Respect due

Although this may come across as lazy, I want to cut and paste the excellent comments that were made after one of my “provocations” earlier this week. It’s mainly because they are more moderate and tempered than the original article, and anyone reading this blog deserves to get the occasional piece of well thought out analysis between my carry on.

I’d been blathering on about how I think that art embodies the ideals of the society that created it….

Art today isn't just a creation of the capitalist epoch we're living in. It embodies all of human culture, from pre-historic times onwards. And throughout that long history, humanity has passed through different modes of production, each of them with different values. Values around ideal love in ancient Greece were different from values of ideal love in medieval Scotland. But those values can and do influence art and artists today.

I really ought to have understood this. Artists are influenced by their predecessors – a playwright, for example, is likely to have read some Shakespeare. It is part of the reason that I cherish art: it allows the communication of ideas across generations. For all of my immersion in the present era, I am constantly banging on about how my understanding of human nature is informed by Sophocles’ Oedipus and Loyola’s spiritual exercises.

And more than that, a different kind of society - a communist society made up of a free association of humans - can only be born out of this present capitalist society. It can't appear from nowhere. So the values of that society are here already, although present in deformed ways because - although we can imagine and fight for a different world - we can't escape the one we're actually in. 

Artists can be conscious of all these values in their work, or not. But they influence them. Art is a form of communication. And communication is a social phenomenon. The artist only exists in society.

I don't know about there being a consciousness in capitalist society. Capital itself is a human creation that exists separately from us, but rules us at the same time. Marx called it dead labour that only lives - vampire-like - by sucking the life from living labour. It's a process and a social phenomena, but it's thing-like and without consciousness. 

I might as well admit that I have some very weird ideas about consciousness. I am of the opinion that cities and ideas have consciousnesses. It is part of my general mysticism, my most infuriatingly atavistic quality. At the same time, I believe that consciousness is a fiction. Fortunately….

But humans have consciousness, and I suppose the ruling ideology - that this mode of production is normal and natural and unchanging and unchangeable - approximates to your Leviathan consciousness?

This describes exactly what I thought I was trying to get at.

I don't think that ideology 'decided' there was going to be a credit crunch though. I think that's to do with the internal contradictions of capitalist economic development - and as I said, I think capital is thing-like and without consciousness. The ideology kicks in after the credit crunch, making sure that the rulers aren't the ones who pay for it.

So I'm not sure about your final point. Does art always end up reinforcing that ideology? I don't think it has to. I think it can do, but - either consciously or unconsciously - artists can communicate ideas that oppose it.

I am more pessimistic about 'free will' than I realised. Although my rudeness about Marxism is a little tongue in cheek, I worry that resistance is either easily integrated ('the legitimate protest is a sign of democracy,' says the complacent prime minister, who is then free to ignore the protest's message) or part of the same Leviathan consciousness.