To spur on further thoughts on this week's reading: the following words have been taken from Jean Genet on what triggered him to write "Les Negres", or "The Blacks" -- perhaps one of the most difficult yet profound works on the philosophical structures of racism in twentieth century literature. As you may know, Genet was a twentieth century French writer who is most famous perhaps for his works including "Our Lady of the Flowers," "The Thief's Journal," and for his political (also described as existentialist and Absurdist) plays ranging from "The Balcony" to "The Maids."
Genet on what made him think of writing "Les Negres":
"The point of departure, the trigger, was given to me by a music box in which the mechanical figures were four Blacks dressed in livery bowing before a little princess in white porcelain. This charming bibelot is from the eighteenth century. In our day, without irony, would one imagine a response to it: four white valets bowing to a Black princess? Nothing has changed. What then goes on in the soul of these obscure characters that our civilization has accepted into its imagery, but always under the lightly foolish appearance of a caratydid holding up a coffee table, of a train bearer or a costumed servant bearing a coffee pot? They are made of fabric, but they do not have a soul. If they had one, they would dream of eating the princess.
When we see the Blacks, do we see something other than the precise and sombre phantoms born of our own desire? But what do these phantoms think of us then? What games do they play?"
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The impetus would then be to produce writing, to write: but a writing that would never cease to implicate and question its own premises, failings and totalizations. A writing that recognizes what it silences, and yet speaks about silence not as its abjected Other, but what a priori produces speech in the first place.
It's interesting in this context, as Genet wrote what to my mind is one of the most beautiful novels ever: Our Lady of the Flowers (wriiten when Genet was in prison) that speaks of homosexuality and sexual perversion in beautiful, disjointed, fragmentary prose: it seems the unspeakable must fracture coherence at any price, and it MUST do it for Art to be produced. Artaud's notion of the cruel theatre is then a suitable paradigm of just such a corporeality of performative violence that is enacted upon the text (of modernist writing).
not really sure what you mean here by "Art" - must it incite and spur action in its audience over and above entertaining and enlightening, or does the violence inflicted upon itself merely accentuate the escapism that other less violent works foster? When Brecht highlighted the artifice of his plays, his goal was that the distancing should ideally keep the focus on ideas, rather than on the characters that embody them. Sometimes, however, we are only able to appreciate the violence without taking it on the upshot - and still remain trapped in the music box.
I suggest (qua Adorno) that the only way out of easy bourgeois commodification of culture is precisely an Art that wounds itself, that becomes eloquent and COMMITTED because of its need to bear witness to internal wounds and reptures
No Art worthy of its name can risk contamination with ideology; this is why we must be suspicious of Art that "incites and spurs action" (however much Brecht wanted to enact Marxist critique, his theatre was still too inverted-Aristotlian): it is the only antidote for culture and late capitalism that can allow pockets of resistance and yet mystify it at the same time as mere "escapism".
So art that gives itself to ideological struggle, that opens up oppositional positions, can only offer a modicum of resistance? How does Art become contaminated, as you say, with ideology? Thirdly, do you see violence as the kind where the process by which the work is produced is made explicit?
Brecht is inverted-Aristotelian - I grant you that. Then consider Augusto Boal, whose decidedly non-Aristotelian poetics led him from forum theatre to municipal politics. Must art have nothing to do with that?
Art cannot and must not offer any solution or read as though it does: if it did, then it returns in a debased, inferior form. We are a long way from Tennyson's brash proclaimations of Art sounding the "ringing grooves of change" towards Auden's poignant claim that "poetry makes nothing happen".
This is the danger: Art must not want to say this or do that; it is one small step away from being completely manipulable in the hands of any ideological system of thought. To insist on this instead of aesthetics reduces Art to a calculative and insiduous rationality disguising itself as some "mystical" championing of laughable humanism.
I remain unconvinced. You seem to think in any given work aesthetics and ideology are mutually exclusive. So after having considered the question of "Who eats poetry?", are we to remain forever esconsced in our "opaque repose"?
No, that would be an absolutely bad response to Art. Martin Heidegger states that "Language speaks, man does not speak". Man must let the work of Art speak, indeed, the work of Art can only speak if we enter into it. We do not speak for the work, the work speaks us.
We must then respond to the work; the work challenges us and our horizons. This cannot happen when we use the work to forward any agenda, when we want to champion sham Art because it has an "ideological function": we foster bland mediocrity and promote BAD literature.
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