we need less anarchist writing by economists and philosophers and more anarchist writing by artists. i know. i'll get to it.
i've
posted this a few times. i don't absolutely identify with any single
strain of anarchist thought, but this is really the closest thing i've
seen to articulating my own viewpoints.
" Now as the
State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to do. The
State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be
the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The State is
to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.
And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a
great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the
dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about
manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is
mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does
not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless
activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing
for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting
occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to
me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is
made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind
should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that
it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the
slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as
soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve.
This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our
system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of
five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of
employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to
thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it,
and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably,
which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really
wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by
it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All
unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that
deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be
done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all
sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets,
and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or
distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper
conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this
is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country
gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or
enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man –
or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply
contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be
doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that
civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless
there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture
and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong,
insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the
machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are
no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute
bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have
delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things
for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great
storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and
this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to
his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include
Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country
at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it
looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the
realisation of Utopias.
Now, I have said that the
community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful
things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual.
This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which
we can get either the one or the other. An individual who has to make
things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and
their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put
into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a
community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any
kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either
entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and
ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique
temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he
is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they
want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other
people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist,
and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest
tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is
the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am
inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the
world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to
have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and
interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone,
without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the
artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely
for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
And
it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form of
Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it in an
authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as
it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always,
and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art
to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd
vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what
they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy
after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are
wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular.
The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide
difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his
experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a
character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the
subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of
people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that
he had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought,
provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those
who had never thought in any sphere at all – well, nowadays the man of
science and the philosopher would be considerably amused. Yet it is
really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected
to brutal popular control, to authority – in fact the authority of
either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed
for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of course, we have
to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the
community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the
individualism of speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with
the individualism of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it does
more than linger; it is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.
In
England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the
public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have
been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read
it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult
poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them,
they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in
which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of
popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces
such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form,
such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The
popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It
is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is
too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style,
psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned
are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most
uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such
requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament,
would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the
amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his
individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender
everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are
a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true,
but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy,
the two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work
may be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of
this kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is
when one comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of
popular control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is
novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely
distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art
depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject-matter.
The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents
to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist
that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public
are quite right in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and
Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its
immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type,
slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the
level of a machine. In Art, the public accept what has been, because
they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their
classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the
inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them.
Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to one’s own views, this
acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical
admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an instance of
what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical
authority enter into the matter, so that I need not dwell upon the
point. But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the
public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If
they saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the
drama; and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the
development of the drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the
classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They
degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for
preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always
asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter
why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact
that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an
artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and
whenever it appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always
use two stupid expressions – one is that the work of art is grossly
unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What
they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work
is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a
beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly
immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing
that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter
to subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an
ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single
real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the
British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and
these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France,
is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make
the establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England.
Of course, the public are very reckless in their use of the word. That
they should have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be
expected. Wordsworth was a poet. But that they should have called
Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist is extraordinary. Kingsley’s prose
was not of a very fine quality. Still, there is the word, and they use
it as best they can. An artist is, of course, not disturbed by it. The
true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is
absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of
art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the
public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that
was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously
question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and
consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either
of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/
