What Should Be The Writer's Role In Society?

[Rakhmetov]

I mean the artistic writer of poetry and prose fiction--- what should be his/her role in our society?

James Joyce felt he should be apolitical and disengage from the politics of his nation and go into exile. Do you agree with this stance? Is it moral or ethical????

I think it is an abomination to disengage yourself from the political battles brewing around you. The artist should sink his intellectual fangs into the carotid artery of the state machine and help to destroy it.

[Old Man Diogenes]

I mean the artistic writer of poetry and prose fiction--- what should be his/her role in our society?

James Joyce felt he should be apolitical and disengage from the politics of his nation and go into exile. Do you agree with this stance? Is it moral or ethical????

I think it is an abomination to disengage yourself from the political battles brewing around you. The artist should sink his intellectual fangs into the carotid artery of the state machine and help to destroy it.

It depends upon the artist, though I generally find that no artist that has been involved in revolutionary politics, using someone like Orwell or Auden as an example, has been involved to the point where it compromises his or her art. In my opinion, I would say any artist, writers and poets included, have to be on the side of truth and freedom in all it's forms (expression, thought, etc.) otherwise they have nothing really worthwhile to say.

[Tommy4ever]

An artist should make art. It can deal with politics or it can deal with other aspects of the human condition. I see no need for them to focus soley on politics nor any need to ignore it.

[OhYesIdid]

writers and poets included, has to be on the side of truth and freedom in all it's forms.

Get that on a fucking frame and hang it where all lazy pothead liberal arts majors cannot avoid it, for the love of shit.
I'm currently reading José Martí, and he talks strongly against detached pure-artism, he says something to the effect of: "Truth is talent dignified". The artist should be an agitator and an agent of dissent, especially the writer, for he deals with thoughts in a much more direct manner. Art for art's sake is sterile and pointless; dissent for dissent's sake can do nothing but good.

I think it was Brecht who said: "to spend our talent and time describing the beauty of a tree is a crime almost as horrible as all the other atrocities artists should spend time and talent denouncing"

[thesadmafioso]

The artistic branch of the intelligentsia should serve the purpose of examining and aiding in the effort of revolution. Of course they may do so in whichever manner they prefer to do so in, so long as it helps to strengthen the breadth of proletariat culture. Combating the hegemony of bourgeois culture is a cause to be taken up by any and every able minded writer, a desire for apathy is no excuse for inaction on this front.

[Blackburn]

I think it was Brecht who said: "to spend our talent and time describing the beauty of a tree is a crime almost as horrible as all the other atrocities artists should spend time and talent denouncing"

I like it!

:laugh:

Most artists I know are sell outs.

[x359594]

Is it useful to art to prescribe what a writer should write about? Or how a writer should write? I don't think so. Instead, audiences should subject art to criticism and let the artist respond however she thinks appropriate.

Also note that art exceeds the intentions of its maker, so that Joyce for example ended up engaging the politics of the Western world in virtually all his novels and his single play.

[OhYesIdid]

Also note that art exceeds the intentions of its maker,


What, really? (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/index.htm)
:tt2: (I find this essay funny because of how much of a pure-art wanker Wilde could sometimes be, yet even his stories were really pieces of social critique)

I do, however, think it is useful to demand compromise, subvertion, and incitation from our artists. As strange as it sounds, I believe the revolutionary left should direct artists towards innovation, as all innovation is, necessairly, a subvertion and a rebellion against established froms.

[Sixiang]

I mean the artistic writer of poetry and prose fiction--- what should be his/her role in our society?
Under proletarian-socialist society, the role of the artist should be to promote and advance proletarian ideals in art. That is: revolution, progress, study, and so forth.


James Joyce felt he should be apolitical and disengage from the politics of his nation and go into exile. Do you agree with this stance? Is it moral or ethical????
No man is an island. You cannot completely disengage from society. Even if you try to avoid writing about society, your art is the product of the society that you came from and lived in. And as such, your art will undoubtedly reflect your or other people's sentiments about society.


