File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9712, message 16


Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 22:38:09 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: M-FEM: Pathos, Ecstasy, and Ideology (was On Beauty...)


Ken wrote:
>If this is true then there is an interesting aporia here.  If works
>of art stem from and reflect the capitalist conditions that exist
>at the time of their creation then all works of art MUST commit
>themselves to a kind of pathos if they are to avoid the pitfall of
>pleasure....

I would like to come back to Carrol's comment on Baudelaire: proximity to
"that bourgeois drive in the 19th century to equate capitalism with nature
(and thus convert all attacks on capitalism and 'the bourgeois' into
celebrations of the tragic human condition)." I don't know if he is right
about Baudelaire, but I do think that a long-standing aesthetic tradition
basically promotes the production of a particular kind of pathos as
pleasure ("celebrations of the tragic human condition"). This aesthetic
regard inclines the artist/reader to assume passive and contemplative
attitudes toward contradictions of capitalism (which produce what is often
taken to be the "tragic human condition"). Left modernists such as Brecht
tried to disrupt the absorption of the audience into pathos, but I don't
think his formal experimentation had the effects he intended.

Facist modernists such as Pound don't seem to be that interested in the
pleasure of pathos. They would rather reformulate the contradictions of
capitalism and modernity as sublime violence and urge us to enjoy them
ecstatically.

>In this way taking pleasure in art would be a kind of perverse
>internalization of ideology - since if one celebrates a work of
>art then one also justifies the conditions which create it.

I don't think that private appreciation of art constitutes justification of
the conditions which create it. But I do think that art can and often does
become a *refuge* for once radical intellectuals when the class struggles
and/or social movements in which they participated decline. In this sense,
art may serve as a substitute for religion and the family--the haven in the
heartless world. Strong aestheticizing tendencies of postmodern
intellectuals, in my mind, exemplify this retreat very well.

Yoshie




   

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