Art and Morality
Recently, I have found myself in a series of arguments—the best kind, both friendly and spirited, arguments that linger in your thought and complicate your understanding—that revolve around the question of how we should approach artistic expression that offends our moral feeling. While these discussions—sometimes debates—were invigorating, I still feel that they began on bad footing, one inherited from a specific legacy of European philosophical aesthetics, a legacy that continues to affect public discussions of artistic value long after that tradition is actively recalled. This divides the consideration of artistic work into two spheres, the aesthetic and the moral. This distinction obscures: artworks either transcend moral considerations by dint of their aesthetic merits, or the quality of a work depends upon its conformity with whatever is deemed the correct moral attitude.
Art’s relation to morality is not figure to ground. Art works upon the mores of its time as a medium: it expresses itself through them, showing that there are more—perhaps many more—attitudes to morality than With or Against, conformity or transgression. Art interprets morality, showing that it is not a monologic discourse capable of an absolute clarity that has somehow escaped the ambiguities of language, the contingency of context, and the partiality of perspective that all other discourses are subject to. There is an inextricable ambiguity in the most fundamental of moral distinctions: the good and the bad. Melanie Klein’s famous thesis that the infant “splits” the mother into two—the Good Mother who stays and feeds and the Bad Mother who leaves and deprives—represents this semi-mythical situation of original moralism, one that must be overcome by an understanding that the Good and Bad Mothers are one and the same. Art dramatizes these ambiguities and so demands from us a moral understanding that is less facile, less infantile. We need a broader repertoire of response than wailing and suckling to maintain even the most modest ethical stance.
Moralism is inartistic in the same way it is unethical: it praises the starkest of distinctions as a righteous achievement rather than the indulgence it is. We must recognize there is an ambiguity in the Good Thief: yes, this may be the penitent who earns a place in paradise through self-sorrow, but it is also the Artful Dodger, who is good at thieving, and discovers through the art of pickpocketing something like a moral code. It is, he insists convincingly, “hard work.” He stands against all those who are “green,” the inexperienced, the fops, the naïve moneybags and marks who show a lack of circumspection of the world around them. On the other hand, the Good Thief of the Christian Gospel seems to us to lack a sound moral judgment: do we really feel that crucifixion is a fitting sentence for a petty thief? His pitiable righteousness, a scene more maudlin than moving, suggests that he was caught not because of his crime but his lack of sound sense. Cunning is its own virtue: when Rabbit tricks Otter in the Cherokee tale, we admire his wit, while we also feel his comeuppance is just when he in turn is tricked by Bear. There is, every tradition reminds us, more than one meaning to Good. Is virtue for the virtuous or the virtuoso?
Even more prevalent in contemporary criticism is the attempt to reveal the moral character of a work through the artist’s biography (and the moralism so often attendant upon that genre). Even when the moral purpose of a work is made explicit, as in Milton’s aim to “justify the ways of God to man,” we may agree with Empson that in this he failed, whether intentionally or not. It is the failure that sustains our moral interest in the work: Satan is far more sympathetic than those dullards, Adam and Eve, or even the aloof justice of the Lord. Milton’s Satan resembles the Islamic Iblis, a noble angel who refuses to bow before humanity. In Sufic interpretations, Iblis is the most devoted adherent of Allah, refusing to bow to anyone but the All-Merciful, who nevertheless punishes him for disobeying the divine command while following the divine will. Would we bow before our own humanity, one wonders—and so enters a more pointed ethic than we could find in the tired opposition of sin and righteousness.
Art doesn’t simply present morality but works upon it as one of its materials of expression, as one might shape clay, produce sound, blend colors. That is to say, morality presents questions of technique to the artist. Verdi’s La Traviata did not simply assert the virtue of Violetta, a courtesan hiding her fatal illness, and the nobility of Alfredo for gambling his fortune and then throwing his winnings at her feet. The aria and the duet, denigrated by Wagner in his Opera and Drama for artificiality—merely a way of making the audience less distracted—is essential to the persuasive transformation of the traditional heroic conflict between private love and public duty to the more complex one between social pleasure and secret love: we hear, in the music itself, the meaning of these attitudes. The poet’s use of language, even when not explicitly dealing with a moral question, can present an ethical stance more profound than any moral conviction. Primo Levi describes in the chapter on “Communicating” in his memoir of Auschwitz, The Drowned and the Saved, how
the Lager’s German was a language apart: to say it precisely in German, it was Orts- und zeitgebunden, “tied to the place and time.” It was a variant, particularly barbarized, of what a German Jewish philologist, Klemperer, had called the Lingua Tertii Imperii, the language of the Third Reich, actually proposing for it the acronym LTI with an ironic analogy to the hundred other acronyms (NSDAP, SS, SA, SD, KZ, RKPA, WVHA, RSHA, BDM, etc.) dear to the Germany of that time.
Paul Celan’s late poems are a reclamation of the German language as well as an argument with it. His intensive use of German’s agglutinative morphology, one of the features used to stultify and disorient the prisoners of the Nazi death camps and ghettos, becomes a poetic talisman against the endurance of that psychic violence:
Desmegne of litter, urgent as dust. Evening after evening, embassies drift over, distilled from thoughts, hard as kings, hard as night, into the hands of the grief- constables: from the break in their life- lines the answer steps soundless: the one eternal drop of gold.