I think it is an abomination to disengage yourself from the political battles brewing around you. The artist should sink his intellectual fangs into the carotid artery of the state machine and help to destroy it.
While I think that there should be artists involved in social criticism and politics, I also think that there is still beauty and artistic value and all that jazz in writing about nature and other aspects of the universe. And there are artists who deal with practically everything out there.


An artist should make art. It can deal with politics or it can deal with other aspects of the human condition. I see no need for them to focus soley on politics nor any need to ignore it.
Pretty much this is what I mean.

[Fawkes]

What, really? (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/index.htm)
As strange as it sounds, I believe the revolutionary left should direct artists towards innovation, as all innovation is, necessairly, a subvertion and a rebellion against established froms.

You seem to be drawing some unusual distinction between the "revolutionary left" as this abstract concept and "artists" as individuals, forgetting that there aren't these mutually exclusive groups and that the revolutionary left itself is a grouping of people, many of them artists. I pretty much agree with what x#s and Tommy4ever said. Artists shouldn't be authoritatively directed to make work in a particular way by anyone. Artistic innovation tends to precede and lay the groundworks for revolutionary sentiments among the broader population, not the other way around. Artists should make whatever they want -- progressive things will be accepted, reactionary ones will be rejected. Also, it's important for it to be noted that one need not write The Jungle in order to create something political. "Politics" is the way we structure our lives, how power intersects, and the manner in which our actions and relationships are manifested. I get much more enjoyment out of listening to a very personal yet political song like "Mind's Playing Tricks on Me" than some buzzword-filled Immortal Technique or Rage Against the Machine song.

Also, if somebody thinks they're making art "for art's sake", let em, who cares. They are still a product of their environment and subsequently their work will contain some kind of social commentary, whether they recognize it as such or not.

[Decolonize The Left]

I mean the artistic writer of poetry and prose fiction--- what should be his/her role in our society?

Whatever role they choose to carve out for themselves, of course.
Some writers may wish to write children's stories, totally apolitical and nonsensical; others historical romances, with long-winded scenes; others political commentary and polemics; others poems for a lost loved one.

There are no prescribed roles for artists.


James Joyce felt he should be apolitical and disengage from the politics of his nation and go into exile. Do you agree with this stance? Is it moral or ethical????

That was Joyce's stance and his own. I cannot fault him for it just as I can't fault many great writers for being alcoholics or heroin addicts. His "stance" isn't a political one really, it's a personal choice which he made in order to continue his work, most likely because he felt he had to.


I think it is an abomination to disengage yourself from the political battles brewing around you. The artist should sink his intellectual fangs into the carotid artery of the state machine and help to destroy it.

A radical leftist artist will certainly do that. A reactionary artist may not.

- August

[Minima]

http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/kirill-medvedev-literature-will-be-scrutinised/

"In culture, the new sincerity emerged in reaction to the brain-twisting bankruptcy and intellectualism of postmodernism, and, on the other hand, to the hang-ups of (post-)Soviet consciousness. At some point, direct statement and an appeal to biographical experience as a zone of authenticity were the weapons used to smash at least two discourses—the crudely ideologized discourse of Sovietness and the ascetic, incorporeal, cultish discourse of the underground. Nowadays, the trend towards “sincerity,” “emotionalism,” and “direct statement” (with their appeals to biography, etc.) becomes ever-more reactionary."

[Rakhmetov]

I was reading Don Delillo (author of Libra, a classic novel of the JFK assassination and his other works White Noise and Underworld and Mao II) and he said this:

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence. The writer is the man or woman who automatically takes a stance against his or her government. There are so many temptations for American writers to become part of the system and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist. American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

--Don DeLillo, from the 1988 interview with Ann Arensberg

Thoughts?

[Orange Juche]

I would argue, as a writer, this:

Most professions have a role in society and would not cease to exist in a post-capitalist society. Writing, and the production of art, has a role that I believes needs to always be continued - and I don't believe that merely reducing the artist to "revolutionary" work does any service, but a disservice.

