La Nouvelle Critique has sent me your letter.1 I hope you will permit me, if not to reply to all the questions it poses, at least to add a few comments to yours in the line of your own reflections.
First of all, you should know that I am perfectly conscious of the very schematic character of my article on Humanism.2 As you have noticed, it has the disadvantage that it gives a ‘broad’ idea of ideology without going into the analysis of details. As it does not mention art, I realize that it is possible to wonder whether art should or should not be ranked as such among ideologies, to be precise, whether art and ideology are one and the same thing. That, I feel, is how you have been tempted to interpret my silence.
The problem of the relations between art and ideology is a very complicated and difficult one. However, I can tell you in what directions our investigations tend. I do not rank real art among the ideologies, although art does have a quite particular and specific relationship with ideology. If you would like some idea of the initial elements of this thesis and the very complicated developments it promises, I advise you to read carefully the article Pierre Macherey has written on ‘Lenin as a critic of Tolstoy’ in La Pensée, No. 121, 1965.3 Of course, that article is only a beginning, but it does pose the problem of the relations between art and ideology and of the specificity of art. This is the direction in which we are working, and we hope to publish important studies on this subject in a few months time.
The article will also give you a first idea of the relationship between art and knowledge. Art (I mean authentic art, not works of an average or mediocre level) does not give us a knowledge in the strict sense, it therefore does not replace knowledge (in the modern sense: scentific knowledge), but what it gives us does nevertheless maintain a certain specific relationship with knowledge. This relationship is not one of identity but one of difference. Let me explain. I believe that the peculiarity of art is to ‘make us see’ (nous donner à voir), ‘make us perceive’, ‘make us feel’ something which alludes to reality. If we take the case of the novel, Balzac or Solzhenitsyn, as you refer to them, they make us see, perceive (but not know) something which alludes to reality.
It is essential to take the words which make up this first provisional definition literally if we are to avoid lapsing into an identification of what art gives us and what science gives us. What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of ‘seeing’, ‘perceiving’ and ‘feeling’ (which is not the form of knowing), is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes. Macherey has shown this very clearly in the case of Tolstoy, by extending Lenin’s analyses. Balzac and Solzhenitsyn give us a ‘view’ of the ideology to which their work alludes and with which it is constantly fed, a view which presupposes a retreat, an internal distantiation from the very ideology from which their novels emerged. They make us ‘perceive’ (but not know) in some sense from the inside, by an internal distance, the very ideology in which they are held.
These distinctions, which are not just shades of meaning but specific differences, should in principle enable us to resolve a number of problems.
First the problem of the ‘relations’ between art and science. Neither Balzac nor Solzhenitsyn gives us any knowledge of the world they describe, they only make us ‘see’, ‘perceive’ or ‘feel’ the reality of the ideology of that world. When we speak of ideology we should know that ideology slides into all human activity, that it is identical with the ‘lived’ experience of human existence itself: that is why the form in which we are ‘made to see’ ideology in great novels has as its content the ‘lived’ experience of individuals. This ‘lived’ experience is not a given, given by a pure ‘reality’, but the spontaneous ‘lived experience’ of ideology in its peculiar relationship to the real. This is an important comment, for it enables us to understand that art does not deal with a reality peculiar to itself, with a peculiar domain of reality in which it has a monopoly (as you tend to imply when you write that ‘with art, knowledge becomes human’, that the object of art is ‘the individual’), whereas science deals with a different domain of reality (say, in opposition to ‘lived experience’ and the ‘individual’, the abstraction of structures). Ideology is also an object of science, the ‘lived experience’ is also an object of science, the ‘individual’ is also an object of science. The real difference between art and science lies in the specific form in which they give us the same object in quite different ways: art in the form of ‘seeing’ and ‘perceiving’ or ‘feeling’, science in the form of knowledge (in the strict sense, by concepts).
The same thing can be said in other terms. If Solzhenitsyn does ‘make us see’ the ‘lived experience’ (in the sense defined earlier) of the ‘cult of personality’ and its effects, in no way does he give us a knowledge of them: this knowledge is the conceptual knowledge of the complex mechanisms which eventually produce the ‘lived experience’ that Solzhenitsyn’s novel discusses. If I wanted to use Spinoza’s language again here, I could say that art makes us ‘see’ ‘conclusions without premisses’, whereas knowledge makes us penetrate into the mechanism which produces the ‘conclusions’ out of the ‘premisses’. This is an important distinction, for it enables us to understand that a novel on the ‘cult’, however profound, may draw attention to its ‘lived’ effects, but cannot give an understanding of it; it may put the question of the ‘cult’ on the agenda, but it cannot define the means which will make it possible to remedy these effects.
