Art is better than life

Today we face a crisis of meaning. Despite everyone's best efforts, the project of modernity lumbers forward, carrying in its wake disillusionment, cynicism, and the shattered bodies of once-formidible systems of belief and life. All of life is reduced, explicitly, to the conflictual interaction of opposed powers, with no possibility of a meaningful reference to principles, truths, or gods of any kind. Even the once-great religious traditions of the world are not exempt from the "reduction to power" -- aside from the obvious example of Islamic extremism, it is clear that Christians in the United States are essentially one interest group among others, seeking recognition and advancement in a shared political game. Even appeals to traditional Christian themes, such as the importance of morality or public prayer, are nothing but plausible excuses to legitimate naked power plays.

In the face of this phenomenon, which we might term "nihilism," there are counter-trends at work. They take place within the realm of power, and indeed can be understood as an after-effect of the reduction to power. It must be understood from the outset that these counter-trends are utterly hopeless, and most of them consciously accept and embrace this fact. One example is "leftist Christianity." Claiming to express the "radical core" of the Christian tradition (with a variety of more or less plausible explanations for the consistent failure of that radicality to manifest itself), leftist Christians have no reasonable expectation that the kinds of practices and policies they promote will be even marginally accepted, even within Christian circles. In fact, on the historical level, often the best arguments that leftist Christians can offer for their contention to represent the true core of Christianity are novel readings of the scriptures or a variety of arguments from near-silence about the practices of the authentic "early church." Another distinctive patterns include a thorough-going contrarianism, such that in American evangelical circles, the leftist position is often to support a return to "tradition," whereas in Roman Catholic circles, the leftist position is often to return to the Bible and strip away later accretions.

A key interpretive principle in many such groups is "the cross." The cross teaches us not to expect success, and in fact to expect nothing short of death, when "speaking the truth to power." The important thing is to follow the teachings and practices set forth in the gospel, as idiosyncratically understood by the leftist Christian group, with no regard for the outcome. Since leftist Christians take themselves to be the true "realists," meaning that if their teachings and practice were universally followed, the problems of the world would be significantly reduced if not eliminated outright, the leftist gospel amounts to a latter-day Kantian categorical imperative. A second interpretive principle is "grace" or "the movement of the Holy Spirit." This is used to explain fleeting moments of success for the movement, which has no right to expect anything but outright extinction. Patiently proclaiming and practicing the gospel becomes a way of actively waiting upon the Spirit, or in secular terms, waiting for the chance success.

There is no apparent way to draw rational conclusions from either the cross or the movement of the Holy Spirit that support particular teachings or practices. In addition, there is no leftist Christian teaching or practice that cannot be found in other movements. Broadly speaking, the leftist Christian position incorporates much of the far end of the "liberal" side of the political spectrum, together with a few idiosyncratic positions (most frequently on sexual matters), and most importantly, with the assertion that the Christian interpretive framework keeps these teachings and practices from becoming exploitative or nihilistic (as they ostensibly become so in a liberal interpretive framework). In order to support this contention, they cite the inarguable moral superiority of Christ and the early church (in whom they find the basis for their teachings) over the founders of "modernism" or "liberalism" (Descartes, Locke, Kant, whomever). The fact that the vast majority of people throughout history who have claimed to be following Christ have held views that these particular Christians find abhorrent is referred to "the cross," if it is addressed at all.

What does this have to do with art? It is my contention that the appeal of "the gospel" or "the cross" in leftist Christian circles is primarily an aesthetic appeal. Only as such does the leftist Christian claim have any validity or subversive power. The reduction to power characteristic of modernity strips religion of any claims to legitimacy or normativity -- whether it was true all along or only becomes the case after the turn to modernity, within the confines of modernity it is always true that religion is yet another power play. Historical reasons for this, such as the general tendency of religion to oppose the movement toward modernity in the West and now in much of the Islamic world, are of no particular importance in our current situation. Religion has been hollowed out and can never fulfill the functions to which it once aspired. The deed is done, and it is irrevocable.

