Re: [Marxism] When Facebook Isn't Fun, or..

[Ruthless Critic of All that Exists <ok.president+nbsy@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 7:04 AM, Ian Pace <ian@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> This is something of a devil's advocate's point: whilst in this particular
> case I can absolutely see the point in preserving in such music, more widely
> might some music be better left to die a natural death? The instinct to
> preserve historical music, at least in the West, only dates from the
> mid-19th century (with that era's strong historicising tendencies). In the
> classical world, I see the tendency towards preservation (and continuous
> digging up of obscure works and composers from past eras) as tied in with
> idealisation of hideously unjust former times. Presentation and appreciation
> of the operas of the French baroque, and styles of performance which
> emphasise the rigid hierarchical structures contained within the music, has
> undoubtedly something to do with a nostalgia for the supposed splendour of
> the absolutist feudal system of the time; similarly the mixture of
> exoticism, mysticism, canned sensuousness and de-subjectivisation in
> Tchaikovsky mirrors (and quite consciously so) the whole aura created around
> the Tsarist monarchy (and for this very reason it was despised by early
> musical revolutionaries in the Leninist era, though in the Stalin/Zhdanov
> times that music which had become part of a nationalistic construction of
> 'tradition', including most of the romantics, became presented as some type
> of 'workers' music'). I wouldn't be unhappy to see much of this archaic
> music die away.

I disagree.... Notice what Trotsky (quite brilliantly) points out
about why art produced even under conditions characterized by highly
oppressive social relations can nevertheless be valuable:

"One cannot approach art as one can politics, not because artistic
creation is a religious rite or something mystical, as somebody here
ironically said, but because it has its own laws of development, and
above all because in artistic creation an enormous role is played by
subconscious processes – slower, more idle and less subjected to
management and guidance, just because they are subconscious.

"It has been said here that those writings of Pilnyak’s which are
closer to Communism are feebler than those which are politically
further away from us. What is the explanation? Why, just this, that on
the rationalistic plane Pilnyak is ahead of himself as an artist. To
consciously swing himself round on his own axis even only a few
degrees is a very difficult task for an artist, often connected with a
profound, sometimes fatal crisis. And what we are considering is not
an individual or group change in creative endeavour, but such a change
on the class, social scale.

"This is a long and very complicated process. When we speak of
proletarian literature not in the sense of particular more or less
successful verses or stories, but in the incomparably more weighty
sense in which we speak of bourgeois literature, we have no right to
forget for one moment the extraordinary cultural backwardness of the
overwhelming majority of the proletariat.

"Art is created on the basis of a continual everyday, cultural,
ideological inter-relationship between a class and its artists.
Between the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie and their artists there was
no split in daily life. The artists lived, and still live, in a
bourgeois milieu, breathing the air of bourgeois salons, they received
and are receiving hypodermic inspirations from their class. This
nourishes the subconscious processes of their creativity.

"Does the proletariat of today offer such a cultural-ideological
milieu, in which the new artist may obtain, without leaving it in his
day-to-day existence, all the inspiration he needs while at the same
time mastering the procedures of his craft? No, the working masses are
culturally extremely backward; the illiteracy or low level of literacy
of the majority of the workers presents in itself a very great
obstacle to this."

Leon Trotsky, in  "Class and Art"

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