For bourgeois society, there is something particularly shockspeak on the subject of art. Marxists may be grudgingly tolerated when they speak of history, politics, cconomics — for that, after all, is their patch. But the sacred shrine of art mustn't be defiled by the grubby hands of materialists.
For isn't art the expression of all that is uniquely 'individual", the finest Rowering of the "human spirit", of the 'eternal essence' of humanity? Doesn't it foat sublimely above the sordid everyday concerns, speaking of what is "universal" and 'spiritual'? Art is the last spiritual refuge of a bourgeoisie on the run; and It even that can -De analysed in a materialist way. then surely nothing is sacred.
Karl Marx once wrote of capitalism's deep hostility to artistic production. And indeed the philistinism of capitalist society contrasts sharply with that intense concern for art and culture which the Marxist tradition has always shown. It is, ironically, the materialists who have taken art scriously, as a real social force, a dynamic for transforming social consciousness; and it's the idealists, the 'cultivated' elite, who have trivialised art by reducing it to a ritual or a pastime, a cultivation of the private soul for the weary capitalist on holiday from the office.
CULTURAL CONTROVERSY Marx and Engels were themselves formidably cultured people who seem to have read just about every important work of literature in most European languages. The Bolshevik plosion of artistic innovation and cultural controversy, much of it centred on the figure of Leon Trotsky, And since then there has been a rich heritage of revolutionary debate and experiment in the cultural field.
What is the relationship of art to ideology, its role in maintaining the power of class-society! To what extent 1 art ellect a revolutiona transrmation of consciousness? Shou revolutionaries devote themseives to building a 'proletarian culture"? Can there be a 'scientific" analysis of art along materialist lines? What should be Marxism's attitude to the 'great" art of class-socicty, produced as it was our of exploitation and elstism?
These are some of the questions which the Marxist cultural tradition bas raised, and they obviously can't all be dealt with here. But two main issues can be separated out: the relation of art to ideology, and the material basis of artistic production.
It's clear that art has a close relation to ideology, and so plays its part in preserving the cultural and political dominance of a ruling class. But the Marxist cultural tradition has on the whole protested, rightly, against reducing art to ideology.
POWERFUL Art belongs to the superstructure' of society, and only becomes fully possible at a certaio stage in the division of labour; but it's relation to the class-struggle is usually by no means a direct one. Indeed art is so ideologically powerful precisely be cause it isn't just propaganda. By creating 'fictions", Imaginary worlds which engage our sensuous and emotional responses, art can carry the values of a ruling ideology into the very bloodstream and nervous system of those subject to that ideology.
Art transforms ideological values, brings them to dramatic life, casts and re-casts them into continually fresh and surprising shapes. In doing so, it plays its part in resolving' certain contradictions within ideology: by level, it produces certain potent myths which embody - and thus help to confir - the way people live out relations...)
Art in itself won't bring about revolutionary change. But it can become part of that process of "cultural revolution" in which women and men experience their social conditions in new forms, and thus are impelled to change their real social TERRY EAGLETON writes on SOCIALIST CHALLENGE 22 June 1977 p.13 duced. Every art-work is related to history at a particular angle, grasps (and distorts) it from a particular ideological perspective, which may or may not correspond to the dominant ideology of the time. The way art 'reflects' ideology isn't just a matter of theartist's conscious political views. It's matter of what is possible within the laws of the art-form itself. For every art-form has its own laws, its own methods of procedure, which aren't reducible the laws ideology, much less to the laws of the mode of production'.
If I decide to write a love-sonnet, theo the conventions of that particular art-form already in part determine, shape and limit what I want to say. If, on the ober hand, I decide that the love-sonnet is a clapped-out artistic form, then historical materialism will want to know why: why is it that, at a certain point in bistory and the class-strugale, this art-form no longer seems to correspond to the way people ideologically experience their social conditions.
----- pull-quotes -----
Art and