If politics is to be defined solely or primarily as partisanship, then is feminism itself political? Is an essay that attempts to tease out and describe the facets of rape culture, without offering any kind of solution, political? Is social science that describes rape culture political?

If the answer to these questions is genuinely no, then I will re-examine my stance here. But I do, genuinely, feel that the answer is yes.

I think the answer to these questions is unequivocally yes. But here’s one way of teasing out further the point I was trying to make, I think. I tend to distinguish between politics with I call a capital P and politics with what I call a small p. Capital P politics has to do with the fact that all human relationships are political because all of them involve negotiations of power. So, a position, say, which calls for more women in elected office is, for me (and I am drawing here a rough sketch), a capital P political position because it involves power negotiations between men and women on a rather large scale without necessarily getting into the question of the particular policy positions held by the women who get elected. On the other hand, a position which argues that, yes, there should be more women in office, but that the only women who should be elected are women whose policies are on the left, is small p politics, because it involves a kind of partisanship that—no matter how much I might want it to be the way my world runs—is actually separate from the question of whether more women should be in elected to office.

Each of these positions is, arguably, feminist—or at least grows out of a feminist consciousness about the world—but I would suggest that a work of art intended explicitly to propagandize for and promulgate the latter stance at the expense of exploring all the complex questions that it raises (and it this sacrifice of complexity that is for me one distinguishing charactristic of propaganda) will ultimately fail as art. This does not mean it will not serve an important social/cultural/political function; it’s just hard for me to imagine it succeeding as a work of art, by which I mean something that is supposed to represent/reflect back at us/choose-your-verb the complexities, the full complexities, of human existence.

(And you are right: some art engages politcs explicitly; other art engages it implicity; but I would disagree with your friend. I think it’s a mistake to back off from an all-[insert artform]-is-political stance because to back off is implicitly to let people who don’t produce explicitly engaged work off the hook, as if they are not responsible and accountable for the social/cultural/politcal implications of what they write. It’s more important, I think, to refine and define what you mean by political so that your position speaks to the spectrum of ways in which art is political. By the way, have you ever read the essays of June Jordan or of Sam Hamill? I learned more about the relationship between poetry (and therefore art) and politics from reading them than from almost anywhere else.)

And what you say about the nature of narrative is, of course, true, and I have had my share of the conversations you describe about art not being political with people who avoid the whole issue by hiding behind what is, truly, an impoverished notion of politics. I do think it is important—and I am not saying you do this—not to let those people frame the context in which we talk about what it means for art to be political.

You are always eloquent. If that’s all over the place for you, I hope someday to emulate your messes.

Your position is clearer. It’s interesting to me, though, that the time when I feel I encounter the most desire to define politics as “partisan” and relating specifically to, say, one party versus another in a governmental election, is when I’m discussing art. I’m sure you’ve thought about this a lot and that this definition is something that you have come to from serious contemplation. However, I’ve frequently encountered in my discussions about this topic with people that they will claim that art cannot be political, until I point out something that is political, and then, rather than redefining art to embrace the political — they will redefine the political to exclude that art.

If politics is to be defined solely or primarily as partisanship, then is feminism itself political? Is an essay that attempts to tease out and describe the facets of rape culture, without offering any kind of solution, political? Is social science that describes rape culture political?

If the answer to these questions is genuinely no, then I will re-examine my stance here. But I do, genuinely, feel that the answer is yes.

–

For the record, I’m highly suspicious of Big Poetic Abstractions, like beauty, truth, and justice, so I find it difficult to have the discusison on that plane. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder — and what is beautiful is contextually defined, the latter process being itself political.

A friend of mine has counselled me on my personal blog, where I cross-posted this, not to sling around the words “all fiction is political” because he fears it will lead to a conceptual flattening where all work is equally political. Some work has a conscious, intellectual engagement with the political; other work has less of this.

I think, though, that we talk in stories — or, in the case of poems, in stories and contemplations — because narrative is one of the primary ways humans understand the world. One writes a novel instead of a political tract because a novel offers its own ways of understanding, both as a writer and as a reader. Many political points are best conveyed as stories, which I would surmise is why so many of these conversations become heavily dominated by the anecdotal. Likewise, the act of representation is always itself political, because politics are unavoidable when one is creating a world. The extent to which these two things are true will depend on the political point, or the work, but I think they are always true at base in any piece. Everything else is a matter of degree.

There, now I’ve been all over the place, too. :) And a silly side note, I think art and propaganda can be pretty closely linked themselves: unless I’m much mistaken, some of Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s plays are explicitly intended as propaganda to persuade Kenyans of the good of marxism.

1. To write a story with the explicit intent of, as you put it, “put[ting] a human face on tragedy” is absolutely a political act; the story will be, by definition, implicated in the politics of whatver tragedy it is trying to humanize and the politics of the place where the story is published/told. This fact, however, does not mean that the story was written with the intent of “sending a political message,” if you understand “political message” to mean supporting a partisan agenda in relation to whatever tragedy it is that we are talking about.

2. This is why I distinguished in my comment between art and propaganda, not because I think that art is somehow a special category of product that is, in its essence, different from anything else—more pure, apolitical, whatever—but because its purpose is different, which is also to distinguish between and among different kinds/levels of craft (including hierarchical rankings of talent and ability) and the purposes to which they might be put. This is not a particularly western notion. Poets going back hundreds and even thousands of years, for example, have always distinguished between writing that qualifies as “art” and writing which does not—though you would be correct to point out that this distinction is not the same as the one which says art is something that belongs in a museum or the academy or the rarefied atmosphere of certain kinds of literary readings or that genres like science fiction are not “real” literature because they are, well, “genre” literature. I just don’t think that this latter distinction is what Mattawa is talking about in the passage I quoted in my original comment.