In the same way, these few elementary principles perhaps enable us to point the direction from which we can hope for an answer to another question you pose: how is it that Balzac, despite his personal political options, ‘makes us see’ the ‘lived experience’ of capitalist society in a critical form? I do not believe one can say, as you do, that he ‘was forced by the logic of his art to abandon certain of his political conceptions in his work as a novelist’. On the contrary, we know that Balzac never abandoned his political positions. We know even more: his peculiar, reactionary political positions played a decisive part in the production of the content of his work. This is certainly a paradox, but it is the case, and history provides us with a number of examples to which Marx drew our attention (on Balzac, I refer you to the article by R. Fayolle in the special 1965 number of Europe). These are examples of a deformation of sense very commonly found in the dialectic of ideologies. See what Lenin says about Tolstoy (cf. Macherey’s article): Tolstoy’s personal ideological position is one component of the deeplying causes of the content of his work. The fact that the content of the work of Balzac and Tolstoy is ‘detached’ from their political ideology and in some way makes us ‘see’ it from the outside, makes us ‘perceive’ it by a distantiation inside that ideology, presupposes that ideology itself. It is certainly possible to say that it is an ‘effect’ of their art as novelists that it produces this distance inside their ideology, which makes us ‘perceive’ it, but it is not possible to say, as you do, that art ‘has its own logic’ which ‘made Balzac abandon his political conceptions’. On the contrary, only because he retained them could he produce his work, only because he stuck to his political ideology could he produce in it this internal ‘distance’ which gives us a critical ‘view’ of it.
As you see, in order to answer most of the questions posed for us by the existence and specific nature of art, we are forced to produce an adequate (scientific) knowledge of the processes which produce the ‘aesthetic effect’ of a work of art. In other words, in order to answer the question of the relationship between art and knowledge we must produce a knowledge of art.
You are conscious of this necessity. But you ought also to know that in this issue we still have a long way to go. The recognition (even the political recognition) of the existence and importance of art does not constitute a knowledge of art. I do not even think that it is possible to take as the beginnings of knowledge the texts you refer to,4 or even Joliot-Curie, quoted by Marcenac.5 To say a few words about the sentence attributed to Joliot-Curie, it contains a terminology – ‘aesthetic creation, scientific creation’ – a terminology which is certainly quite common, but one which in my opinion must be abandoned and replaced by another, in order to be able to pose the problem of the knowledge of art in the proper way. I know that the artist, and the art lover, spontaneously express themselves in terms of ‘creation’, etc. It is a ‘spontaneous’ language, but we know from Marx and Lenin that every ‘spontaneous’ language is an ideological language, the vehicle of an ideology, here the ideology of art and of the activity productive of aesthetic effects. Like all knowledge, the knowledge of art presupposes a preliminary rupture with the language of ideological spontaneity and the constitution of a body of scientific concepts to replace it. It is essential to be conscious of the necessity for this rupture with ideology to be able to undertake the constitution of the edifice of a knowledge of art.
Here perhaps, is where I must express a sharp reservation about what you say. I am not perhaps speaking about exactly what you want or would like to say, but about what you actually do say. When you counterpose ‘rigorous reflection on the concepts of Marxism’ to ‘something else’, in particular to what art gives us, I believe you are establishing a comparison which is either incomplete or illegitimate. Since art in fact provides us with something else other than science, there is not an opposition between them, but a difference. On the contrary, if it is a matter of knowing art, it is absolutely essential to begin with ‘rigorous reflection on the basic concepts of Marxism’: there is no other way. And when I say, ‘it is essential to begin …’, it is not enough to say it, it is essential to do it. If not, it is easy to extricate oneself with a passing acknowledgement, like ‘Althusser proposes to return to a rigorous study of Marxist theory. I agree that this is indispensable. But I do not believe that it is enough.’ My response to this is the only real criticism: there is a way of declaring an exigency ‘indispensable’ which consists precisely of dispensing with it, dispensing with a careful consideration of all its implications and consequences – by the acknowledgement accorded it in order to move quickly on to ‘something else’. Now I believe that the only way we can hope to reach a real knowledge of art, to go deeper into the specificity of the work of art, to know the mechanisms which produce the ‘aesthetic effect’, is precisely to spend a long time and pay the greatest attention to the ‘basic principles of Marxism’ and not to be in a hurry to ‘move on to something else’, for if we move on too quickly to ‘something else’ we shall arrive not at a knowledge of art, but at an ideology of art: e.g., at the latent humanist ideology which may be induced by what you say about the relations between art and the ‘human’, and about artistic ‘creation’, etc.
If we must turn (and this demands slow and arduous work) to the ‘basic principles of Marxism’ in order to be able to pose correctly, in concepts which are not the ideological concepts of aesthetic spontaneity, but scientific concepts adequate to their object, and thus necessarily new concepts, it is not in order to pass art silently by or to sacrifice it to science: it is quite simply in order to know it, and to give it its due.
April 1966