Culture as Politics

Selected Writings of Christopher Caudwell

Christopher Caudwell, David Margolies

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781583676882
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Considered by many to be the most innovative British Marxist writer of the twentieth century, Christopher Caudwell was killed in the Spanish Civil War at the age of 29. Although already a published writer of aeronautic texts and crime fiction, he was practically unknown to the public until reviews appeared of Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry, which was published just after his death. A strikingly original study of poetry’s role, it explained in clear language how the organizing of emotion in society plays a part in social change and development. Caudwell had a powerful interest in how things worked – aeronautics, physics, human psychology, language, and society. In the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s he saw that capitalism was a system that could not work properly and distorted the thinking of the age. Self-educated from the age of 15, he wrote with a directness that is alien to most cultural theory. Culture as Politics introduces Caudwell’s work through his most accessible and relevant writing. Material will be drawn from Illusion and Reality, Studies in a Dying Culture and his essay, “Heredity and Development.”

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 and Reality can seem rather formidable, with a bibliography that Caudwell jokingly said was designed to terrify reviewers, Studies contains more clearly focused essays which are fairly short and must seem more manageable. The topics had a more obvious relevance than the ‘study of the sources of poetry’ which the subtitle of Illusion and Reality suggested.

The essays of Studies were radical, explicitly so, and the subjects were examined against a political background. The rise of fascism and the growing resistance from the Popular Front – the People’s Front as it was in Britain – made the issues sharper. Writers as citizens and as writers had to take sides; Writers’ International allied itself to ‘the class that will build socialism’. Caudwell’s joining the International Brigades to fight fascism confirmed his citizen commitment; Studies is a clear demonstration of his commitment as a writer.

The effect of writing from commitment meant that the balance of explanation and argument shifted; the essays were propagandistic in their advocacy. They are more tendentious than his writing that is not shaped to a political purpose, but what they lose in nuance they gain in rhetorical vigour. They have a tremendous energy, which sometimes overruns their logic. In evaluating Freud’s contribution to human understanding, for example, Caudwell’s conclusions have a good balance but he commits occasional excesses in passing which he then modifies, for example, ‘Freudism, attempting to cure civilisation of its instinctive distortions, points the way to Nazism.’ Freud, he says explicitly, rejects fascism but promotes a bourgeois misunderstanding of the nature of society which can point to fascism.

Similarly, Caudwell says of D. H. Lawrence, ‘it is Lawrence’s final tragedy that his solution was ultimately Fascist and not Communist’ because he is advocating a return to the primitive (he is not taking up fascist politics). The point for Caudwell is that Lawrence’s reaction to the decline of human relations is backward-looking: he refuses to understand that society is what makes humans human, whereas a blind retreat into the body in fact negates the very thing that transforms the beast into the human. This essay is Caudwell’s most eloquent plea to recognise the fundamental role society plays for humanity.

The final essay of the book, ‘Liberty’, is one of Caudwell’s most thoroughly developed arguments. Again, he is insistent about the fundamental role of society, without which liberty is meaningless. Politically, it is one of the most important pieces of his writing, not because of party advocacy, but because it examines views about freedom that are important in making political choices, are commonly held throughout bourgeois culture and are fundamentally wrong.

These three essays are, I think, the most relevant of the collection and best stand the course of time. They are presented in the order in which they appear in the original volume. The essays I have not included were on George Bernard Shaw, T. E. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, Pacifism and Violence, and Love.

The appearance of * * * in the essays indicates text that has been left out of this edition.

1

D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Bourgeois Artist

What is the function of the artist? Any artist such as Lawrence, who aims to be ‘more than’ an artist, necessarily raises this question. It is supposed to be the teaching of Marxism that art for art’s sake is an illusion and that art must be propaganda. This is, however, making the usual bourgeois simplification of a complex matter.

Art is a social function. This is not a Marxist demand, but arises from the very way in which art forms are defined. Only those things are recognised as art forms which have a conscious social function. The phantasies of a dreamer are not art. They only become art when they are given music, forms or words, when they are clothed in socially recognised symbols, and of course in the process there is a modification. The phantasies are modified by the social dress; the language as a whole acquires new associations and context. No chance sounds constitute music, but sounds selected from a socially recognised scale and played on socially developed instruments.

It is not for Marxism therefore to demand that art play a social function or to attack the conception of ‘art for art’s sake’ for art only is art, and recognisable as such, in so far as it plays a social function. What is of importance to art, Marxism and society is the question: What social function is art playing? This in turn depends on the type of society in which it is secreted.

In bourgeois society social relations are denied in the form of relations between men, and take the form of a relation between man and a thing, a property relation, which, because it is a dominating relation, is believed to make man free. But this is an illusion. The property relation is only a disguise for relations which now become unconscious and therefore anarchic but are still between man and man and in particular between exploiter and exploited.

