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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