In the LRB, Terry Eagleton writes about how Marx viewed art: 'art
is a prototype of what it is to live well...the point is not to
substitute art for life, but to to convert life into art'. This seems to me to relate very much to what Bristol Diving School artists - including you, Ben - may be trying to do. 'If artistic work is a scandal to the status quo, it is not because it champions the proletariat but because to live abundantly in this way isn't possible under capitalism. Art prefigures a future in which human energies can exist simply for their own delight. Where art was, there shall humanity be.'
Eagleton suggests that Marx sees art and artists almost providing a model of how socialism will be.
'Poetry that merely revels in its own soundscape is a type of formalism, and so for Marx is the commodity. Its value lies not in its material qualities but in its formal exchange with other such products. Despite their seductive ways, commodities are abstract, fleshless things, and it is the task of socialism to restore to them their material bodies. Yet Marx also sees commodities as fetishes that exert material power over human beings. Their interactions in the marketplace can put men and women out of work or consign them to starvation wages. So the commodity is at once too formal and too material, and in this it resembles a botched work of art. Art is made of material stuff, but it is material shaped into meaningful form. It reveals a unity of form and content that is lacking in the capitalist marketplace. In this sense, Marx's work belongs to an aesthetic critique of capitalism running from Schiller and John Ruskin to William Morris and Herbert Marcuse.
Unlike most realists, Marx does not see art as precious because it reflects reality. On the contrary, it is most relevant to humanity when it is an end in itself. Art is a critique of instrumental reason. John Milton sold Paradise Lost to a publisher for five pounds, but he produced it 'for the same reason that a silkworm produces silk. It was an activity wholly natural to him.' In its free, harmonious expression of human powers, art is a prototype of what it is to live well. It is radical not so much because of what it says as because of what it is. It is an image of non-alienated labour in a world in which men and women fail to recognise themselves in what they create.
The aesthete, then, possesses more of the truth than the political left generally imagines. The point is not to substitute art for life, but to convert life into art. Living like a work of art means fully realising one's capacities - this is Marx's ethics. It is also the basis of his politics: socialism is whatever set of institutional arrangements would allow this to happen to the greatest extent. If artistic work is a scandal to the status quo, it is not because it champions the proletariat but because to live abundantly in this way isn't possible under capitalism. Art prefigures a future in which human energies can exist simply for their own delight. Where art was, there shall humanity be.
Eagleton doesn't allow us to idealise these artistic ways of living, however: he criticises Marx's utopian view of human nature as lived by artists, asserting that while Marx saw a symmetry and wholeness in art, this has been shown to be false by postmodern culture.
Self-realisation, however, must be more than individual, which is the reason Marx adds a crucial rider to this humanist case. You must realise your powers reciprocally, through the equal self expression of others. Or, as The Communist Manifesto puts it, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. This is the way he converts an essentially aristocratic ethic into communism. Oscar Wilde would do much the same in his essay 'The Soul of Man under Socialism', in which layabouts like himself who don't have to work anticipate a socialist order in which this will be true of everybody. In his belief that the political goal is to get rid of labour rather than make it creative, Wilde is closer to Marx than William Morris is, though Morris was a Marxist and Wilde was not.
There are difficulties with the self-realisation thesis, as there are with any form of ethics. It seems to assume that human powers are positive in themselves, and the only problem is that some of them are being blocked. But the urge to shoot down schoolchildren should be restrained whatever the harm to your creativity. The idea also implies that our various capabilities are in harmony with one another, which is far from true. Like postmodern culture, it errs in seeing diversity as inherently valuable. But why should a life rich in a variety of impulses be more worthwhile than one devoted to a single activity? Emma Raducanu may have led a fuller life if she had played less tennis, but people have good reason to envy her all the same.
Marx never wrote a book on aesthetics. Instead, he put literary works to compelling use, eroding the borders between the artistic, political and economic. In doing so, he held out against the growing division of intellectual labour, just as he lamented the effects of the division of labour in industrial society. In this, as in his ethics, he remained captive to an ideal of wholeness inherited from his classical education, one that no longer has the force it did. It is ironic that this unflagging political agitator, a man who in a Brechtian phrase was forced to change countries more often than his shoes, should have found conflict and contradiction in history but symmetry and integrity in art. Only with the advent of modernism and the avant-garde did the conflicts of history erupt in art. There is, however, a minute detail in one of Marx's letters that might be read as foretelling this cultural moment. He has heard of an Arabic translator called Da-Da, he tells Engels, and thinks he might use the name in the title of one of his pamphlets. He didn't, in fact, leaving the two syllables to be seized on later by others.'
(Terry Eagleton, incidentally, was highly thought of in my left-wing circles in Oxford in the 70's, his Marxist literary criticism lectures being very popular among a number of my friends who were reading English.)
¡Que haya luz! Kerenza ha yeghes da! Dad/Grandpa/Andrew x