As humans, we have imaginations, and need at times to explore recreation for the sake of joy and happiness that we may gain a sense of calm that we will not get elsewhere. Making art only "revolutionary" will, in fact, kill art.

A writer's role should be the same, in my opinion, as it has been - a force of recreation and relaxation for the masses. It could deal with revolutionary ideas, certainly, but could be anywhere from a sci-fi novel to a collection of romance short stories - whatever people enjoy. This would help to serve the emotional and (secular) "spiritual" needs of the people.

If you make everything in society about the revolution, a rather dreadful and dull society it becomes. Humans have the need to express their imagination, they have the need to share it and intake it, let them do it. As a writer, I will say that it is more work than any job I've ever done (100 hours a week, with potentially no pay) and should be considered a profession in and of itself.

There's more to the revolution than the revolution itself - it's about liberating ourselves from the constraints of hierarchical oppression. Anything that serves our emotional and recreational needs as humans I would say is a part of this, regardless of the "topic" of the art. To shove aside non-revolutionary art is culturally oppressive nonsense.

I'd say the same goes for professional sports teams, amongst other recreational professions.

[Rusty Shackleford]

to write!

[Jimmie Higgins]

to write!Yup. If people want to see more political and insightful art being produced, only one thing radicals can do will accomplish this task: helping to radicalize more people*. The goal of the artist has to be to represent the world as they see it - in non-revolutionary times this means that most people are going to be influenced by the dominant ideas in society. Having the "right" ideas empirically or the "right" ideas from a working class perspective will not necessarily produce more great art - it might produce some good propaganda or essays or whatnot, but the good ideas don't automatically make art, art.

The great political and socially-involved art of the past depended not on the will or ideas of the artist alone, but on the existance of real movements of workers that were, in practice, challenging the dominant capitalist (or even feudal) ideas of the world. On practical example is Impressionism and modernism in general. Before impressionism, artists in France had to go to the official school and learn to paint basically portraits of aristocrats and work contracted from the church/government. The rising bourgeois at first just wanted to emulate the aristocrats and also wanted portraits, but as their hegemony in society grew, they created a space for artists to sell their pre-made works through independant galleries and so on. This allowed artists to paint landscapes and eventually abstract and conceptual pieces rather than work directly contracted by patrons.

People like Mark Twain gained insight through living through the revolutionary upheaval of the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction and then the early years of US Industrial imperialism. Oscar Wilde lived at a time when the conventional ideas of the position of elites was in flux and this helped him become one of the greatest satirists of the upper class ever. Brecht produced plays that were performed by revolutionary workers! Steinbeck was paid by newspapers to go to migrant camps and write news stories.

IMO artists should reflect the world they are living in. Radical situations will produce radical works, not the other way around, but to be dialectical about it, being a radical does help people to see deeper into the working of society and how people interact with the circumstances they belong in, so being a radical I think can help someone's art become more profound and insightful, but it isn't necessary to be a radical to produce interesting art - I think it probably helps though.


*Actually, another thing we can do as radicals to help produce better art that reflects working class ideas is by helping to concretely make more space for new artists from working class backgrounds. Some kind of art-funding reform could help this as it did in the past, winning reforms to schools which allow more art education better tools to be available to more students or helping more people to gain access to higher education would all create more potential for more art with interesting insights.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

The Red Museum (http://theorangepress.com/publications/theredmuseum.html):

[A few years before the French Revolution an anonymous critic warned]:


If one were to tell those few who own everything, ‘Keep the artist busy, and pay him well; for, with the slightest parcel of this same skill with which he brings canvas or stone to life he might, if he so wished, find infallible ways to enrich himself at your expense.’Or even better, find ways to not let you enrich yourself at his own. Those of us who’ve taught in the jails and the community colleges know the students and the bloods think of writing as a trap—which it is, it all depends on who gets caught and who does the catching. The author of the Late Classical treatise On the Sublime knew, too, art was a trap, he said to hide your meaning in the presence of the tyrant. [...] Linear clarity: that was, and, is the language of the tyrant, and we're in the presence of a tyrant now, The fussy Mammon, that pretends to be a tame pet now, and so devours us in our sleep. Learn from Rabelais, Dante, Catullus, Joyce: mix up High and Low, polite and rude, truth and lies, the teacher and the taught. Speak up and down and sideways, to the educated and the bums, the educated bums, ackiespeak, slang, all the instruments of joy that skillful numbers can employ. [...]  Blur the distinction between art as a form of work and work as a form of art, between the artist, the artisan and the technician.[...] Your work will never be merely work on products but always, at the same time, work on the means of production. [Benjamin]. Write dirty like you fight dirty; write like you’ve got a shiv or a shank up your sleeve. 