The reduction to power, as stated above, produces its own counter-movement. In the modern case, the only possible category that can embrace all counter-movements is the aesthetic. Already in the very beginning of modernity, truth and goodness have been colonized by science and the general value of utility, with such overwhelming success that a decolonization is not possible. The only remaining transcendental value to which resistance to modernity can appeal is beauty, because the progress of industry and science cannot reasonably lay claim to beauty as its own.

Most early modern aesthetic movements are explicitly returns to the past, whether that be the classical or medieval past, or even the pristine state of "nature," as in Wordsworth's romanticism. Although the late Victorian aesthetic movement claimed that the aesthetic move is beyond politics, in point of fact, aestheticism in modernity has traditionally carried with it certain political positions. The classical British romantics were all politically engaged to some degree, and later romantics only intensified this trend. Ruskin viewed the middle ages as a kind of utopia and is also remembered as one of the first socialists; Carlyle's own art, and more significantly, his influence on Dickens, represented a specifically political purpose behind aestheticism. Even Marx himself appealled to a mythological "primitive communism" in formulating his economic and political theories, arguably qualifying Marxism as a broadly "aesthetic" movement.

The most obvious problem with this aestheticisim of early modernity is that beauty never is never directly present. It is usually to be found in some lost moment in the past, and even in the romanticism of nature, the beauty of the contemporaneously existent "natural scene" can only be captured in "emotion recollected in tranquility." In the case of Marxism, the society of beauty is found both in the distant past and in the more or less distant future. Literary modernism properly so called seeks to short-circuit this process, making beauty present itself directly in modernity. In the modernism of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, among others, the aesthetic tendencies toward mining the past are accompanied by a new impulse toward making the past new -- it is no longer beautiful or meaningful "in itself," but must become such by being taken up in the modernist work of art.

Ever more personalized works of art, using of "stream of consciousness" and other techniques to render the present directly, eventually culminate in a pure formalism of the present -- even if Ulysses is, in principle, comprehensible, the beauty of the novel as a work of art is in essense a matter of taking the artist's word for it, and later art, verging on the "postmodern," eventually collapses the concrete individual content of the modernists into the assertion that "this is art." Ever more repulsive subject matter is found and asserted to be aesthetically valid -- refusing to give the reader or viewer or listener what she wants becomes an end in itself.

Whatever one's personal opinion of such art, it nevertheless remains true that the aesthetic impulse is able to grant meaning to everything -- except the modern project itself. The horror of propagandistic use of beauty, of which Nazism is perhaps the unsurpassable example, is how close it comes to colonizing beauty for the same reduction to power that has already infected truth and goodness. Propagandistic use of beauty threatens to close off the only escape we have, which would amount to a complete foreclosure of hope.

Beauty is always an escape, and as such, leftist Christianity and Marxism and romanticism are all escapist movements. All aesthetic movements posit another space, another narrative, to which we can refer to find the meaning of the otherwise meaningless present. At its worst, beauty serves nothing but a therapeutic function, as when a young man temporarily divests himself of his petty insecurities and frustrations by producing a literary text, giving his experience an artistic weight and meaning they would otherwise lack. Beauty can also serve a critical function, providing the only available avenue through which to criticize the order of modernity, which is otherwise inescapably self-evident. Beauty, in both its therapeutic and critical manifestations, does inevitably take part in the game of power, but only at a remove -- by fighting against the reduction to power itself, in its entirety. In the modern world, art is preferable to life, because art is the only possible site of hope and meaning.

What is less clear is whether beauty can also serve a transformative function, or whether it is instead always necessarily parasitic on the modern reduction to power. That is to say, is it possible to escape not simply from the present, but into a new and viable present? Part of the aesthetic appeal of leftist Christianity, as with other similar movements, is that it attempts to answer yes to that question -- but at the same time, the very fact that the "yes" is always accompanied by a "not yet" means that the question must remain open, at least for the present, and perhaps until the eschaton.