If the letters of Christopher Carp and Patricia Manos are any indication, some readers may have confused an essay of critical reflection for an attempt at an exhaustive academic paper or comprehensive diagnosis. As an exploratory essay, I am glad that it elicited further discussion. However, I would like to clarify understandable confusion and to elaborate on what was for me a critical exercise to engage with and make sense of personal experience.1 While I am glad if they can get something from my initial essay, I did not write it to funded artists or any sort of art school crowd.2 I wrote it to the people I interact with and whose explicitly stated nostalgia for socialist realism is not in question for me. Rather than addressing people in the “mainstream progressive” movement (presumably social democrats) I wrote my essay to other communists. These comrades are far more likely to be familiar with Maxim Gorky than Molly Crabapple.
Manos rightly points out that I do not explicitly state the subject of my critique. I believe this oversight has contributed to some of the misunderstandings around my initial essay. To correct this error, I would like to state upfront that I did not set out to critique socialist realism or people on the grounds of their understandable nostalgia. Rather, I wrote the essay to critique a common adulteration of socialist realism, which is in direct contradiction to its historical ethos, and the larger—and thus more pervasive—bourgeois dichotomy of “pure” and “civic” art from which many socialists have yet to break away. Manos is also correct to point out that left-wing nostalgia is far reaching and diverse—a welcomed observation which I do not believe to be in contradiction with my essay.
I would also like to clarify my use of language. My use of “conservative” is in the general sense of the word, not in the political sense wherein it is interchangeable with reactionary.3 I do not believe form determines content—a position I hoped would be clear in my refusal of the common deterministic dualism. This position, I believe is at the root of some socialists’ dismissal of non-socialist art which has contributed to artistic shortcomings since the time of Bogdanov.
Carp asserts that I claim the lack of new and dynamic socialist art in the US is a result of nostalgia. However, this is a reduction of my argument. Nostalgia, for me, is a descriptor of a general state of inactivity. As indicated above, this nostalgia is in lieu of production, not necessarily an impediment or primary determining factor. I do not believe the problem is strictly of aesthetic nostalgia. Rather, I believe the particular case I consider in my initial essay points to the larger perennial issues around the pure-civic dichotomy among socialists—a connection I should have made more explicit.
One needn’t share my experiences around a popular conception of socialist realism to acknowledge that the larger issue remains much as it did in Bogdanov’s time. The reoccurrence of reductive debates around form and content point to the pervasiveness of the issue and the need to face it at multiple sites and from multiple angles. While my own essay responded to the specific context within communist circles of which I am a part it is not an issue of particular camps or political tendencies forming around a static position on art or culture.4 We are all capable of nostalgia and this nostalgia can have positive, negative, and neutral manifestations and consequences. The root of the problem lies not in nostalgia but in maintaining the bourgeois dichotomy of “pure” and “civic” art.
In closing, I would like to briefly consider the question of popular artistic preference or taste. In the US context, such discussions among socialists should include grappling with the tendency to neglect the genius of non-white artists and to hold fast to highly restricted parameters as to what constitutes revolutionary or socialist art.5 We should all be open to reflecting on why most readers will be so familiar with the likes of Pete Seeger while only a subsection of readers may even recognize the names of such greats as Archie Shepp. Obviously, such disparities cannot be explained away by saying there is just more folk records than jazz records. Likewise, I find Carp’s speculative argument that the preference for socialist realist art among socialists is accounted for by its relative quantity to be unsatisfactory and premised on a handful of unstated assumptions. Not least of which is that popularity is a direct function of quantity—which obscures the relationship between popular taste and the social and historical context in which it is embedded. Such arguments also rely on the assumption that other forms or manifestations of socialist art are few and far between in comparison. While there is of course an apparent racial disparity in the popularity of Seeger and Shepp, there is also a tendency among some socialists to neglect modern forms that do not fit neatly into the civic conception of art—thus neglecting art that makes innovations in form. To illustrate this, we can consider Paul Robeson’s popularity in comparison to that of Shepp. Popular tastes are a result of dominant social values rather than proliferation. We socialists, regardless of our tendency, are not above such social influence. If we are to reflect on such dynamics, we might notice that such conceptions are typically premised around an infantilizing populist distinction between “high and “low” art which has been a central assumption in debates that pit form and content against one another.
Solidarity,
Christian Noakes
- To be clear, my own personal experiences and the people that populate them are not debatable in the sense of whether they exist. Readers are not entitled to all the specificities of private conversations, regardless of public reflections they might elicit. With that said, this background information was left out of my initial essay which likely contributed to confusion and misreading.
- Manos has misinterpreted my essay as an argument that “Left-Wing artistic production is plagued” by nostalgia when I in fact assert that such nostalgia appears in lieu of our own production and is in fact a prominent characteristic of our lack of artistic exploration/production.
- Given the dominance of the political usage of the term and the fact that Cosmonaut is openly partisan not being explicit about my usage was a mistake which I am glad to correct.
- My essay does not rule out different preferences of taste but instead works from the specific toward the general.
- A parallel can be drawn to outdated, and indeed revisionist conceptions of the working class as being strictly white industrial workers.