The artist [...] knows a few things about primitive means of production and primitive systems of distribution, too. [...] He knows the Luddites weren’t losers whining about machines, they were workers who smashed machines when the boss wouldn’t share, like that abstract expressionist whose paintings were painted to fall apart as soon as the collector’s check had cleared. 

[...] Technique isn't doing what the machine wants, it's making the machine do what you want; it’s understanding what the tools can do instead of thinking what the “Creative Class” thinks you should think they do. [...]Art was promoted by business and politics? That's your problem.

So the artist is a Luddite. He wants to seize control of the means of production for himself and for others, and in the process he discovers that to seize control he’s going to have to wrest control, hiding in the cloister and seizing it for himself alone isn’t going to cut it; telling others to seize it for him isn’t going to cut it either; or claiming History’s going to take control for him. And so he joins the ranks of the oppressors and the oppressed, the self-hating capitalist, the cybermuzhik in his bast Weejuns. [...]

At the tail end of the Nineteenth Century a group known as the People’s Will was trying to organize the workers of Saint Petersburg. The workers weren’t impressed. Finally, one of them told the organizers,


I listen to you and all the time I have the feeling that you want to get us mad. We want you to give us the facts, and when we know everything and the time comes to get mad, we will get mad ourselves.One day a grizzled old museum visitor told me,


I hear you lecture and I have the feeling that you want to sell me something: Beauty, revolution, the joys of being rich. Give me the facts, and when the time comes to produce or to consume—the time when I decide what to produce, how to consume—I’ll make my own decisions, thank you.There’s really not much need to get folks mad these days; just tell them what they’re mad about.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/://i226.photobucket.com/albums/dd258/TheOrangePress/TheRedMuseum/KMSaid.jpg

[blake 3:17]

The artist should be an agitator and an agent of dissent, especially the writer, for he deals with thoughts in a much more direct manner. Art for art's sake is sterile and pointless; dissent for dissent's sake can do nothing but good.

Those are two too much.

[CornetJoyce]

Also note that art exceeds the intentions of its maker, so that Joyce for example ended up engaging the politics of the Western world in virtually all his novels and his single play.

His disciple Beckett declared that he preferred France at war to Ireland at peace. But France lost the war and he found himself in the Resistance, the vicissitudes of which are explored in Godot.

[ZeroNowhere]

I mean the artistic writer of poetry and prose fiction--- what should be his/her role in our society?
Write morally, but not didactically.

The problem with pure aestheticism is that it abstracts aesthetics from life and places it within its own little corner, so that, as Glenn Gould commented, "I do try as best I can to make only moral judgments and not aesthetic ones". Didacticism, on the other side, reproduces this separation and crudely imports factors of the carefully demarcated 'life' area in the hope that by throwing enough of them at art from the outside they will stick at some point. It tries to be moral art without considering the moral nature of art, imports external prejudices concerning morality into art, and hence ornaments art with platitudes to emasculate it. In some sense I could be said to support art for art's sake, on the other hand my conception of art differs from that of most people who would use the phrase. Art is only a part of life's integrated whole when it is itself autonomous; the less art is adulterated, the more it can play its own role.


