Response
From Issue 0: Commitment
If art is unquestionably a social activity, then it participates in the fields of social crisis. Faced with the mounting wreckage of two centuries of capitalist catastrophe — in whatever forms it may take across history — what is the role of the artist today? What is the role of the critic? What could and should they do?
A brief glance at the history of literary criticism and literary theory ought to impress upon us a particularly raw and humbling truth about writers: they are incapable of knowing everything about what they’re doing. Whatever poetics they claim, whatever attempt to map the known world, provide pleasure, anatomize the courtship rituals of societies, or erect the cult of their own genius — whatever they say on their MacDowell Colony statements — there’s enough that evades their conscious control to have allowed for a Library of Babel’s worth of interpretations and counter-interpretations. In this sense, a critical theory work like Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, the language of which lurks behind phrases like “two centuries of capitalist catastrophe,” should contain a salutary message for any writer of the present age: You have a political unconscious and it’s not something you control. Make your work as intentionally political as you like, write about microaggressions or melting glaciers, cram it full of allusions to Walter Benjamin at Port Bou or John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, the political content of the work will also be other than what you say it is. It is not given to the writer to control, only to encode. Often, the more one tries to control, the less is ultimately encoded. Or, perhaps fairer to say that whatever the writer’s political intentions — to critique, to expose, to appear on the side of justice, to promise — what is also encoded is the record of the writer’s attempt to control and the desire that drives them to do so.
The space of art or writing, now, as ever, should be a space of unknowingness, of uncertainty. This isn’t to suggest that we bring back, or could bring back, even if we wanted, the poet or writer as medium, the pagan idea that poets were a sort of transmitter and antenna, the Aeolian harp, that figure opposed by Plato precisely because poets could only encode and so repeat social untruth or divine (anti-social or natural) truth without knowing which was which. But, as the editors’ questions suggest, our current configuration places an enormous, almost joyless responsibility on “the artist,” especially to “play a role.”
Aeolian harp in the old castle of Baden Baden. Wikimedia.
Victoria Sambunaris, Artist at work in a MacDowell Colony studio. TransArtists.
Let us admit that all roles are just that: masks, poses, appearances, and put-ons. In the throes of composition, the writer should have no role, no identity, no social obligation to appear as anything. It is only afterwards, when the naked mess doing the writing is replaced by the public persona of the author that the question of role comes into it. And this is also when the contemporary writer comes to participate most directly in the catastrophe of capitalism, the point where capitalism enters the soul or species-being of the writer. At no point since the 1930s have writers been under more pressure to appear political, to choose sides, to engage. Unlike the 1930s, however, the political is also the profitable.
Publishing, which has become ever more corporate, has also become more “socially responsible.” At the same time, organized institutions of authorship from the MFA program to prize committees to professional service organizations have also united behind an idea of artistic responsibility to the socio-political issues of the moment. Under these conditions, it becomes fully in the artist’s interest to engage or appear engaged, to learn how to make their works politically conscious rather than politically unconscious. The institutions of American literature now seem to have assigned themselves the role of the “good” 18th century English novelist — at least according to Samuel Johnson — to see that virtue is rewarded and vice punished. The author, as the price of entry, thus agrees to have his, her, or their work subsumed into a spectacle of public edification. In other words, the engaged, enlightened, fully politically conscious author becomes themselves a commodity form, replacing their own work. In a sense, they become the work, but they are no longer their own creation. The market has no politics, but knows only sales figures.
Under these conditions, criticism should be more important than ever. Who else will stand up for and point out the existence of an unconscious of any kind, of the slippage between intentions, effects, and affects? Who else can point out that, despite the current, ongoing revolution in American letters, fictional form has stagnated: Realism, magical realism, and various iterations of the first person still dominate the field of the novel, even more than they did half-a-century ago. The rise of the institutional novel is an aspect of capitalism as well as an aspect of Democratization, but in which proportions? But criticism in the politically conscious age is one thing no one has the time or money for. The progressive and the capitalist are united in their hatred of skepticism. //
