The immense majority of the art that we receive – view, read, hear; in a word, consume – is bourgeois art. That is not to say that most art is produced by the bourgeoisie, actually, most art is produced by the petty-bourgeoisie. In very-slightly-less-Marxist terminology, most artists who live by their art, also own the means by which they produce it and have effective control over their labour and conditions. There are exceptions, obviously; the TV and cinema director controls the labour of others, as do artists like Damien Hirst who own large studios full of assistants. It is also not to say that all or even most petty-bourgeois artists identify ideologically or culturally with the ruling class. Some of the most interesting and well regarded art was made by people sharply critical of the ruling class and their interests, even if the artists themselves did not understand their critiques in class terms. And occasionally, you get an artist like Pablo Neruda who was not only politically critical of the ruling class but was actually a communist (although, being a Stalinist, it would be more accurate to say that he was opposed to the ruling classes of the West and an ally of the ruling classes of the USSR and its allies). The fact that most artists are middle class, rather than ruling class, probably accounts for a good deal of its range and scope – it is, after all, the middle classes which are most adept at swimming from one camp to the other.
Indeed, the ability of the middle classes to take the side of the oppressed and exploited is probably a vital part in the 'information processing' which the formation of the ideology of the oppressors and exploiters so requires.
Furthermore, a good deal of what gets called art was produced before there were any bourgeoisie, petty or otherwise, to produce anything. By what stretch of the imagination could it be claimed that The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, or Beowulf are products of bourgeoisie?
Only in the sense that the bourgeoisie have inherited humanity's cultural history and they can do with it what they will.
I was required to read The Iliad in my all-boy high school, I have since come to a greater appreciation of it, but, like most high school boys, I was not, at the time, capable of seeing what was tender, beautiful, or sublime in that poem. What I absorbed was that there was something absurd about paganism, something valorous about prowess in aggression and in warfare, and I found it wholly intelligible that the conflict of the text should have centred around who should have the honour of raping one particular woman. It was just a matter of course that 'manly' virtues like courage and glory were men's work, while 'womanly' virtues like being the spoils of battle was women's work.
Lysistrata has not entered into the canon of literary masterpieces in the way that The Iliad has. Perhaps we can blame Aristotle for this – it was he who deemed comedy inferior to tragedy – but it is surely surprising that our choices for what should be read and what can be put on the back-burner should still be made in the shadow of Aristotle. The enduring influence of Aristotle's judgements may have something to do with the fact that Lysistrata has too much in it politically that can be twisted against the bourgeoisie. Lysistrata calls together women from all over Greece to propose a way to end the Peloponnesian War. Her plan is simple, withhold sex until the men agree to peace. Having been written a good deal before Victorian prudery, she can do this not because women are in reality sexless anyway – actually the plan nearly founders on the women's frustrated libidos – but because the women are able to prioritise, they can place their hopes for peace above their animal desires for sex. By this reading, Aristophanese, in 411 BCE, was able to recognise in women what the bourgeoisie have only grudgingly begun to today: reason. And agency with it.
In a similar way, the poetry attributed to Sappho is – to my mind, at least – every bit as lyrical and moving as some of the much more famous and heterosexual Albas of Medieval Europe: it is exactly those virtues which might make Sapphic poetry dangerous.
The essays of T.S. Eliot, a semi-fascist, were instrumental in temporarily nudging John Milton's Paradise Lost out of the English canon – supposedly on 'aesthetic grounds'. That Milton was a left-wing bourgeoisie revolutionary, that Eliot's elitist theological approach to humanity differed radically from Milton's, or that previous revolutionaries (Shelly, Blake) had found inspiration in Paradise Lost must not have had anything to do with it. The aesthetic difference between Milton and Eliot is itself political. Milton's cerebral verse was composed with the express intention of forcing the reader to be both active and conscious; T.S. Eliot's is written to appeal to the reader's 'digestive tracts' in an irrationalism which would have warmed Goebels' heart. (Whether Eliot actually succeeded in that project is another matter.)
This is not to say that critics of similar politics should necessarily agree on aesthetics. C.S. Lewis agreed with Eliot on many issues outside of literature, but defended Milton from him and others with his usual mix of erudition, sentimentality and silliness. However, Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost is primarily concerned with decorum and sexuality (he doesn't really explicitly relate the two). Both topics are highly ideological. The processes of art criticism, canon formation and art distribution are intimately linked and always political.
Of course, art production is also always political. That is true whether or not the art actually thematises politics. Under capitalism, art is political on at least two grounds: first, as an autotelic activity (art is surely, at least in part, its own purpose) it is a utopic space separate from the instrumentalism of alienated labour; second, because art must be produced by living breathing human beings, it is itself conditioned and determined by the same things which condition and determine human beings. Hence, it is utopic in both meanings of the word: it is an enclave of unalienated labour and an imaginary escape from the realities of capitalism. Art is both produced under and creative of ideology.