I get much more enjoyment out of listening to a very personal yet political song like "Mind's Playing Tricks on Me" than some buzzword-filled Immortal Technique or Rage Against the Machine song.I don't disagree with the general sentiment here. I really don't mind people singing about the world in which they live in, so long as it's a form of expression rather than the kind of things which fit into the latter category which you bring up. The problems often arise when artists, rather than expressing themselves personally, make art with the aim of being 'agitators' or fulfilling their 'social role' at the front of their mind. It's no real surprise that sentimentalism, cheap plot devices, false depth and kitsch run rampant in most didactic and allegorical literature. Sometimes one tends to think that most 'LEFTIST AGITATOR' artists more or less make art in the same way as the mainstream, profit-oriented artists whom they oft despise, with the difference being that instead of writing for some dumbed-down image of 'the masses' (people tend to look like the masses when looked down from above, and these kinds of art tend to involve the artist-audience hierarchy in its most pronounced form; this should be clear with a brief look through a certain speech in Atlas Shrugged, for example), they write for a similar image of the 'proletariat', or, hell, the 'poor masses'.

[black magick hustla]

there is no role for the writer that isn't just writing. adorno sucks

[RED DAVE]

The artistic branch of the intelligentsia should serve the purpose of examining and aiding in the effort of revolution. Of course they may do so in whichever manner they prefer to do so in, so long as it helps to strengthen the breadth of proletariat culture. Combating the hegemony of bourgeois culture is a cause to be taken up by any and every able minded writer, a desire for apathy is no excuse for inaction on this front.And what are you going to do with an artist who doesn't care to follow your program?

Same old stalinist shit about art. I wonder how many Russian artists were murdered because of this crap?

RED DAVE

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

"Combating the hegemony of bourgeois culture is a cause to be taken up by any and every able minded writer,"I wonder how many Russian artists were murdered because of this crap?


Quite a few before 1917...

(Does the name Alexander Pushkin light your samovar?)

[RED DAVE]

The artistic branch of the intelligentsia should serve the purpose of examining and aiding in the effort of revolution. Of course they may do so in whichever manner they prefer to do so in, so long as it helps to strengthen the breadth of proletariat culture. Combating the hegemony of bourgeois culture is a cause to be taken up by any and every able minded writer, a desire for apathy is no excuse for inaction on this front.
And what are you going to do with an artist who doesn't care to follow your program?

Same old stalinist shit about art. I wonder how many Russian artists were murdered because of this crap?
Quite a few before 1917...

(Does the name Alexander Pushkin light your samovar?)Sure, but Pushkin was killed in a duel.


Later, Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova, whom he married in 1831, became regulars of court society. When the Tsar gave Pushkin the lowest court title, the poet became enraged: he felt this occurred not only so that his wife, who had many admirers—including the Tsar himself—could properly attend court balls, but also to humiliate him. In 1837, falling into greater and greater debt amidst rumors that his wife had started conducting a scandalous affair, Pushkin challenged her alleged lover, his brother in-law Georges d'Anthès, to a duel which left both men injured, Pushkin mortally. He died two days later.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pushkin#Life_and_career

I'm talking about the results of a stalinist literary theory. What the fuck are you talking about?

RED DAVE

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

What the fuck are you talking about?

RED DAVE
You mean "which fuck am I talking about?" The lefty artfucks who practice what the great Marxist art critic Max Raphael called "double entry bookkeeping:" "Culture" is where the radbrats can truly "express" their inner reactionary core.

BTW - It's widely understood by those who have a basic knowledge of Russian cultural history that Pushkin was most likely set up for murder; and that if he hadn't been simply bumped off this way the regime you so admire for its "freedom of expression" would have found another way to silence him. Wanna hand me some more "facts" from Wikipedia?

[RED DAVE]

You mean "which fuck am I talking about?" The lefty artfucks who practice what the great Marxist art critic Max Raphael called "double entry bookkeeping:" "Culture" is where the radbrats can truly "express" their inner reactionary core.You know that for sure that that's what culture is?


BTW - It's widely understood by those who have a basic knowledge of Russian cultural history that Pushkin was most likely set up for murder; and that if he hadn't been simply bumped off this way the regime you so admire for its "freedom of expression" would have found another way to silence him. Wanna hand me some more "facts" from Wikipedia?BTW - Having studied Russian cultural history, I'm aware of that. And I suggest that before you run your mouth about what regimes I "admire" and what I think is "freedom of expression" you do a little research.

