean, and subversive than photographic media.)

If there’s some reason peculiar to my tastes and interests that I should run out and see The Northman, please let me know. For background, I thought The Witch didn’t have enough to offer beyond the lugubrious recreation of a vanished lifeworld (this by itself is just a stunt), and that the attempt to compensate for this lack in The Lighthouse with an almost random piling-up of unintegrated symbolism (it’s oedipal! it’s archetypal! it’s queer!) was a failure. Aesthetic isn’t the antonym of intelligent.