Affect/Effect

A nice instance of attribution of causality to art is found in Virgil, who comments on the effects of poetic creation thus:

immemor herbarum quos est mirata iuvenca
certantis, quorom stupefactae carmine lynces,
et mutata suos requierunt flumina cursus

Virgil attributes to poetry not only effect on other creatures (cows and lynxes which are enchanted by poetry), thereby proclaiming universality of art, but also causal effects (streams that stop flowing because of poetic force). Of course Virgil, being a son of the enlightened ages, no longer explicitly believed in the immediate causal effects of art, but this mythical origin is still reverberating in his lines. If we read them hyperbolically, we do not come to a satisfactory explanation, after all effecting nature is not a higher degree of aesthetic effect, it is rather qualitatively distinct from effects on a public of reasonable beings.

Art and Lustprinzip

Freud reduces artistic expression to phantasmal realization of desire, akin to that of dreams and daydreams. When looking at the earliest instances of art, that is palaeolithic cave paintings, one must concede some truth value to his theory. These cave paintings often take on the form of phantasmal realisation of desire, they almost exclusively portray animals that were hunted for food or the act of hunting itself. On some walls traces of the impact of spears and arrows can be found, showing that the ritual was a mimesis of hunting, an artwork taking the place of the real object. This is as far as I can agree with Freud, but now I would rather choose to venture on the path of sociology and ask what social consequences these ancient magical practices had.

First of all we must realize that ancient art can not be reduced to the formula of phantasmal realization of desire, although it is one of its defining features. We are dealing with a society living in scarcity, where every working hour not spent rationally can threaten the survival of the community. Looking at cave paintings one realizes that an enormous amount of technical skill was required for such a naturalistic depiction (stylized depictions cropped up only later), hence a substantial amount of working hours had to be taken away from essential activities like gathering food, hunting, building shelter etc. We see that the first manifestation of the separation of material and intellectual production - a social circumstance that for Marx and Engels meant that for the first time social consciousness was more than a direct registering of social praxis - took the form of a magical activity being separated from the neccessities of survival.

What Freud can not explain is why so much effort was put into magical practices if daydreaming could have performed the function of phantasmal realisation of desire quite adequately. The answer is that at the heart of civilization lies a misconception. Cave paintings were not only a fantasy, but a fantasy to which causal effects were ascribed. The only rationale of having a craftsman-artist absent from hunting and gathering in the conditions of material scarcity is that artistic practice has a causal effect on material praxis. By enabling intellectual production to have a certain degree of autonomy from praxis this misconception enabled the birth of civilization.

Let us look at another formula that aims to describe the essence of art: Adorno's promesse du bonheur. The fantasy that found its expression in the first instances of art was not merely one of gratification of immediate practical needs, it entailed a promise and a desire for the world to be formed according to the dictates of reason. The ancient magician claimed to be able to form the world according to human needs through ritual, a desire that is homologous with the desire of enlightenment for the rationalization of the world. The ancient misconception is still at work millennia later in Kant and Hegel, in the stirring of the French revolution, in Marx and in Adorno and in the Universal declaration of human rights. This is the illusion at the core of illusion. While the incidental desires art expresses are multitudinous and can range from love to revolution, from pumpkin pie to a new pair of Adidas, at its core always lies a desire for freedom, with which art transcends the world and offers us a vision of the emancipated society.

Happiness

Faust, part II, act 5, scene 3:

Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluß:
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben,
Der täglich sie erobern muß.
Und so verbringt, umrungen von Gefahr,
Hier Kindheit, Mann und Greis sein tüchtig Jahr.
Solch ein Gewimmel möcht' ich sehn,
Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn.
Zum Augenblicke dürft' ich sagen:
Verweile doch, du bist so schön!
Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdetagen
Nicht in Äonen untergehn. –
Im Vorgefühl von solchem hohen Glück
Genieß' ich jetzt den höchsten Augenblick.

A translation of the meaning of these lines:

This is the last judgement of wisdom:
Only he deserves freedom and life,
Who has to strive for them daily.
And so, surrounded by danger, strives
Through childhood, manhood and old age.
I want to see such swarming,
To stand amongst a free people on free soil.
I dare say to the moment:
Linger on, you are so beautiful!
The mark of my days on earth
Will not be erased in aeons. -
In anticipation of such happiness
I now enjoy the most blissful moment.

"Verweile doch, du bist so schön!" or "Linger on, you are so beautiful!" is of course the line with which Faust forefeits his soul and Mephistopheles is much amused to see this precious gift squandered on what he deems the emptiest and lowliest moment - the vain phantasies of an old blind man. God interprets this act somewhat differently and in an ending that is homologous to the one of the Threepenny opera - where the narrator anounces it with the words: "so that at least in the opera you may see how for once mercy triumphs over law." - he declares the contract by which Faust traded his soul not void, but suspended.

To this a part from dispatch number 6 from John Berger's Ten dispatches about endurance:

This can be put the other way round: on this earth there is no happiness without a longing for justice.