I found the David Walsh International Worker article interesting, to say the least. I am familiar with both Wilde's Soul of Man Under Socialism (the quote I used in 'Artist as Ideology' was from that work) as well as Trotsky's Literature and Revolution. What Mr. Walsh left out of his strained attempt to merge the 'human face' of Trotsky's Marxian dogmatism and the bourgeois face of Wilde's unrestrained Libertarianism was passages such as this:
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the people.(1)
It is easy to see how the theatre-going nascent industrial bourgeoisie found such pronouncements amusing, but less easy to imagine how a 'commissar of culture' would incorporate such anti-demotic sentiments into a prolecult campaign...Wilde (and I am quoting from The Soul of Man Under Socialism) leaves no doubts about his disregard for the 'masses':
One who is an emperor or king may stoop down and pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud.(2)
And there is the classic 'human nature' Libertarian argument (complete with crude attempt to appropriate Darwinian theory):
Individualism does not come to a man with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and toward which every mode of life quickens. Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows that people are good when left alone. To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except toward individualism.(3)
Let us consider his shibboleth: 'Individualism...says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him,' especially his use of the word 'compulsion.'
Consensus, as I have pointed out before, is the most 'democratic' form of governance possible. Every vote truly has an impact (and what sort of democracy is one in which a vote doesn't matter?). The process of consensus, of course, results, more often than not, in many first and second choices of some participants to be rejected as compromise is effected by the power of dissent. A consensus decision is a decision forged by compromise. Here we must admit that consensus is control; here we see that compromise is compulsion...On the other hand, a 'free market' democracy permits each citizen to vote exactly as he or she wishes---with no compromise necessary---, such a democracy predicated upon the acquiescence of a losing minority...
Let us return to Wilde's statement '[o]ne who is an emperor or king may stoop down and pick up a brush for a painter...' This goes to the heart of my idea of artist as ascendant, the quintessential artist's fantasy. A rather high-brow example can be found in Henry James' short story 'Mrs. Medwin,' where a respectable but insignificant (and hitherto unsuccessful) social climber fails to make the first rungs of 'proper society' until her dissolute, uncouth (but shockingly witty) half-brother appears on the scene to give the anemic ruling class just the right dash of verve it cannot find anywhere else but amongst the varletry. A more recent (and lower brow) example can be found in the movie The Day-Trippers, where a pompous 'struggling novelist' explains to his disappointed, materialistic girlfriend that 'the artists, if they're worthy, get to join the higher ranks, get to be the aristocracy.' The point of all this is: the aristocracy doesn't necessarily mind taking in one or two, but (and I assert this is central to the artist's fantasy) they have no intention of ever taking in everyone!
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You will not find me to be very sympathetic toward the disparities between Trotsky the writer and Trotsky the ruler. In Revolution and Literature, he states:
It is very true that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to reject or to accept a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art.(4)
This is the 'human face' I mentioned above. It does not correspond with the reality:
The rumors of the street do not wholly coincide with the tone of the newspapers...The liberal and compromisist circles, encouraged by the sabotage of the functionaries and their own own light-mindedness, believed strangely in their own impunity. They spoke and wrote of the Bolsheviks in the language of the July days...The new government had to show these people a firm hand before they began to believe in it. The more unbridled papers were detained already on the night of the 26th. Some others were confiscated on the following day.(5)
This description of Bolshevik censorship (occurring on the eve of the revolution) was published by the American firm of Simon & Schuster because, in rare irony, Trotsky's history of the Bolshevik revolution was banned in the U.S.S.R., due largely to the precedents of censorship he himself initiated and tirelessly defended...
(I would suggest to Mr. Walsh that Trotsky's disregard for 'the masses' was equal, if not superior, to Oscar Wilde's.)
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: Well, like I said at the beginning, art is a very complicated subject. Yes, the world comes first. And certainly art can be considered decorative display. And yes there are elitists who would make claims about High Art, Beauty, Truth, etc. But we are interested in mechanisms of transformation. You stated in another post: 'some phylogenic behavior may have had an ontogenic origin.' There is always interplay between the individual and the environment. To put it in materialistic dialectics, products or impacts of an organism create new conditions to which those organisms must then respond. Art may also be response.
I essentially agree with you, Bill, although my emphasis, in the case of art, leans more toward the environment. The reason for this is because the promulgation of art requires cultural consent. As many an artist can tell you, an artist is free to create whatever she or he wishes to create, but if no one is interested in it then it will not make an impact. Most 'starving artists' do not starve; most abandon art and return to the world of socialized labor that most artists neglect in their more enraptured moments. Only the artists who 'go with the grain' of the ideological constraints of the time are artists who are paid---and paid attention to (however rebellious they may seem).
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Notes:
1. Wilde, Epigrams and Aphorisms (John W. Luce, 1905), p. 89.
2. Ibid., p. 90.
3. Ibid., p. 92.
4. Trotsky, Revolution and Literature (Russell & Russell, 1957), p. 178.
5. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, vol. III (Simon & Schuster, 1932), pp. 319-20.
