Culture as Politics - Christopher Caudwell

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is writing the essays of Studies, ‘bourgeois’ no longer conjures up the picture of a class thrusting its way to freedom but the opposite: a class with an ideology of individualism that blocks the possibility of achieving the very freedom it is supposedly advocating. It is obviously the same class but in a different context different aspects have become more important for Caudwell.

      The change of Caudwell’s use of ‘illusion’ can be better understood in reference to the change of value he attaches to ‘bourgeois’. When he explains the functioning of poetry in a pre-industrial context, ‘illusion’ is a vision, a fantasy, something that is not a material reality. He uses it as a quasi-technical neutral term that has to do with the mental state accompanying the tribal, pre-industrial poetry-music-dance experience – a hyper-reality. However, when he moves to his own period, the focus switches from the form to the content; i.e., ‘illusion’ is still a vision but now what it envisions is false. Thus it acquires a negative meaning – ‘illusory’. It is still immaterial and fantasy but misleading – more ‘delusion’ than simply ‘illusion’. This confusion led the German translator of Illusion and Reality to add Bürgerliche (bourgeois) to ‘illusion’ in the title. This misses Caudwell’s point, of course, that the poetic illusion has a general function – it is not tied to bourgeois consciousness – it can be a vision that helps to create the consciousness and unity that not only offers a picture of reality which is shared and common, but helps to make it deliverable. It helps to realise – i.e., make real – the ‘reality’ in the vision. It is that process of an emotionally charged vision directed toward reality that he sees as the general function of poetry. Two other terms might create some confusion – ‘dialectics’ and ‘determined’. ‘Dialectics’ has become mystified, a term with magic resonance but with unclear application. Caudwell uses dialectics to convey studying things in movement and in context. Motion or change is the natural state of things and in actual life there is always context. Dialectics sees the interaction of things that are bound together in such a way that a change in one of the elements necessarily involves change or re-positioning in the other elements and therefore in fact in the whole configuration. At the simplest level, in the abstract, dialectics concerns the relation between front and back, or inside and outside, etc. When the subject involves humans, instead of an abstraction, the variables will be greater and the matter therefore significantly more complex. And if there is a macro-scale subject (society or the economic system), the variables are massively increased, are less stable, change at different speeds and move in different directions. The whole becomes extremely complex. This is why economic forecasting, for example, is considered to have so little chance of being accurate in a real world. But there is in popular media a habit of abstraction, of reducing the number of real factors or freezing their movement into a snapshot. This simplification is a falsification. The real world is in constant change – and this is what dialectics addresses.

      Caudwell showed a dialectical turn of mind long before he came to Marxism. His invention of an automatic gear based on a moving fulcrum illustrates this. Most people probably learned something about the theory of fulcrums in primary school maths or science and, at a practical level, understood fulcrums through, for example, the see-saw. In regard to the see-saw, the problem of balance is not complex because there are few components and also because the fulcrum does not move and thus the only variables are the weights and the distance from the fulcrum. However, it is easy to imagine that, if the fulcrum were moving, the problem would be complex. Seeing dialectics in material terms does not make it less complex but it removes the mysticism.

      The popular prejudice that ‘determinism’ denies the possibility of free will is, for Caudwell, a species of mystification. It is effectively denying the possibility of control by making mysterious things that are potentially explicable. At various points, he argues against religious mystification – faith is essentially mystical because it rejects the role of evidence – but his rationalist concern is more with an anti-scientific attitude. Cause and effect are an aspect of the material world. Every effect has a cause, and to designate an effect as ‘random’ or ‘accidental’ means only that the cause is not yet specified. There are no uncaused effects; an effect results necessarily from a cause. If we understand causation, then some choice of effects is possible. But if we reject cause and effect, then we cannot make a meaningful choice. Science and rationality are determinist. Caudwell’s view is clear in Illusion and Reality’s epigraph, taken from Engels: ‘Freedom is the recognition of necessity.’

      THE ORDER OF COMPOSITION

      We know from his letters that Caudwell wrote Illusion and Reality first and wrote the essays of Studies in a Dying Culture shortly after, just before leaving for Spain. Illusion and Reality is, however, theoretically more advanced although Studies is more orderly and seems more finished. The explanation, I think, lies in Caudwell addressing two different sets of demands. Through most of Illusion and Reality he is explaining his theory of the function of the arts but in the final chapter, where he deals with the present, he changes his tone and direction – he moves further into political persuasion. He had been living happily with his brother and sister-in-law in Surrey, in the London commuter belt but then moved to the working-class east London district of Poplar and joined the Communist Party. He lived in a house with other comrades and shared party tasks such as selling the Daily Worker. He had become an activist and his life was now organised in terms of political struggle.

      ‘The Future of Poetry’, the final chapter of Illusion and Reality, praises the Soviet Union as the model of the post-capitalist society of the future. Caudwell also points out that artists and professional intellectuals in all disciplines are allying themselves with the proletariat in the People’s Front, an umbrella organisation of anti-fascists. The chapter fulfils political duty but suffers from rather forced arguments about Soviet democracy and what writers must do as writers to meet their political responsibilities. Caudwell constructs a speech addressed to ‘all bourgeois revolutionaries’ and spoken by ‘the conscious proletariat’. The logic of the demand to accept proletarian discipline is a bit abstract but the change in the form of presentation of the argument is striking and significant: it is highly unusual that in non-fiction he should speak through the voice of a character; its awkwardness suggests some difficulty with the argument. The conclusion of the address says: ‘You are not now “just an artist” (which means in fact a bourgeois artist); you have become a proletarian artist’ (IR, p. 319). Although he sees what has to be done in the art world, he also sees that the artists are ‘not fit for purpose’ – he is caught in an impossible position. For poetry, the time is out of joint: the poet cannot be the leader of revolution ‘because his world has become by the pressure of alien values too small a part of the real world and it is part of the task of the revolution to widen it’ (IR, p. 326).

      Caudwell’s analysis of the way the development of economic structures has shaped cultural production and the functional role of the arts is indeed revolutionary, but it was clear in his last chapter of Illusion and Reality that he had already recognised that the rise of fascism made demands of a different order. The problem now was immediate and demanded a more direct style. In Studies he refocuses, assuming a more militant posture and making better use of his journalistic skills. The essays deal with what is wrong with bourgeois culture in the present. They have a better pace than Illusion and Reality and their statement is sharper and clearer. Caudwell is also more attuned here to other people’s ways of looking at things; he realises his task is not just to construct an argument that can be persuasive but actually to persuade, to persuade people who may well see the world in quite a different way. His theories as a critic have at this point led him to a different practice. The energy of the essays in Studies comes across well; this is vigorous argument that makes them attractive to read. It should not be surprising that in the current crisis-riven period they remain relevant.

      PART I

       Studies in a Dying Culture

      INTRODUCTION

      Studies in a Dying Culture was published by The Bodley Head in 1938 and was reprinted five times in the decade after the war. It was Caudwell’s most accessible theoretical work and probably the most popular at the time. Whereas Illusion

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