How art arises in human history: Christopher Caudwell

Reading notes: Marxist Literary and Cultural Theory by David Anshen (2017)

Chapter Two: Major Marxists' Approaches to Literature and Culture

CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES TO CATEGORISING MARXIST LITERARY THEORY

Anshen here discusses some of the categories Eagleton and Milne introduce in their anthology Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996).

My interest in fantastika immediately found an echo in Anshen's discussion of UK critic Christopher Caudwell.

....Music, dance, song and collective ritual entice humans into collective labour and harvesting, in Caudwell's view. Even more interesting, particularly from the vantage point of later thinkers like Roland Barthes (whose theories of myth have already been touched upon) and other critics of ideology, is the way Caudwell's depiction of the early collective development of society validates and praises the function of illusion.

Most Marxists see illusion and imaginary fantasies as precisely the realm of ideology that needs to be critiqued and fought against in order to liberate humanity from deception by the ruling classes. However, the fight against illusion is not what Caudwell chooses to emphasise when describing the development of society from an animal-like biological existence to collective activity. Borrowing from schools of anthropology that stress the functional adaptive mechanisms of the collective expression of emotion in ritual and festivals, Caudwell praises, even glorifies, ceremonies of magic and collective emotional release. He writes: 

The poem adapts the heart to a new purpose […] it does so by projecting man into a world of phantasy which is superior to his present reality precisely because it is a world of superior reality—a world of more important reality not yet realized [….] Without the ceremony phantastically portraying the granaries bursting with grain, the pleasures and delights of harvest, men would not face the hard labour necessary to bring it into being. Sweetened with a harvest song, the work goes well. (Solomon 323)

Caudwell stresses the 'directed' nature of the illusion. Poetry transforms early humans into joyous labourers who work in common cause to sustain and create agricultural surpluses. Caudwell may be correct to stress the positive features of illusion at the heart of early human society as a necessary function of binding individuals together, but to a modern Marxist reader such praise of 'phantasies' might leave a bitter taste in the mouth. The idea of 'illusions' portraying a better world than reality and spurring humans to shape their labour practices based upon 'phantasies' seems to convey an idyllic, pre-lapsarian existence that may be mythical itself. Also to modern audiences, this argument might not be convincing since we may have only seen illusions hold back human development.

No doubt the song makes work sweeter; the consoling features of music in the face of unjust labour conditions can be traced from the African American spirituals during slavery in America (and these songs also held secret messages of rebellion and escape) to the songs of plantation labour and the work songs of convict labour. Indeed, in the United States such music developed into popular musical genres like blues, jazz, folk, country music and the antecedents to rock and roll. However, none of these musical forms seem to have fully ameliorated unjust conditions.

Indeed, Caudwell's language almost suggests a kind of romantic idealisation of rural labour common to some capitalist, Stalinist and Maoist ideologies. One almost wonders if Caudwell's passionate entry into the British Communist Party in the 1930s, at a time when the official line was that the Russian peasants were joyously embracing what later was revealed as horrible forced collectivisation of the peasantry, shapes Caudwell's enthusiasm.

This may be unfair, however, because Caudwell offers a plausible explanation for the function and role of collective oral traditions in the rise of human society that does not necessarily reference what were contemporary events in the Soviet Union. He also strangely (given his hostility to Freud and Freudianism) sees art as a kind of projection of fantasies and illusions to compensate for lack in the real world, which smacks of Freud's theory of the fantasy and art deriving from wish-fulfillment. Caudwell is deeply hostile to Freud (and Solomon makes a case that he has not read Freud broadly or well), and again reminds the reader of Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser's definition of ideology as the imaginary resolution of real contradictions. The difference is that for Caudwell, the illusion promotes a positive change in reality, at least potentially. It builds social bonds that then operate practically upon the world. This practical function ascribed to art can be viewed as ahistorical and it may be unfair to compare it with ideological features late in the history of capitalism, yet the formulations are strikingly similar. This can perhaps be understood as common mechanisms functioning differently within different historical stages of development.

Interestingly, the ways in which illusions are mistaken for reality and structure the labour process seem historically accurate. We must keep in mind that art, as a semi-autonomous realm, distinct from religion per se, is a product of modernity. However, Caudwell's idealisation of early human labour seems somewhat one-sided and overly romantic, at least from a modern perspective. Overall, however, despite how Caudwell's analysis gets evaluated, he makes a fruitful effort at a logical, historical, and collective understanding of how art arises in human history....