What I "wanna" hand you is a book or two on Stalinist censorship of arts, which sometimes could get a bit extreme. The following artists, just for openers, were executed:

• Osip Mandelstam
• Boris Pilnyak
• Vsevolod Meyerhold
• Titsian Tabidze

Unless, of course, you think they were spies, terrorists or, even worse, Trotskyists!.

(This list is from the dreaded wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge)

Thirteen Jewish poets shot in 1952. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Murdered_Poets)

RED DAVE

[Vanguard1917]

[T]his was and is the mission of poetry and fiction: to put questions, to raise problems in the form of new men and new fates of men. The concrete answers that naturally are given by poetic works frequently have – seen from this distance – an arbitrary character in bourgeois literature. They may even throw the actual poetic problem into confusion. Goethe very soon saw this himself with Werther. Only a few years later he made Werther exhort the reader in a poem: “Be a man and don’t follow me.”

Ibsen quite deliberately considered questioning the task of the poet and declined, on principle, any obligation to answer his questions. Chekhov made a definitive statement about this whole matter when he drew a sharp distinction between “the solution of a question and the correct putting of the question. Only the last is required of the artist. In Anna Karenina and Onegin not a single question is solved yet these works satisfy us fully only because all questions are put in them correctly.”

This insight is particularly important for a judgment of Dostoevsky for many – even most – of his political and social answers are false, have nothing to do with present-day reality or with the strivings of the best today. They were obsolete, even reactionary, when they were pronounced.

Still, Dostoevsky is a writer of world eminence. For he knew how during a crisis of his country and the whole human race, to put questions in an imaginatively decisive sense. He created men whose destiny and inner life, whose conflicts and interrelations with other characters, whose attraction and rejection of men and ideas illuminated all the deepest questions of that age, sooner, more deeply, and more widely than in average life itself. This imaginative anticipation of the spiritual and moral development of the civilized world assured the powerful and lasting effect of Dostoevsky’s works. These works have become even more topical and more fresh as time goes on.


- Georg Lukacs

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1949/dostoyevsky.htm

[Revolutionary_Change]

I think before the revolution an artist should fight for the overthrow of the capitalists and liberation of humanity: not because they are an artist but because they are human. We should each be doing whatever we can to aid and further the revolutionary cause regardless of our profession. Artist actions and choices should be motivated by revolutionary solidarity not party dictates.

After the revolution I have to agree with Raoul Vaneigem of the Situationists: "There are no more artists since we've all become artists. Our next work of art is the construction of a full-blooded life"
I don't think a post revolutionary society has much need for people working soley in the arts, as such a society should emphasize the creative potential of all rather than a select group.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

The following artists, just for openers, were executed:

• Osip Mandelstam


RED DAVE
Mandelshtam was not executed, he died in a labor camp, probably of pneumonia, after somehow surviving the dissemination of his "Death Sentence Poem," which referred to Stalin as the "Butcher from Georgia." Hardly my idea of a non-engaged poet, bless his great soul.

My point (deep breath) was, you can't put everybody who feels an artist has a social responsibility in the same camp as Andrei Zhdanov, especially considering the number of "liberal" or "progressive" artists who got blindsided by Zhdanovism in the 'thirties. Do that, and you leave no room between the liberal ideal of a non-engaged poet, and one of Stalin's flunkies. It's an old game, and it's played a lot in the liberal press, witness for instance the way Shostakovich was turned into a crypto-capitalist by a faked biography.

Give Mandelshtam his due: Just like Pushkin he died for standing up to a tyrant, not just because he wrote pretty stuff. I'd expect no less from either.

[heirofstalin]

role of writers and all other artists is to alleviate the daily onslaught of cancerous banal information fed to us from all corners of society.
In a world where everybody lives for others, and forced to work and be something their not.
Its up to poets and other artists to set an example to the rest of us what the human spirit can accomplish and what levels of beauty it can achieve.