RADICAL ART AND THE QUESTION OF FREEDOM OF INQUIRY by Kirby Olson

Foto von Kilian Seiler auf Unsplash

The notion of radical art bifurcates shortly after the great democratic revolutions at the end of the 18th century.  Radical artists no longer painted propaganda for church and state, no longer did art mean the painting of flattering portraits of the rich; instead it meant on the one hand painting and drawing which mobilized the consciousness of the poor towards revolt, and on the other it meant pure research into the nature of art and the human experience without regard to any external source of appraisal of standard of values.  This bifurcation continues to this day and can be seen in nearly every artist and critic – but can perhaps be summarized in the artistic mode of difference between Picasso’s Guernica, which expressed outrage over the fascist destruction of a small Spanish city; and his pure research into forms in his Cubist period.

Not every artist has had the luxury to explore his conscience as Picasso had.  Under state socialism, the purely social value of an art work has been given primary importance.  Any other artistic value was not only discredited, but annihilated, often along with the artist.  Artists in democracies can continue to contest formal art, and to explore as they wish, but once a society becomes autocratic, it’s over.  As the Stalinist general and literary critic Andrei Zhdanov put it before the first Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow, August 17, 1934:
 
“Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of human souls.  What does this mean?  What duties does the title confer upon you?
         In the first place, it means knowing life so as to be able to depict it truthfully in works of art, to depict it not in a dead, scholastic way, not simply as ‘objective reality,’ but to depict reality in its revolutionary development. 
         In addition to this, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic portrayal should be combined with the ideological remolding and education of the working people in the spirit of socialism.  This method in literature and literary criticism is what we call the method of socialist realism.
         Our Soviet literature is not afraid of the charge of being ‘tendentious.’  Yes, Soviet Literature is tendentious, for in an epoch of class struggle there is not and cannot be a literature which is not tendentious, is allegedly nonpolitical” (12-13).
         While state socialism has officially fallen in most of the countries of Europe and Asia, Marxist dogma continues to operate in the American academy, and in the mainstream feminist movement.  The equation of master/slave has simply been changed.  It is now: white heterosexual male/multicultural men and women. Today, Siberia is cultural Siberia.  The dead white male such as Ernest Hemingway is no longer read.  Women authors who don’t support the attempt to reengineer human souls are not published, or are not given support within the Academy. 
         To Stalinists, “pure” writers are considered frivolous.  As George Konrad of Hungary has put it in his foreword to Miklos Haraszti’s The Velvet Prison: Writers Under State Socialism:
         “In state socialism one never talks about the writer’s freedom, only about the writer’s responsibility.  He who talks about freedom is irresponsible” (xii).
         The state has usurped the individual’s freedom to explore his/her world according to conscience.  Max Stirner, an early critic of socialism, wrote in 1834:
         “Communism rightly revolts against the pressure that I experience from individual proprietors; but still more horrible is the might that it puts in the hands of the collectivity” (257).
         Stirner critiques Marx’s notion of class subjectivity, and instead posits the individual’s good:
         “As with the Greeks, there is now a wish to make man a zoon politican, a citizen of the State or political man.  So he ranked for a long time as a ‘citizen of heaven.’  But the Greek fell into ignominy along with his State, the citizen of heaven falls with heaven; we, on the other hand, are not willing to go down along with the People, the nations and nationality, not willing to be merely political men or politicians.  Since the Revolution they have striven to ‘make the people happy,’ and in making the people happy, great, and the like, they make us unhappy.  The people’s good hap is – my mishap” (233).
         Furthermore, Stirner wished to demolish the Cartesian notion of the spiritual subject:
         “Descartes’ dubitare contains the decided statement that only cogitare, thought, mind – is.  A complete break with ‘common’ consciousness, which ascribes reality to irrational things!  Only the rational is, only mind is! This is the principle of modern philosophy, the genuine Christian principle.  Descartes in his own time discriminated the body sharply from the mind, and ‘the spirit ‘tis that builds itself a body’ says Goethe” (85).
         The Hegelian notion that mind is master incenses Stirner, who writes explicitly against any culturally formed notions of identity, against the very idea that we are ‘human beings.’  We are, because we feel.
         “You are indeed more than a Jew, more than a Christian, etc., but you are also more than a human being. Those are all ideas, but you are corporeal” (126).
         There is no idea higher than one’s own corporeal feeling self.  The Christian/Marxist ideal of living for ideas is ridiculed:
         “What, am I in the world to realize ideas?  To do my part by my citizenship, say, toward the realization of the idea ‘State,” or by marriage, as husband and father, to bring the idea of the Family into existence?  What does such a calling concern me?  I live after a calling as little as the flower grows and gives fragrance after a calling” (366).
         To have done not only with God, but also with Marx, is Stirner’s quest.  Stirner sought to go against this spirit of good works measured by community values, and sought instead to reinstall the notion that we should simply squander life as we see fit.
         “Henceforth the question runs, not how one can acquire life, but one can squander, enjoy it; or, not how one is to produce the true self in himself, but how one is to dissolve himself, to live himself out” (320).
         Stirner wishes us to dispense of thought, of the image, in order to dispense of the control of language (346), but realizes that finally we will be beaten: language will ultimately reconquer us, and take us out on our shield.  “That is the very humor of the thing” (358).
