File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9712, message 18


Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 11:37:37 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: Beauty's Progress (was On Beauty...)


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

>So the story of Beauty's Progress is that of evolution from naturalized
>landscape of social relations (romanticism) to interiority (high modernism)
>to surfaces of the body and language (postmodern mannerism)? (I don't know
>how Dickinson fits in this plot, though.)

I don't know exactly, never worked it all out fully. But talk about
interiority! She was 75 years ahead of her time.

>This doesn't bode well for the
>relationship between Beauty and Marxism, does it?

No it doesn't. I've never been terribly moved by the things that
historically have been the favored kinds of art of Marxists (at least
American ones), like realist fiction and folk music - the sight of a banjo
sends me screaming towards the exit. In high art, I like things like
Shelley and Stevens, Beethoven and Schonberg, Merce Cunningham. In low art,
I like the Velvet Underground and Sleater-Kinney (snobby corners of a
downscale genre). Does this make me hopelessly bourgeois?

>It looks as though you
>are telling a story of the loss of dynamic engagement between art and
>society. Then again, you may be simply tracing the fate of the "individual"
>in capitalism.

Oh, both I think. Now, it seems, the utopian impulse, interiorized in the
modernists, has broken completely, and ironic appropriation of the detritus
of consumer society is the favored approach, an extreme form of
disengagement.

Doug




   

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