Jay

3 November 2021

Anshen on. defamiliarization, Shklovsky and Bakhtin

Reading notes on: Marxist Literary and Cultural Theory by David Anshen (2017)

Chapter Two 

Major Marxists' Approaches to Literature and Culture

THE EFFORT TO DEVELOP A MARXIST THEORY OF ART

Initiating a discussion of formalism, Anshen looks at Cleanth Brooks' defense of New Criticism.

....So, according to this view, attempts to situate the artistic politically or historically are not necessarily wrong, but they are not the job of literary critics.

....one might note that they find a unique function for themselves in the academic division of labour.

....it remains questionable whether analysis ever escapes political and social concerns; to avoid even explicit politics only happens in certain political situations and what constitutes politics derives from historically determined conceptions of the political.

Anshen then expands focus from formalism to discuss criticism that combines formalism and concerns of perennial interest to Marxists.

....to give the New Critics their due, they raised the rigorous question of what makes things 'literary' or 'poetic', and many Marxists have adopted this concern. This was a creative process which began in the early twentieth century, in the period surrounding the Russian socialist revolution, when critics known as the Russian Formalists developed ideas in conflict with, and in relationship to, Marxism. Interesting discussions and debates broke out about what comprises 'poetic' or 'aesthetic' language in contrast to everyday speech. Marxists threw themselves into these debates and much from this period remains interesting and relevant. For example, one of the most significant Formalist theorists, Victor Shklovsky, in his essay 'Art as Technique' (1917), argues that things and social relations appear normal due to their everyday familiarity, becoming 'habitual' and 'automatic' (778) in perception. Artistic phenomena 'defamiliarised' these everyday objects, thereby also negating automatic responses to the world around us.

....For Shklovsky, art challenges the standard experiences of the world, disrupting conventional impressions through the aesthetic or artistic experience. Interestingly, Shklovsky stressed the purely aesthetic nature of his concerns, yet many of his examples borrow from literature depicting directly political questions. It almost seems that when Shklovsky strives to determine the precise nature of pure aesthetic criteria, the political world sneaks in. For example, he illustrates the aesthetic power of defamiliarisation through a short story by Tolstoy, told from the point of view of a horse. The horse, in Tolstoy's story, observes a servant receiving a beating by his master and cannot understand how this happens. The horse also cannot understand his own status as property and ponders, 'But even then I simply could not see what it meant when they called me "man's property"....

....Shklovsky's concern with what techniques make language artistic or poetic leads to the conclusion that the artistic can be defined as the presentation of the normal in a new way that 'makes [it] strange'. Art thereby transforms our perceptions of the world by its very nature as art.

....Shklovsky's contemporaries such as Mikhail Bakhtin merge aspects of Russian Formalism with Marxism to produce very interesting results. Bakhtin argues in his study Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1972) that Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels display polyphonic features (a formal innovation), which means they contain no singular viewpoint on the world, and certainly not one related to Dostoevsky's poetics, which were conservative if not reactionary. Despite Dostoevsky's personal views, Bakhtin notes: '[…] Dostoevsky found and was capable of perceiving multi-leveledness and contradictoriness not in the spirit, but in the objective social world. In this social world, […] opposing camps, and the contradictory relationships among them were not the rising or descending course of an individual personality, but the condition of society' (27).

....Bakhtin, like the Formalists, starts with the artistic structure of texts in their formal specificity before moving to content or sociological analysis. Bakhtin notices how formal devices in Dostoevsky unpack a critique of society, despite Dostoevsky's personal convictions.

....Bakhtin does not feel compelled to separate literature from social life, but rather builds from the narrative features of Dostoevsky's novels to explain how real-world historical, social and political struggles find themselves embedded in aesthetic features. Dostoevsky's works remain dialogic or structured along dialogues that form the conflicts the novels play out. Such conflicts get verbally fought out, offering contrary ideological positions ultimately reducible to different class reactions within a distinct historical period and its changing values. Bakhtin doesn't begin with the political, ideological views of the author, but rather moves from the text, beyond and against the author to what presents itself as the underlying 'polyphonic' or multiple voices within the text. These opposing viewpoints given voice in the novel are articulations of differing class viewpoints. In this way, the political and the formal complement each other.

