REAL ART’S CRITICAL PRINCIPLES

I recently pissed off an old friend inadvertently. He’s just finishing up his first year teaching, is very fired up about what he’s doing, and, like all teachers, is working his ass off. He’s been reading Real Art rather faithfully from the beginning, so he’s well aware of my radical criticisms of public education, but I guess that actually entering the field and dealing with the extraordinary day-to-day pressures that teachers endure made my wild statements become just too much for him. He started taking what I was saying personally, and decided that the best thing for our friendship was to just stop reading Real Art, which is a big drag for me.

I suppose it’s all for the best, but it got me thinking about how I and other people conceptualize important issues. That is, I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job explaining my views on education and other issues, but I think that sometimes my conclusions are seemingly so outrageous that they are difficult for people to swallow, no matter how well I’ve argued my point. In other words, despite the fact that it’s pretty darned clear that public education is so utterly inundated with authoritarianism that as an institution it is irreparable, my conclusion that the schools should be shut down and paved over so we can start over with a clean slate seems to shock the senses, especially with liberals, who cherish education mythology more than conservatives or moderates.

What I’m getting at is that “conventional wisdom” or “common sense” is probably a much stronger force than I had realized, and I already knew that it was powerful. For instance, I recall a Michael Ventura column that ran in the Austin Chronicle some ten years ago called “Forrest Gump, Why?” The essay essentially blasted the hit movie because of its hidden ideology: all the real solutions to life’s problems are simple—“Momma always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.” Of course, this ideology is straight-up false. Life is complicated. Sometimes simple solutions work; most of the time they don’t. Forrest Gump’s hidden ideology plays right into the hands of America’s traditional anti-intellectualism, and teaches people a false reality. However, Ventura’s column seemed to create a firestorm of irate reader response. The next week’s letters-to-the-editor section was chock full of messages from people who loved Forrest Gump, many of them blasting Ventura’s essay because the film was “just a movie” that made people happy. How dare Ventura tarnish such a fine film with his outlandish bullshit? The response was so overwhelming that his next column was entitled “Forrest Gump, Why Not?” In it, he bolstered his opinion, backing down not one bit. The one statement I remember from this second column is that “there’s no such thing as ‘just a movie.’”

Of course, I had recently gotten my degree in Radio, Television, and Film (RTF) from the University of Texas, and I was well aware that there’s no such thing as “just a movie.” Almost every social, cultural, political, and economic institution and artifact in the world has some sort of ideology embedded within it. But most people haven’t studied communications, and it’s probably much more difficult for them to not take cherished cultural artifacts at face value. Consequently, these Austin Chronicle readers were pissed off when challenged, and Ventura’s carefully crafted arguments made no difference: all that mattered to them was his seemingly outlandish conclusion.

Here’s another good example. Noam Chomsky has observed that the Bible is the most genocidal work in the Western literary canon. This is demonstrably true. Just go read the Old Testament. But the statement, on its face, is completely insane because the Bible is “the good book.” Try running around, say, the South, telling people that the Bible is genocidal and that you can prove it. How long will it take before some zealot shows you God’s love by kicking the shit out of you? People aren’t interested in your reasoning if you’re attacking something in which they strongly believe.

But I digress. The point to this essay is to try to shed some light on how I approach issues and ideas such that my conclusions don’t seem so wacky. I mentioned above that I studied RTF at Texas years ago. This is where I got my first heavy dose of criticism as a concept. We read what seemed like hundreds of critical essays, some of them bullshit, but most of them eye-opening. What really turned me on, however, were the Marxist and feminist essays. It’s not that I’m particularly into Marx or feminism, although I am to some extent; it’s that the way these writers approached their subjects opened up an entirely new strain of thought to me—it is important to note that many feminist writers, especially those writing in the 1970s, were strongly influenced by Marxist critical principles. So really, it all comes down to Karl Marx.

From the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism:

Marx and Engels viewed the capitalist mode of production as one highly adept at securing its legitimation through the habitual patterns of thought encouraged by the social structures it fostered, such as the division of labor peculiar to the factory system but replicated throughout bourgeois social institutions. "Ideology" would refer to the sum total of the writings, speeches, teachings, pronouncements, beliefs, and opinions that assert the naturalness and desirability of such structures and social practices. Marx and Engels first set forth their concept of ideology in The German Ideology (1845), a polemical work aimed at the neo-Hegelian philosophical school. In it, they attributed the "ruling ideas" of any given historical period to that age's dominant class, but their explanation of the workings of ideology moved beyond simplistic assertions of cause-and-effect relationships between power and ideas, or some one-to-one correspondence between economic forces and cultural trends.

Marx and Engels inherited the Napoleonic sense of ideology as confusion or distraction from the practical realities of everyday life, as opposed to the later use of "ideologies" (still common today) to refer to specific political views or agendas. In The German Ideology they began to transform the meaning of "ideology" more toward the sense of "false consciousness," a way of misunderstanding the world and our place in it. What is most important, they suggest the inescapable nature of ideology, that is, that it refers to that which we just do not see, comprehend, or anticipate as we confront the world.

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Don’t let all the big words fool you. I haven’t read any Hegel that I know of, and, for that matter, I’ve only read a tiny bit of Marx’s stuff. But all these people I was reading in school have read Marx, and his influence, I think, carried through to me. For me, the point is that there is meaning in virtually everything, and that meaning is not always apparent. Furthermore, it is extraordinarily important to understand this because nine times out of ten, the face value meaning of a given cultural, political, or economic artifact tends to serve those in power. If one is in the business of subverting power, one must expose such illusions; often, this exposure can be jarring, even pissing people off while they adamantly refuse to acknowledge how their attacker came to understand that a cherished point of view is a load of crap.

I think that’s how I upset my teacher friend. Fortunately, the two of us have agreed that we disagree, and are leaving it at that. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Americans out there who are not so tolerant of dissenting views. Should I worry about pissing them off? It seems that no matter how polite I am, I’m bound to step on some toes here and there simply because of the content of my statements. My personal instinct is to say “tough shit.” I really believe that I have a responsibility to use my mind and the wonderful education I’ve gotten to try to make people understand the world a bit better. If that is annoying to some, so be it.

In summary, I found a nice little piece on Marxist literary criticism that succinctly states some of the critical ideas that tend to guide me when I’m writing and thinking about, well, everything. The essay is specifically aimed at literature students, but also pretty easily generalized to include real art, and politics, and culture.

From The Literary Criticism Web:

Below is concise summary of some particular Marxist assumptions about social relations that can often provide useful entries into an analysis of literature:

* Individuals do not have an existence independent of society. Individuals are creatures of social history.

* Society is dynamic, constantly in flux. Social change results from a dialectic of opposing forces out of which a new synthesis of society is constantly emerging--a new set of social relationships, standards and ideals. History is a record of this dialectic of social forces.

* The forces fueling this social dialectic are essentially economic in nature, and they are dramatized in tensions within and between social classes. These forces set the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in opposition to one another.

* All literature is ideological. That is, all literature reflects the social dialectic of history and directly or indirectly declares an allegiance or hostility to these forces. All literature, then, is polemical.

* Good literature is consciously polemical. It is itself a force of change, fostering a dialectical consciousness in readers. The good writer is conscious of the dialectic of social forces reflected in the literary subject and seeks to make the reader aware of the dialectical predicament of society and its member-individuals.

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Just for the record, I am not, nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party. I'm just a sympathizer.

Hasta la vista, comrades.

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