3. You suggest that Youssef’s political stance towards/in his art, as Mattawa characterizes it, seems to rely on “on a static concept of beauty.” I don’t agree. What Mattawa says is that Youssef has a commitment to beauty and that, for him [Youssef], justice and compassion are aesthetic choices. Justice and compassion, in other words, are part of what makes beauty for Youssef, not that beauty exists as some kind of Platonic ideal that justice and compassion must be shoehorned into. For Youssef, Mattawa argues (and I agree having read some but not all of Youssef’s work), the writing of poetry is a political act in precisely the way you describe all art as being political because it “generates feelings of empathy and solidarity.”

As a poet who writes politically engaged work, the questions you have raised are deeply important to me. I believe, not naively, that art, and in my specific case, writing, can be a real force for change in the world, but I have learned through a long process of trial and error that every time I have tried to write a poem that sends a political message—rather than a poem that allows the politics (and, yes, my understanding of the politics) of the situation I am writing about to become visible and available for my readers to explore—the end result has been not only a failed poem, but a message that is far less powerful than it might have been.

I guess what I am saying is that whenever a writer states that her or his primary concern has been with storytelling rather than sending a political message, I hear that person saying that he or she has focused on the craft of storytelling, rather than the craft of propaganda, and that is why he or she produced a novel rather than a political tract.

I feel like this response has been all over the place, but at least it puts forth some of the ideas contained in the comment I lost.

It’s also a lot more efficient. I’m a lawyer. I’m self employed, and for my profession I don’t make all that much, but after all my deductions I certainly make a lot more than is needed to hire a food bank staffer. It makes more sense for me to work and donate earned income for the time i worked, than for me to work those same hours at the food bank.

I sometimes see writing that denigrates people who give money to political causes, implying that they are insufficiently dedicated, that their help is lesser and a salve to privileged consciences.

I’ve encountered this too, and it is a particular line of thought that has always bothered me, in that it seems to be making political activism about the purity of the activist, rather than whether or not effective aid is provided to the recipient. It makes charity entirely about the donor, in other words.

From having worked with a few different charities over the years, sometimes, they want labor, sometimes they want money. Both are useful most of the time, and there’s nothing wrong with helping out with what is needed.

—Myca

I just lost a whole big response to your questions, which are really good and need more time than I have now to retype what my response was. I will come back to them, I hope, within the next day or so.

Thanks for taking the time to stop by. I always appreciate your posts and arguments.

I’m not really seeing this one, though. It seems to rely on a static concept of beauty, and my first instinct is to problematize that. What is beauty?

What, for that matter, is art? I am fairly uninterested in this question, actually, as I tend to think it leads to a lot of wankery. However, I think the attempts to define it have been interesting.

I tend to look at the definition of art as something coming out of the western tradition of categorization, where there are lots of distinct, non-overlapping boxes. Given that, it’s not surprising that art gets defined in ways that pull on other distinct, non-overlapping boxes. Art is Beauty. Art is Not Politics.

But of course, one’s sense of aesthetic itself is political. To reproduce it unquestioned is political; to choose to alter it is political. These are basic decisions that follow their own politics, certainly as much or more as it is a political decision to wear lipstick, forego high heels, or choose not to argue when your coworker says something racist.

Certainly, in this case, the stated intent (from Susanne Pari) was to put a human face on tragedy. This is in essence a political desire for recognition. It’s consciousness raising.

She also said that both of them are interested in storytelling rather than sending a political message.

This put me in mind of this quote from Khaled Mattawa’s introduction to Without An Alphabet, Without A Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef:

Poetry can only be an exploration of ideology, not a means of expressing belief in it. Reluctant to declare his ideology as the way out of alienation, Youssef shows how his ideology, transmuted within poetry, generates feelings of empathy and solidarity. For Youssef then, the commitment to justice and freedom stand beside his poetry, not above it. His political values, manifested in active participation in social struggle, are in reality fulfilling his abiding devotion to beauty. Justice and compassion in Youssef’s verse are presented in a sensual manner that symbolizes his individualized appreciation of harmony and balance. They are aesthetic choices first and foremost.

I believe this and this is what I tend to think artists who produce political art—politcal in the largest sense of the word, not as narrow partisanship—mean when they say they are not looking to “send a political message.” It is, the idea expressed in the quote from Mattawa’s introduction, at the heart of the difference between art and propaganda. Not that propaganda is unimportant and not that there is anything inherently wrong with writing propaganda in the form of a novel, poem, dance, play, etc.; in fact it can be quite important work. But it is not art in the sense that Mattawa is talking about, and I am guessing this is what the Iranian writer at the reading meant as well.

i think a reason some of us in the creative fields have this mixed set of feelings is twofold. one one hand, we are continually being called upon to consciously blur the line between commercial and non-commercial art, which is really a facet of the same struggle of perception. i mean, if money isn’t political then what is? secondly, i find an awful lot of american “public art”, which is generally required to be “socially responsible” and as unthreatening/inoffensive as possible, to be bland. publicly funded sculpture, architecture, poetry on the buses, and high school writing competitions come to mind right away. i imagine part of this, though, is less about mixing art with politics as it is mixing art with CERTAIN PEOPLE’S IDEA of politics. people on the margins of society will inescapably express art that to some will seem transgressive; and so unfortunately a lot of art that is accepted as “socially responsible” and representative of diverse segments of the community are actually the most watered down, filtered by city councils that aren’t really all that diverse.

clearly, the statement “the personal is political” and its correlary, “all art is political”, means something different when your personal life is what to watch on cable and whether to eat thai or italian tonight, versus a personal life that involves such experiences as being harassed by the police because of your appearance. so, thanks for reminding me of that.