....Despite Dostoevsky's intentions, the different ideas receive fair treatment. As Bakhtin explains, 'Dostoevsky […] creates not voiceless slaves [….] but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even rebelling against him' (6) [italics in original]. Characters fight out their views and no narrative perspective firmly dictates the readers' judgment. The result is that a war of ideas is presented through the novel, though the genre has been taken, traditionally, as imposing a viewpoint on the ideal reader. This illustrates that the naïve view of Marxist approaches to reading, which assumes the Marxist critics should reproduce the world view and social milieu of the writer to explain the text, misses some of the complex interplay between author, text and reader that sophisticated Marxism considers and allows.

....Shklovsky's concept of 'defamiliarisation' remains very close to the aesthetic theory and practice of one of the most significant and influential Marxist aesthetic theorists and practitioners who was discussed in Chapter 1, Bertolt Brecht....

Jay

2 November 2021

Stalinist coup killed Maurice Bishop, Grenada Revolution – The Militant

....Stalinism destroyed the Grenada revolution. Bernard Coard was trained in its brutality, rigidity, and bureaucratic “decisiveness.” Like all Stalinists, he confused political clarity with dogmatism, centralism with commands, flexibility with softness, discipline with submission, firmness with harshness. The faction he was building in Grenada was truly petty bourgeois — the nucleus of an administrative caste trained in giving orders and wielding authority, not of a political vanguard of the working class relying on the revolutionary organization, mobilization, and political education of the exploited producers. 

Maurice Bishop, not Bernard Coard, was the communist educator of Grenadian working people. Through Bishop’s speeches, workers and farmers gained a deeper understanding of the class struggle in Grenada, the Caribbean, and worldwide. Through working to deepen the Grenadian people’s involvement in the revolution, Bishop helped promote their class-struggle experience and politicization. Bernard Coard was not a “brilliant master of Marxist strategy and tactics.” He was a Stalinist phrasemonger.

Although Stalinism remains a powerful obstacle to workers’ and peasants’ struggles, as shown by the events in Grenada, its hold over the international working-class movement has been irreversibly weakened by the advance of the world revolution since the closing years of World War II. Above all, a corner was turned in 1959 with the victory of the Cuban revolution under the leadership of a revolutionary internationalist leadership. Revolutionary-minded workers, peasants, and youth throughout Latin America and many other parts of the world have been attracted to and influenced by the example of the Cuban Communist Party. …

Bernard Coard’s political course was based on a rejection in practice of what [Russian revolutionary leader V.I.] Lenin called “one of the most profound and at the same time most simple and comprehensible precepts of Marxism.” …

“In the final analysis,” Lenin said, “the reason our revolution has left all other revolutions far behind is that … it has aroused tens of millions of people, formerly uninterested in state development, to take an active part in the work of building the state.”

That is the communist perspective that Maurice Bishop died fighting to advance.

Stalinist coup killed Maurice Bishop, Grenada Revolution – The Militant

Thousands rally to defend women’s right to abortion – The Militant

....Joanne Kuniansky, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of New Jersey, spoke at the rally. “A woman’s decision about when or if to have children must be a private, personal decision — not the decision of a legislature or court!” she said. “This right is fundamental to winning full social, economic and political equality, uniting the working class and building our unions.”

Signs carried by some demonstrators at protests around the country, and speakers at the rallies, said the road forward for abortion rights supporters is to vote for Democratic Party candidates.

“Our rights were chipped away no matter which of the bosses’ parties — Democrats or Republicans — were in the White House,” Kuniansky said. “Without the fight for women’s equality the solidarity the working class needs to fight the bosses and to wage a revolutionary struggle to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist class is impossible.”

After decades of protests that changed the outlook of working people, in 2018 in Ireland a referendum victory ended the longstanding ban on abortions. Protests took place Oct. 2 in both Dublin and Belfast, as well as in London.

In Dublin, demonstrators carried signs reading, “Dublin to Dallas.” Ailbhe Smyth, one of the leaders of the 2018 abortion rights campaign there, told the crowd, “We understand your struggle. We know your fight. We are here to do whatever we can. We have been through it and we do not want it to happen again.”

The nonstop and all too often unanswered propaganda campaign against women’s right to choose has had an impact on the consciousness of working people. Millions of workers today are convinced life begins at conception, even if they do not support all restrictions on abortion.