         This individualist battle with one’s shadow in literature is ridiculed by the Stalinist Zhdanov, who finds this “spirit” reprehensible in the oeuvre of the Jewish writer Lev Lunts, a member of a group called the Serapion Brothers, and who was censored from the time of his death in 1921 until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Zhdanov cites Lunts scornfully:
         “We have gathered in days of revolutionary, in days of powerful political tension.  ‘He who is not with us is against us’ – we are told from right and left – whom are you with, Serapion Brothers – with the Communists or against the Communists, for the revolution or against the revolution?
         Whom are we with, Serapion Brothers?  We are with the hermit Serapion.
         Too long and painfully has public opinion ruled Russian literature…  We do not want utilitarianism.  We do not write for propaganda.  Art is real, like life itself, and like life itself, it is without purpose and without meaning, it exists because it cannot not exist” (20).
         Silenced by Lenin’s police at the age of 23 for the crime of free thought, Lunt moved to Paris, and died in hospital.  Lunt and his writings fell into the “rubbish bin of history,” as the Marxist phrase would have it for nearly a century.  But three volumes were published in Jerusalem including plays, essays, and stories.  The scythe of right-wing and left-wing canon makers have consistently decapitated the socially irresponsible, and yet a hand will sometimes appear from a collective grave.
         To the ideology of “collective responsibility,” the Stirnerites ask us simply to recognize that pleasure is individual or not at all.  In the universal predicament of living and dying in which we all find ourselves, some theorists from Plato to Simone de Beauvoir have sought to reformulate our desires through a severe control of language and art.  As Stirnerite surrealist Annie LeBrun writes in Vagit-Prop, “le neo-feminisme, comme le socialism totalitaire, participe de la même volunte monstreuse de fabriquer un homme nouveau…
         …Et il est troublante de constater avec quelle continuité, de la lutte du marxisme-léniniste contre ‘l’individualisme petit-bourgeois’ ou contre l’amour préjugé bourgeois’ dans la Chine d’Elisabeth Badinter, c’est la vie sensible qui est traquée sans merci, et, dans cette vie sensible, ce qu’il y a d’irréductible en chacun de nous » (26).
         […neo-feminism, like totalitarian socialism, shares the same monstrous willingness to fabricate a new man…  …and it is troubling to see the continuity, from the Marxist-Leninist battle against ‘petit-bourgeois individualism’ or against petit-bourgeois love in Elisabeth Badinter’s China, that they are always hunting down the affective life without mercy, and in this tactile existence, the irreducible in each of us.]
         The war, then, between individual and irreductible feeling; and the notion that life is logical and primarily language-based – can be traced back as far as one wishes to the watersheds of contemporary thought, from the Marquis de Sade who supported the body and instinct as the only source of value, to the entire surrealist movement, which continues onward today. 
         Against an art committed to putting blinders on the populace, against the notion that the entire world can be steered like a horse to water and made to drink, the communist dissident Miklos Haraszti writes that the price of committed state art is that “we must exclude all art that might suggest that reality is, nonaligned, indifferent, aimless, absurd, intangible, deaf, dumb, or blind.  This taboo is a permanent feature of the cult of commitment.  If, before the advent of state socialism, committed art always had to protest reality, today it must always affirm reality.  The dream of a world in which only positive, life-affirming, and constructively committed art can exist has been realized.  This art neither hates nor worships ‘reality’: it merely denies reality the chance to be mysterious” (38).
         In Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic, he shows the long shadow that Marxist thought has thrown over contemporary communities. Today, in the United States, we face state literary journals, and state coordinators of education, and DEI “coordinators” whose only passion is for censorship. 
         “The everyday world of passions and interests cannot escape the blight of organization, force and hierarchy, if public order and wider civil interest are to prevail.  The appeal to prophecy with a view to abolishing ‘outer bondage’ involves a maximum threat to man’s ‘inner freedom’
         Bureaucratization was the fate of every imaginative impulse; standardization, the destiny of every new vision; uniformity, the outcome of every form-busting work of spirit. This happened to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, to Luther’s ninety-five theses, and was sure to happen to Marx’s Communist Manifesto.  Behind the prophet stands the bureaucrat” (cited in Nelson 162).
         Is there an answer?  In Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism, written shortly before his internment for sodomy, he suggests that the Christian and artistic impulses could be brought together to spell relief from those who claim to represent the masses while torturing individuals in jails for their art and laughter.  Today, it is de-platforming, or throwing professors out of their jobs that is the method of choice. Down the road, it may well be full-blown concentration camps or even extermination camps. Will our colleges become a gulag archipelago across America while our Constitution and literary traditions must pass examination under the lamp of political correctness?  The purest definition of dissent remains within the anarchist perspective.  Allan Antliff writes in his seminal article “Freedom, Individualism, Revolution: Courbet, Zola, Proudhon and Anarchist Artistic Producion,” that “In Proudhon’s system the free exercise of human reason in every social sphere came to the fore as the progressive force in history, a position which led him to argue freedom from all coercion was the necessary prerequisite for realizing a just society.” 
Christ, as anarchist-inspired Oscar Wilde puts it, “…had no scheme for restructuring society.  But the modern world has schemes… it trusts to Socialism and to Science as its methods” (159).  Wilde pushes back against the pushiness of the socialists.  “Individualism … does not try to force man to be good” (156).  He thinks of Socialism as the highest form of meddling or molesting the individual.  “And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them.  Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type” (156).