Moralism judges art by its effect, real or imagined. But sometimes it is real. DOOM was implicated in the Columbine shootings, and not in some incidental way: Harris recreated his high school in the game and seems to have practiced the massacre in the virtual setting. Those who believe it is absurd to think that video games, or any artistic medium, can profoundly influence the attitudes and orientations of its audience treat all art as mere entertainment: a pasttime to be judged only as it succeeds in providing pleasure. But if we concede that works of art may contribute to violent, aggressive, unhealthy behavior, is that the same as to concede the argument to the moralists? How much is a work responsible for its responses? This, too, requires an interpretation of the work. The Manson Killings citation of the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter”—written in blood on the walls of the Polanski estate—was based on a paranoid, racist, and (one suspects) drug-fueled interpretation of the song. The discovery of Timothy McVeigh holding the racist novel The Turner Diaries after the Oklahoma City Bombing is not the same: McVeigh’s interpretation of the work is paranoid and racist because the work is paranoid and racist. It admits of no other interpretation. It is a bad book not merely because it is immoral nor because its prose is by turns flaccid and swollen: its blinkered moral sense is rediscovered in its language, its plotting, its stereotyping of characters.
Moral censorship, however low we rate its motives, in its methods often reveals much about the work through its misinterpretation of its moral content. Some years ago, I bought an English-language edition of Sade, mostly for its inclusion of Simone de Beauvoir’s Must We Burn Sade?—an excellent reflection on the problems of censorship as well as what feminists might make of sadism in literature. But I was amused to find that the translators had made the decision to leave all the bluest language in the excerpts from Sade in French, only heightening the effect when someone had been foutu so hard in their cul they died. We find a more recent example in the much-discussed decision of a school district to ban (as they say) the graphic novel Maus on the pretense of its graphic nudity is a clear example of the moral bankruptcy of this reactionary moralism: the very idea that the horrific dehumanization of the prisoners of Auschwitz, including their enforced nakedness before their murders, would be erotic, is itself the perversity it so loudly condemns.
But the aestheticists make perhaps an equal mistake in treating artworks as transcendent, freed in the first instance from moral questions. We recognize that this is an impossibility even in our most common aesthetic judgments, for instance, that something in a work is gratuitous, that is, what fails to be integrated into the work’s argument. Here we discover the distinction between the pornographic and erotic art. The treacly postcard fodder of an artist like Raphael Kirchner expresses the cheeky—in every sense—appropriation of the erotic for commercial ends. While his models are rarely undressed (not one of his coquettes can keep a shoulder-strap on) , they always appear as objects of a sugary lust. The kitsch of these works can be felt in their failure to work upon the mores of the time. They flatter male taste with the minimum of provocation. By contrast, a film like Basic Instinct, far more explicit in its depiction of sex, and specifically that addressed to heterosexual male desire, is not pornographic: its ability to elicit erotic passions from its audience—in fact, its ability to produce different passions in different audiences—is integral to what is “says.”
Art’s greatest moral task is to argue against moralism, that crass reduction of ethical life into available categories, the ascendance of piety and its ennobling of titles to virtues, offices to duties. The artist ought to be supremely sensitive to moral meanings so as to be better able to transform, carnivalize, or elevate them into the most vivid portion of our experience.
Art as Argument
How else, then, might we approach art with these questions? One possibility is to recognize a work of art as argument. Admittedly, this does not seem very promising. Wouldn’t this to reduce a work into monologue, to treat its expressivity as if it could all be translated into linguistic form, appraised by the senses only to be passed over to the intellect, and giving it the primary purpose of fodder for debate? This sense comes more, I think, from how low we rate argument and how poorly those who study argument have done in rendering its complexity. To consider a work of art as argument does not mean to render it into the flatly literal domain of argumentative discourse. On that understanding, the art world’s ability to present Guerilla Girls’ posters in a museum context is the way in which art is most clearly argumentative—and this distinguishes it from the aestheticist view.
Instead, we might hold out the position that art represents argument in its best expression. It is what the ordinary argument ought to aspire to. The work of art is both claim and evidence. Art’s claim upon us is a model of the inference involved in every argument: not implication, but complication. Art, although it evidences itself, in its claim it refers to the world, to what is not it—to us. It moves us in its meaning, not through its facticity. Art shows a way of seeing.
All this, however, depends upon the idea of a Work. This may already be an outmoded conception, as today cultural production is openly and manifestly Content. Content is not self-contained as a work is, which makes it much more amenable to the quality of experience that is more common to us, marked in absolute rather than relative time. We fill our leisure with the effects of art—vibes—and in this we are also more prone to moralism. The work resists the time of the viewer, transforms it into its own time, and in this distinction is a comment upon “the times”—or, to remember our etymology, our mores.
Content is what makes up our “glassy essence” now—it is what allows for Ctrl + F censorship as well as the most inflammatory provocations to appear as entertainment. We have, at last, freed ourselves from experience. And this is perhaps what is most surprising about the recurrence of our arguments. Morality, as Nietzsche warned, has become all too interesting again. It organizes our sense of the world before we sense it. But there is also a hopeful hum in the whirring of the laptops and the blue light inducing wakefulness in this restless but not aimless generation: what morality may mean no longer finds its limits in the techniques of art. In the world of content, though habit rules, rules may also be made from habit. The leader of the new morality will not be an orator, but a creator of content, one able to occupy the always-halved attention of a public that longs, still, to know what is good.
STREUBESITZ, staub-
unmittelbar.
Abend um Abend schweben
die den Gedanken entzognen
Botschaften ein,
königshart, nachthart,
in die Hände der Klage-
vögte:
aus dem Knick
ihrer Lebens-
linien
tritt lautlos die Antwort:
der eine ewige
Tropfen
Gold.