It is still possible to encounter that common sense idea that studying art or the humanities more generally can somehow make you a better person. I did not come up with the refutation for this position but it is worth repeating. The fact that the Nazi's were aficionados of Goethe and Schiller – the fact that Auschwitz was perpetrated by some of the most learned and cultivated men in Europe – must surely put paid to the lie. It should be patently obvious, but somehow it isn't; the fact that Heidegger was an out-and-out Nazi, the fact that T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and D.H. Laurence all flirted with fascism, should have alerted us to the nature of ideological production and warned us against naivety in our ideological consumption. Of course, this danger is easily enough avoided: we can simply forget.
Of course, this is not to argue that all canonical art is simply reactionary. The modernist canon in literature contains T.S. Eliot, but it also contains Brecht; in the visual arts the cutting edge of modernism was made up of people who often identified as socialists of one sort or another. Furthermore, it would be stupid to suggest that just because T.S. Eliot dabbled with fascism there is nothing of value in his work. Actually, the very effectiveness and the beauty (inexact terms) of the texts produced by authors like T.S. Eliot comes from the energies that have so much in common with fascism. Part of the task of the critic, surely, is to understand why that is.
But here the socialist critic is in a difficult situation. Part of the reason there exists a critical industry is that the bourgeoisie are proud of 'their own culture' – even when that 'culture' has been inherited from the past. By subjecting that 'culture' to analysis, critics are not only a living part of its production process, they help society – and especially the ruling and middle classes – to gain some understanding of its own cultural products. This work, to a great extent, is one of legitimation. Quite often, it serves to recuperate artefacts of their cultural heritage after aspects of the culture itself have come under attack – witness, for example, attempts to claim Milton as a proto-feminist. If this cannot be done, criticism at least offers an apology. In truth, no matter how tenaciously the critic may attack it, the very task of criticism itself serves to shore up the myth of civilisation which is so often employed to valorise capitalism (and, little doubt, every ruling class).
This is not to suggest that professional criticism – i.e.: the academia – should simply be avoided. There are, I think, four reasons that this is the case. [1] 'Intellectuals' need to make a living like everyone else, and we all serve the system in one way or another (productive labour, for example, directly serves the needs of capital accumulation). More to the point, [2] ideology is almost infinitely multi-sided and contested. Just as the likes of Brecht and Walter Benjamin (commited Marxists both) have been put to use by people less committed to capital's destruction, so it is conceivable that the likes of Conrad (or more likely, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) could provide psychological energies to the revolutionary proletariat. Furthermore – and if that strikes you as too sanguine – [3] there is an inherent danger to the project of cultural analysis: if it plumbs too deeply it may conclude with Walter Benjamin that
[art] owes its existence not just to the efforts of the great geniuses who fashioned it, but also in greater or lesser degree to the anonymous drudgery of their contemporaries. There is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism.
(Arcades Project 359)
Or with Marx, that human progress resembles “that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.” (The Future Results of British Rule in India http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm). That kind of understanding begins to turn back against the very system that relies upon it. That does not empty it of usefulness for capitalism, far from it, but it also gives something to its enemies.
And finally, [4] Marxists believe that history belongs to the proletariat. Or, less floridly, if the proletariat can succeed in making a revolution, they will be able to lay claim to the accumulated achievements of humanity. And criticism is surely a part of that heritage. Even if Benjamin was right when he said that art
“may well increase the burden of the treasures that are piled up on humanity’s back. But it does not give mankind the strength to shake them off, so as to get its hands on them.” (361)
the proletariat doesn't need art for that, that is the task of its own self-organisation. The proletariat needs art because aesthetic expression (which under capitalism becomes fetishised and commodified into art) is part to what it is to be human; criticism, for Marxists, can therefore illuminate capitalism's inscription upon our species-being – both in the manner in which it has degraded us, and in the manner in which we have resisted it.
It can do this by attending both to meaning, and to how meaning is made. Criticism should understand the explicit content of a text as well as uncover its latent ideological machinations, strategies and perspectives. But is should also search out those strategies of signification which can more readily render service to one side or another in the class war.1 That is surely the difference between simply appreciating or dismissing someone like Eliot and actually subjecting his work to Marxist critique.
1It is useful here, I think to consider several interacting levels of what might be called form. Form as a category encompasses the medium (spoken word, text, sculpture, painting), the use of that medium (a novel, a serialised webcomic, street art), the genre (science fiction, cubism, naturalism), and what is rather more ephemeral, the 'style' or the authorial devices employed. Obviously, these 'level' are not clear-cut, they are only a provisional way of conceptualising a category that is often dealt with very cavalierly.
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