“We need to fight for the right of all women to family planning services, including safe and secure birth control and abortion, essential for winning women’s emancipation,” Kuniansky told the New Jersey action. “The only way to stop the assaults on our right to choose whether or not to have an abortion is to fight to win the support of the vast majority of working people.”

The latest Pew poll shows 58% favor a woman’s right to abortion, among both women and men, across all age groups.

Thousands rally to defend women’s right to abortion – The Militant

Embracing Mao, Chinese rulers continue assault on working people – The Militant

....Today Xi and like-minded party officials fear sharp inequalities in China will spur working-class struggles.

Xi has said that in China “capital serves the people.” A leading CCP financial committee instructed the government “to regulate excessively high incomes” this summer. The government then cracked down on wealthy individuals it accuses of dodging taxes.

It declared “illegal” the grueling 72-hour workweek that bosses subject millions of workers to, and capped rent increases at 5%.

Xi has recently imposed hundreds of regulations aimed at curbing some of the profits of private high-tech companies. State-owned businesses are expanding investments in industries that private companies have dominated, including those related to national security. Xi intervened to prevent billionaire Jack Ma from launching what would have been the largest-ever public offering of shares in his company Ant Group last November.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, had begun the expansion of capitalist market relations in the 1980s, leading to the rapid growth of industry, profiteering and a massive expansion of the industrial working class. New cities mushroomed in eastern China. Foreign and Chinese capitalists accumulated vast wealth wrung from the labor of hundreds of millions of workers drawn off the land into the mills and factories.

The parasitic bureaucratic caste running the Chinese state is organized through the ruling party, which has grown to some 90 million. This bloated privileged layer rests on the surplus value drawn from capitalist exploitation of working people.

Today real estate and construction employ nearly a fifth of the labor force. Much of the growth of the capitalist economy in the last decade has been inflated by building apartment towers, in what are now “ghost cities,” sometimes completely vacant. Meanwhile, millions of workers live in substandard housing.

Beijing is trying to check some of the speculation involved in the debt-laden capitalist boom. This has threatened the collapse of the world’s most indebted property developer, Evergrande. Hundreds of Evergrande employees protested outside the company headquarters in Shenzhen last month when the company stopped repaying them the loans it had taken from their bonuses earlier in the year.

Evergrande bosses are being forced to sell off some of their strongest divisions to stay afloat, much of it to the government.

Nervous about these developments, some foreign investors counsel pulling back from their China investments. Others, like U.S. tycoon Elon Musk, have praised Beijing for trying to exert more control.

The rulers in Beijing have clamped down in Hong Kong, banning protests and imprisoning critics. They’ve threatened to invade and subdue Taiwan.

To defend its interests across the Pacific and Asia, the government is expanding its armed forces, sharpening tensions with Washington, which views the Pacific as its “prize” for coming out on top of the imperialist slaughter in World War II.

A key foreign policy initiated by Xi in 2013 is the massive Belt and Road scheme. Through state-bank loans, construction firms are building infrastructure needed by Chinese capitalists along global trading routes to increase their exports and imports.

Infrastructure projects costing $843 billion are spread across 165 countries. AidData says that unreported debts to China from regional governments who contracted with Belt and Road projects amount to another $385 billion.

The government of Laos had to hand over part-ownership of its energy grid worth $600 million to Beijing for loan relief from China-based creditors.

Embracing Mao, Chinese rulers continue assault on working people – The Militant

ACLU rewrites history, undermines fight for women’s rights under banner of ‘gender’ – The Militant

....Regardless of how you dress, what surgeries you have had, or how you “self-identify,” it’s a scientific fact that there are just two sexes — male and female.

ACLU rewrites history, undermines fight for women’s rights under banner of ‘gender’ – The Militant

A woman’s right to choose to have an abortion is fight of all working people – The Militant

....Instead of educating and mobilizing to win a majority to defend the right to choose, organizations like the National Organization for Women and the National Abortion Rights Action League have for decades urged women not to rock the boat and to rely on Democratic Party officials. This course has been a disaster.

What is needed is to clearly answer the arguments that opponents of women’s rights use, and to mobilize in the streets to win a decisive majority among working people. Our unions should be at the forefront of this fight.

Without a fight for women’s equality, the solidarity the working class needs to fight the bosses, and to wage a revolutionary struggle to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist class, is impossible. Without the right to decide when or whether to bear a child, women cannot participate as equals in economic or political life.

A woman’s right to choose to have an abortion is fight of all working people – The Militant