Jun 15, 2022 04:29 AM
(This post was last modified: Jun 15, 2022 09:47 PM by C C.)
https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/is-...-political
EXCERPTS: . . . In a culture without effective rituals for processing everything that lies beyond the ethical, the best ersatz we have is in our encounter with art. But art, too, now risks going the way of ritual, as increasingly the social-media mentality occludes from view any awareness or memory of what it is art at its most exalted might be expected to do for us. Art is going the way of politics, which is to say that both art and politics are becoming fandoms, where groups of people invest themselves affectively and publicly in IP’s or brands or parties that appear to them to follow the right set of rules.
There is a non-stop firehose of self-infantilizing testimonia on Twitter, of course, but one recent intervention, by an operation calling itself “Pop Detective”, still managed to shock me:
No, alas, in fact he is simply responding to, and actively shaping, the prevailing aesthetic sensibility of our age, where philistines crowd out properly critical voices with their constant “discourse” about what their beloved Star Wars and Marvel characters are up to, as if there were some prior agreement that these characters could only be moral exemplars rather than, say, tragic figures who teach us about the complexity of life through their moral blind-spots rather than through their rectitude.
This reigning philistinism sends anyone who cares about art back into the past, excavating and unearthing art-works with real moral depth to them, which is to say art-works that were not afraid to depict moral ambiguity and moral transgression. This backward-looking stance can also come across as conservative, or even reactionary...
[...] The current generation of Anglo-American philosophers never had enough invested in the aesthetic to fully grasp what is at risk of being lost when the aesthetic is subordinated to the political. This is why so many philosophers end up echoing the stunning philistinism of Pop Detective, without any real awareness that there is a whole stratum of human experience they are leaving unsounded.
It is not as if the left is intrinsically unable to engage with this level of experience. Indeed the very fact that the current progressive social-media-academic complex is unable to engage with it is in itself cause to wonder about its continuity with earlier generations of left-wing thinkers...
[...] For the moment —and regrettably, in my view— the dissident right, or the post-left, or however you wish to put it, is somewhat better at engaging with culture, and has somewhat more successfully carried the torch of Adornonian criticism into our philistine age. I hope to see this change in the coming years, and when it does change I expect that it will be harder to mistake those of us who refuse to join fandoms of any sort for “conservatives”. There is a stratum of the human that is deeper than politics, and it is the calling of aesthetic education to help others to access it... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: . . . In a culture without effective rituals for processing everything that lies beyond the ethical, the best ersatz we have is in our encounter with art. But art, too, now risks going the way of ritual, as increasingly the social-media mentality occludes from view any awareness or memory of what it is art at its most exalted might be expected to do for us. Art is going the way of politics, which is to say that both art and politics are becoming fandoms, where groups of people invest themselves affectively and publicly in IP’s or brands or parties that appear to them to follow the right set of rules.
There is a non-stop firehose of self-infantilizing testimonia on Twitter, of course, but one recent intervention, by an operation calling itself “Pop Detective”, still managed to shock me:
"Sex scene discourse is back again, and once again missing the point. The question isn’t should sex be portrayed (yes), the question is how is sex portrayed? Is it consensual? Is it coercive? What are the power dynamics? Is it mutually satisfying? Is everyone having a great time?"
What is this? What does this person think movies are? Does he think movies that depict murders are snuff films? Are government-issue educational shorts of the sort we used to have to watch in junior-high sex-ed the only genre to which the author of this strange tweet has ever been exposed?No, alas, in fact he is simply responding to, and actively shaping, the prevailing aesthetic sensibility of our age, where philistines crowd out properly critical voices with their constant “discourse” about what their beloved Star Wars and Marvel characters are up to, as if there were some prior agreement that these characters could only be moral exemplars rather than, say, tragic figures who teach us about the complexity of life through their moral blind-spots rather than through their rectitude.
This reigning philistinism sends anyone who cares about art back into the past, excavating and unearthing art-works with real moral depth to them, which is to say art-works that were not afraid to depict moral ambiguity and moral transgression. This backward-looking stance can also come across as conservative, or even reactionary...
[...] The current generation of Anglo-American philosophers never had enough invested in the aesthetic to fully grasp what is at risk of being lost when the aesthetic is subordinated to the political. This is why so many philosophers end up echoing the stunning philistinism of Pop Detective, without any real awareness that there is a whole stratum of human experience they are leaving unsounded.
It is not as if the left is intrinsically unable to engage with this level of experience. Indeed the very fact that the current progressive social-media-academic complex is unable to engage with it is in itself cause to wonder about its continuity with earlier generations of left-wing thinkers...
[...] For the moment —and regrettably, in my view— the dissident right, or the post-left, or however you wish to put it, is somewhat better at engaging with culture, and has somewhat more successfully carried the torch of Adornonian criticism into our philistine age. I hope to see this change in the coming years, and when it does change I expect that it will be harder to mistake those of us who refuse to join fandoms of any sort for “conservatives”. There is a stratum of the human that is deeper than politics, and it is the calling of aesthetic education to help others to access it... (MORE - missing details)
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