Bibliography
1. Konrád, George. *The Velvet Prison: Writers Under State Socialism*. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
2. LeBrun, Annie. "Vagit-Prop." *Libération*, 28 June 1983.
3. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. *The Communist Manifesto*. 1848.
4. Stirner, Max. *The Ego and Its Own*. 1844.
5. Weber, Max. *The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism*. Translated by Talcott Parsons, Routledge, 1930.
6. Wilde, Oscar. *The Soul of Man Under Socialism*. 1891.
7. Zhdanov, Andrei. "Speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers." 1934. *On Literature, Music, and Philosophy*, International Publishers, 1950, pp. 12-13.
8. Haraszti, Miklós. *The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism*. Translated by Katalin Landesmann and Stephen Landesmann, Basic Books, 1987.
9. Nelson, Cary. *Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945*. University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
10. Antliff, Allan. "Freedom, Individualism, Revolution: Courbet, Zola, Proudhon and Anarchist Artistic Production." *Journal of Political Ideologies*, vol. 6, no. 2, 2001, pp. 159-177.

Bio

Kirby Olson is a professor at a small state college in upstate New York called SUNY Delhi.  This piece has several quotes from Max Stirner in it. He has published about five books including three on bohemian writers such as Gregory Corso, Andrei Codrescu, and some others, as well as a novel about a misfit trying to find a creative niche. It's called Temping (Black Heron 2006), and a book of poems about New York City called Christmas at Rockefeller Center (WordTech 2015).