The artist in bourgeois culture is asked to do the same thing. He is asked to regard the art work as a finished commodity and the process of art as a relation between himself and the work, which then disappears into the market. There is a further relation between the art work and the buyer, but with this he can hardly be immediately concerned. The whole pressure of bourgeois society is to make him regard the art work as hypostatised and his relation to it as primarily that of a producer for the market.

This will have two results:

(i) The mere fact that he has to earn his living by the sale of the concrete hypostatised entity as a property right – copyright, picture, statue – may drive him to estimate his work as an artist by the market chances which produce a high total return for these property rights. This leads to the commercialisation or vulgarisation of art.

(ii) But art is not in any case a relation to a thing, it is a relation between men, between artist and audience, and the art work is only like a machine which they must both grasp as part of the process. The commercialisation of art may revolt the sincere artist, but the tragedy is that he revolts against it still within the limitations of bourgeois culture. He attempts to forget the market completely and concentrate on his relation to the art work, which now becomes still further hypostatised as an entity-in-itself. Because the art work is now completely an end-in-itself, and even the market is forgotten, the art process becomes an extremely individualistic relation. The social values inherent in the art form, such as syntax, tradition, rules, technique, form, accepted tonal scale, now seem to have little value, for the art work more and more exists for the individual alone. The art work is necessarily always the product of a tension between old conscious social formulations – the art ‘form’ – and new individual experience made conscious – the art ‘content’ or the artist’s ‘message’. This is the synthesis, the specifically hard task of creation. But the hypostatisation of the art work as the goal makes old conscious social formulations less and less important, and individual experience more and more dominating. As a result art becomes more and more formless, personal, and individualistic, culminating in Dadaism, surréalism and ‘Steining’.

Thus bourgeois art disintegrates under the tension of two forces, both arising from the same feature of bourgeois culture. On the one hand there is production for the market – vulgarisation, commercialisation. On the other there is hypostatisation of the art work as the goal of the art process, and the relation between art work and individual as paramount. This necessarily leads to a dissolution of those social values which make the art in question a social relation, and therefore ultimately results in the art work’s ceasing to be an art work and becoming a mere private phantasy.

All bourgeois art during the last two centuries shows the steady development of this bifurcation. As long as the social values inherent in an art form are not disintegrated – e.g. up to say 1910 – the artist who hypostatises the art form and despises the market can produce good art. After that, it becomes steadily more difficult. Needless to say, the complete acceptance of the market, being a refusal to regard any part of the art process as a social process, is even more incompetent to produce great art. Anything which helps the artist to escape from the bourgeois trap and become conscious of social relations inherent in art, will help to delay the rot. For this reason the novel is the last surviving literary art form in bourgeois culture, for in it, for reasons explained elsewhere, the social relations inherent in the art process are overt. Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Proust, all in different ways are the last blossoms of the bourgeois novel, for with them the novel begins to disappear as an objective study of social relations and becomes 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 the altered mould of reality, and by a specific organisation of the emotions thus generated, there is a new attitude, an adaptation.

All art is produced by this tension between changing social relations and outmoded consciousness. The very reason why new art is created, why the old art does not satisfy either artist or appreciator, is because it seems somehow out of gear with the present. Old art always has meaning for us, because the instincts, the source of the affects, do not change, because a new system of social relations does not exclude but includes the old, and because new art too includes the traditions of the art that has gone before. But it is not enough. We must have new art.

And new art results from tension. This tension takes two forms. (i) One is productive – the evolutionary form. The tension between productive relations and productive forces secures the advance of society as a whole, simply by producing in an even more pronounced form the contradiction which was the source of the dynamism. Thus bourgeois culture by continually dissolving the relations between men for relations to a thing, and thus hypostatising the market, procured the growth of industrial capitalism. And, in the sphere of art it produced the increasing individualism which, seen at its best in Shakespeare, was a positive value, but pushed to its limit finally spelt the complete breakdown of art in surréalism, Dadaism and Steinism.

(ii) The tension now becomes revolutionary. For productive relations are a brake on productive forces and the tension between them, instead of altering productive relations in the direction of giving better outlet to productive forces, has the opposite effect. It drives productive relations on still further into negation, increases the tension, and prepares the explosion which will shatter the old productive relations and enable them to be rebuilt anew – not arbitrarily, but according to a pattern which will itself be given by the circumstances of the tension. Thus in art the tension between individualism and the increasing complexity and catastrophes of the artist’s environment, between the free following of dream and the rude blows of anarchic reality, wakes the artist from his dream and forces him in spite of himself to look at the world, not merely as an artist, but also as a man, as a citizen, as a sociologist. It forces him to be interested in things not strictly germane to art – politics, economics, science, and philosophy – just as it did during the early bourgeois Renaissance, producing ‘all-round men’ like Leonardo da Vinci. Whether this is good for art or not is beside the point. Bourgeois art like bourgeois culture is moribund and this process is an...