Culture as Politics - Christopher Caudwell

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a study of the subject’s experience in society. It is then only a step for the thing experienced to disappear and, as in Gertrude Stein, for complete ‘me-ness’ to reign.

      It is inevitable that at this stage the conception of the artist as a pure ‘artist’ must cease to exist. For commercialised art has become intolerably base and negated itself. And equally art for art’s sake (that is, the ignoring of the market and concentration on the perfect art work as a goal in itself) has negated itself, for the art form has ceased to exist, and what was art has become private phantasy. It is for this reason that sincere artists, such as Lawrence, Gide, Romain Rolland, Romains and so on, cannot be content with the beautiful art work, but seem to desert the practice of art for social theory and become novelists of ideas, literary prophets and propaganda novelists. They represent the efforts of bourgeois art, exploded into individualistic phantasy and commercialised muck, to become once more a social process and so be reborn. Whether such art is or can be great art is beside the point, since it is inevitably the prerequisite for art becoming art again, just as it is beside the point whether the transition from bourgeoisdom to communism is itself smooth or happy or beautiful or free, since it is the inevitable step if bourgeois anarchy and misery is to be healed and society to become happy and free.

      But what is art as a social process? What is art, not as a mere art work or a means of earning a living, but in itself, the part it plays in society? I have dealt fully with this point elsewhere, and need only briefly recapitulate now.

      The personal phantasy or day-dream is not art, however beautiful. Nor is the beautiful sunset. Both are only the raw material of art. It is the property of art that it makes mimic pictures of reality which we accept as illusory. We do not suppose the events of a novel really happen, that a landscape shown on a painting can be walked upon – yet it has a measure of reality.

      The mimic representation, by the technique appropriate to the art in question, causes the social representation to sweat out of its pores an affective emanation. The emanation is in us, in our affective reaction with the elements of the representation. Given in the representation are not only the affects, but, simultaneously, their organisation in an affective attitude towards the piece of reality symbolised in the mimicry. This affective attitude is bitten in by a general heightening of consciousness and increase in self-value, due to the non-motor nature of the innervations aroused, which seems therefore all to pass into an affective irradiation of consciousness. This affective attitude is not permanent, as is the intellectual attitude towards reality aroused by a cogent scientific argument, but still – because of the mnemic characteristics of an organism – it remains as an experience and must, therefore, in proportion to the amount of conscious poignancy accompanying the experience and the nature of the experience, modify the subject’s general attitude towards life itself. This modification tends to make life more interesting to the organism, hence the survival value of art. But viewed from society’s standpoint, art is the fashioning of the affective consciousness of its members, the conditioning of their instincts.

      Language, simply because it is the most general instrument for communicating views of reality, whether affective and cognitive, has a particularly fluid range of representations of reality. Hence the suppleness and scope of literary art; the novel, the drama, the poem, the short story, and the essay. It can draw upon all the symbolic pictures of reality made by scientific, historical and discursive intellectual processes. Art can only achieve its purpose if the pictures themselves are made simultaneously to produce affect and organisation. Then, even as the artist holds up to us the piece of reality, it seems already glowing with affective colouring.

      Reality constitutes for us our environment; and our environment, which is chiefly social, alters continuously – sometimes barely perceptibly, sometimes at dizzy speeds. The socially accepted pictures we make in words of reality cannot change as if they were reflections in a mirror. An object is reflected in a mirror. If the object moves the reflection moves. But in language reality is symbolised in unchanging words, which give a false stability and permanence to the object they represent. Thus they instantaneously photograph reality rather than reflect it. This frigid character of language is regrettable but it has its utilitarian purposes. It is probably the only way in which man, with his linear consciousness, can get a grip of fluid reality. Language, as it develops, shows more and more of this false permanence, till we arrive at the Platonic Ideas, Eternal and Perfect Words. Their eternity and perfection is simply the permanence of print and paper. If you coin a word or write a symbol to describe an entity or event, the word will remain ‘eternally’ unchanged even while the entity has changed and the event is no longer present. This permanence is part of the inescapable nature of symbolism, which is expressed in the rules of logic. It is one of the strange freaks of the human mind that it has supposed that reality must obey the rules of logic, whereas the correct view is that symbolism by its very nature has certain rules, expressed in the laws of logic, and these are nothing to do with the process of reality, but represent the nature of the symbolic process itself.

      The artist experiences this discrepancy between language and reality as follows: he has had an intense experience of a rose and wishes to communicate his experience to his fellows in words. He wishes to say, ‘I saw a rose’. But ‘rose’ has a definite social meaning, or group of meanings, and we are to suppose that he has had an experience with the rose which does not correspond to any of society’s previous experiences of roses, embodied in the word and its history. His experience of the rose is therefore the negation of the word ‘rose’, it is ‘not-rose’ – all that in his experience which is not expressed in the current social meaning of the word ‘rose’. He therefore says – ‘I saw a rose like’ – and there follows a metaphor, or there is an adjective – ‘a heavenly rose’ or a euphemism – ‘I saw a flowery blush’, and in each case there is a synthesis, for his new experience has become socially fused into society’s old experiences and both have been changed in the process. His own experience has taken colour from all past meanings of the word ‘rose’, for these will be present in men’s minds when they read his poem, and the word ‘rose’ will have taken colour from his individual experience, for his poem will in future be in men’s minds when they encounter the word ‘rose’.

      But why was the poet’s experience different from society’s tradition? Because that cross-section of his environment which we call his individual life-experience was different. But if we take all society’s art as a whole, i.e. the sum of individual cross-sections, we get on the one hand the whole experience of the environment averaged out, and also the average man, or average genotype. Now the constant genesis of new art must mean that the environment is changing, so that man’s individual experiences are changing, and he is constantly finding inherited social conscious formulations inadequate and requiring re-synthesis. Thus if art forms remain unchanged and traditional, as in Chinese civilisation, it is evident that the environment – social relations – are static. If they decay, the environment is on the down-grade, as with current bourgeois culture. If they improve, the reverse is the case. But the artist’s value is not in self-expression. If so, why should he struggle to achieve the synthesis in which old social formulations are fused with his individual experience? Why not disregard social formalities and express himself directly as one does by shouting, leaping, and cries? Because, to begin with, it is the old bourgeois illusion to suppose there is such a thing as pure individual expression. It is not even that the artist nobly forces his self-expression into a social mould for the benefit of society. Both attitudes are simply expressions of the old bourgeois fallacy that man is free in freely giving vent to his instincts. In fact the artist does not express himself in art forms, he finds himself therein. He does not adulterate his free self-expression to make it socially current, he finds free self-expression only in the social relations embodied in art. The value of art to the artist then is this, that it makes him free. It appears to him of value as a self-expression, but in fact it is not the expression of a self but the discovery of a self. It is the creation of a self. In synthesising his experience with society’s, in pressing his inner self into the mould of social relations, he not only creates a new mould, a socially valuable product, but he also moulds and creates his own self. The mute inglorious Milton is a fallacy. Miltons are made, not born.

      The value of art to society is that by it an emotional adaptation is possible. Man’s instincts are pressed in art against

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