affirmative culture

I have already proposed the idea that art can be approached through the framework Marx had developed for the critique of ideology. I argued that role playing games were revealing a specific subjectivity of the contemporary individual and through analysis of this subjectivity a critique of society can be practised. The problem is that this critique of ideology is a critical destruction: for Marx religion was to be destroyed by critique so that it would not be able to comfort people suffering under the given social circumstances and with the abscence of consolation the need for change will rise.

Now I would like to play with another, more affirmative idea of criticism. I will start from Adornos premise that art had a dormant emancipatory potential, a promesse de bonheur. He believed that the harmony and beauty of bourgeois art held a dark mirror to society in which its faults were revealed and a vision of a better world was made possible. In contemporary society for him this was no longer possible - in a world that continually reproduces mass murder, torture and terror the promise of harmony has lost all credibility. Therefore he believed that contemporary culture could only be negative, not affirmative: it could only show society as untrue and broken, but no more show the promise of paradise society could potentially be. Culture industry on the other hand functioned by assimilation to the status quo, to the broken individual such as he has become under the untrue society and even dared to justify this with a recourse to democracy (people are buying, ergo: we are giving them what they want). The question is whether we can find a middle path between this total rejection of the world and complete assimilation to it.

The key is an aesthetic public sphere. The idea has been neglected in favour of the political one, but in Structural transformations Habermas assigned a very important role to a literary public sphere, which was crucial to the formation of a bourgeois public in three ways: 1) it was instrumental in the formation of the fora of the political public sphere like salons; 2) in it the bourgeoisie honed their debating skills; 3) through aesthetic exchange the bourgeoisie formed a specific subjectivity that was the stepping stone for their political activity; The idea I want to defend is that only through the workings of an aesthetic public sphere can art redeem its emancipatory potential. If is to do so it must avoid two pitfalls: assimilation to the existing state of society that makes art perform an ideological function, and a complete isolation from society that while preserving the emancipatory potential, does nothing to realize it. If art is to be a critical force it must go beyond the understanding of it's audience, if it is to have some transformatory potential, it must challenge, it must perturb, it must violate. It is naive to expect that this challenge can be faced by isolated individuals, only by critical reflection on art in a public sphere will they be able to go beyond their current subjectivity.