>In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.
>Mao Zedong
It seems like almost all discussion of art among the fancy critics comes down to political meaning or use. My personal beliefs run against this being the most meaningful way people can understand and appreciate art, although I would say its very possible to turn anything into a political piece though interpretation. I'm more interested in aesthetics and stimulation. I have my own ideas, but I want to be better read on this matter.
So /lit/ could you name some authors, philosophers, etc. who attack or propose a counter to the idea of art being best when treated politically, the definition of art being limited to political meaning, or similar ideas that make art depended on politics?
I've read a fair deal of Nietzsche, but I also can't quite pin down his ideals on art. I often get the impression he embraces art as escapism with what he says about "lies" being necessary for life. On the other hand, I get completely confused by his criticism of Wagner's music, which seems inconsistent at times (maybe due to when he said conflicting statements?). There's also the Apollo/Dionysus concepts, which Greek tragedies apparently managed to fuse successfully through music, which I understand even less.
I'm also interested in Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation and Other Essays". From the snippets I've read so far of the main essay, which I've enjoyed, it seems to be what I'm looking for. "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art" is a slick line.
Any help (or debate) would be deeply appreciated.
The use that most people are making of this kind of thing, especially Marxist and post-Marx-y types (including post-structuralists like Foucault etc.), is not that art CAN be turned to political ends, but that life is inherently immersed in or composed of ideological content, and so art is necessarily ideological as well.
Some lines of thought, like the communist, are more explicit about promoting "revolutionary art" or "proletarian art," often through the state, like socialist realism for the USSR and the ideas of Lenin that Mao is mentioning there, which are also cited explicitly by Gramsci as the major inspirations for his own formulation of culture (prominently including art) as an ideological/political battleground that needs to be won by the proletariat.
Some are more vaguely activist but still activist, like Foucault and a lot of other post-structuralists, and a lot of the Frankfurt School. They focus more on critique and their critiques can be extremely subtle or extremely wide-ranging, basically encompassing entire anthropological theories of Western subjectivity. Most of these guys are informed by the linguistic and discursive strains of 20th century thought, which are pretty much dominant.
What you really want to read of Nietzsche is probably his genealogy of morals obviously, but also On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Nietzsche is a cornerstone of these later views because he reduced truth to held belief (the "lies"), and the mediation of truth to power relationships. His other aesthetics stuff is less influential on these kinds of views (though in general, you shouldn't try to read Nietzsche as a single philosophical system). Look into what Ricoeur called the "school of suspicion" and the general character of 20th century melancholic self-doubt, rather than trying to find the origins of this shit in Nietzsche's aesthetics.
You will also want to know about deconstruction, via Derrida and Paul de Man. Again part of the linguistic, discursive, and general suspicion-of-truth strains. Go into it like it's a cult rather than a coherent philosophical position and you'll understand it a lot better - remember, whatever you think of Derrida or his political mission (whatever it was), the party line of deconstruction was mainly towed by billions of pissant graduate theses and self-fellating lit professors establishing it as orthodoxy, not any actual political action.
If you want to go against this kind of thing, go find pre-deconstruction lit crit.
>I'm more interested in aesthetics and stimulation.
Try reading some Denham on Frye, or on Frye's use of Longinus' ekstasis.
>>7845440
I know it might sound memey and it's music not literature, but Zach Hill in my opinion goes against the whole 'Ideology rules art' concept, and gives a good example of other people you might see that live for art and not some agenda. (I of course am aware of these artist and myself articulating under certain spooks, but think there is a distinct difference between spooks and ideology.)
>>7845440
I think the essay Against Interpretation might strike a chord with you, however, it lacked definition for my tastes. Sontag generally expresses a distaste in something very similar to what you're describing, namely, the literary theories that have become so popular as skeleton keys to interpret any and all texts, lenses to see the world through. Examples of these are Freudian psychoanalysis, reader response, cultural Marxism. She defined her conceived problem well enough. Her solution to her conceived problem perhaps evaded me. At the very least, all of my most prominent theories on what she meant could be controverted.
Sontag is a brilliant woman but she is not an organized thinker. I'm guessing she wrote compulsively. I would set aside two or three hours to read it over, maybe twice, and mull over it.
>>7845476
>the party line of deconstruction was mainly towed by billions of pissant graduate theses and self-fellating lit professors establishing it as orthodoxy, not any actual political action.
That is a type of political action. Not political in terms of national politics, but in terms of academic politics. Academia itself its own sort of political microcosm.
>>7845440
Agreeing with the other anon who said to look for pre-deconstruction art. Modernism and everything prior is, at best, only loosely interested in politics. Even pre-revolutionary Russian critics like the Formalists focused on form. Early avant-garde movements like Cubism and some elements of Dada were also similar.
As for more modern times, I can't say much about the second half of the 20th century, but my intuition is that not much work in that vein would have been done with the prominence of Marxism and post-structuralist thought in academia. The so-called New Sincerity we are seeing now seems to be rejecting such a focus on the political. My work too deals more with aesthetics and sensation that politicized topics and ideology. You're right to be bored with the political circle-jerk. Just give it five to ten years and I think we'll see a resurgence of art that pushes back against politics and the formal tinkering of the late avant-garde.
This is OP. Want to say thanks to those who have posted so far. These have been some really good suggestions, I'm excited to get to them later.
>>7845597
http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300
>>7845495
don't contribute if you don't know what you are talking about.
![220px-TheWellWroughtUrn[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/KY2GnQJ.jpg "220px-TheWellWroughtUrn[1].jpg")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism
and its most famous work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_Wrought_Urn
I'm personally of the opinion that contextual discourse can get reasonably tiresome and some forms of expression, like poetry, are perhaps best appreciated aesthetically or emotionally. But you'd have to be a massive fool to think "politics" (that being the umbrella term thrown around for discourse on the general historical/political/economic context of a work) is not a huge part of all expression. Not saying op is suggesting that, but people tend to slide into that outlook fairly quickly.
