The Value of (Artistic) Knowledge

Can we make a distinction between ‘knowledge’ and “artistic knowledge”? Are they different kinds of things? Can we connect them to different kinds of truth, in that, is it the case that artistic truth is qualitatively different to truth in other fields? What would an artistic truth be like?…These aren’t rhetorical questions (no Aquinas here), I genuinely wonder…

So, I suppose the first thing to do is to try to establish some kind of definition of ‘knowledge’. Put another way, what can I/we know, and in what relation do I stand to what I (think I) know? This being said, do I need to stand in a relation to knowledge, for knowledge requires me as much as I require it (or do I?). We have two categories here: (i) knowledge and, (ii), not-knowledge. Each dependent on the other, yet each dependent on a framework, a structure of meaning/a structure that confers meaning. But why? If I can be said to possess knowledge, then knowledge possesses me – turns me into its subject, in ways few of us question…or even think about. Truth then becomes a function of the calculus of whatever structure we are caught in (better to call it a ‘web’?).

Earlier in this blog, I referred to what appear to be the two dominant types of knowledge: the rational and the emotional, which give rise to the two dominant types of truth – again, the rational and the emotional. One submits to the Age of Enlightenment, the other to Romanticism (we really don’t seem to have come any further). In the former, others choose for me, in the latter I choose for myself…or so I think.

So we still have the same binary conflict ranging over centuries. But is it a conflict? And is that idea that I choose for myself self-deception? Well, there is an argument to be made that, without Romanticism to oppose it, Enlightenment is meaningless. If self-justifying, rational thought existed alone, then it wouldn’t exist because we would not be aware of it’s existence. Obviously, for something to exist we must be aware of it, and to for us to be aware of it, there must be a contrasting idea, and opposite other – both in a relation of mutual reliance.

The second question, that problem of self-deception in regard to choice, ‘choice’ is a concept generated by the structure that prioritises the rational, rationality which is approved by society (how do we know this? We believe it is the consensus view). By assenting to this idea of “the rational”, we feel secure, we feel part of a bourgeois majority. Yet behind the mask of the bourgeoisie, lies a populist – one that subscribes to conspiracy theories and notions of belief without independent proof, but is intelligent enough not to admit this. In much the same way as, when questioned, a majority apparently despise neoliberalism but, in the privacy of the voting booth, return right-wing parties.

‘Choice’ is something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand we demand it, on the other we convince ourselves that we do not have it because it makes our self-interested actions easier to justify to ourselves. By this ‘reasoning’, we inhabit, and support, a “nodding democracy”: a political system that is not democratic, but one in which we feel constrained to class it as democratic even whilst we feel that we have no real choices. We simply nod to a definition with which we do not agree, and continue on our way – a way that is dictated by a neoliberal agenda that is fast becoming an anarcho-capitalist one.

The Romanticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, stressed a break with the tradition of the Enlightenment. What we can also see is an age-delineated system; the young were patrons of the Romantic, that idea that idealism could be pitted against tradition. Yet, as with the emergence of Youth Culture in the 1950s and 60s, this classification of Romanticism as a ‘movement’ of youth, allows it to be contained, allows a condescension. The criticisms of the Enlightenment project, of tradition, are not really criticisms, they are simply the rebellion of youth – a desire to criticise for criticism’s sake. A hormonal side-effect of the phase one is going through. The general idea is that one will “grow out” of this phase, and come to realise the ‘truth’ of tradition. There will be those who do not do this, who continue to protest, but we can classify them as puerile, as resisting the imperative that one becomes “an adult” and sees the world as it “really is”. What hides this ideological move is the idea that rationality is a singular thing – whilst it appears to exist independently of the person, it is in fact an ideological construct that simply passes off the interests of the ruling class as the independent rationality applicable to all areas of life. Quite obviously, this is a lie – part of what Marx calls false class consciousness. All the more false because people do not realise that it’s class consciousness, they simply accept it as “just the way things are”.

This is why Art is so dangerous. This explains why Art (and artists) must be marginalised. Art continually exposes the inequality, the injustices of society because it deals in a different formulation of knowledge, therefore, a different formulation of truth. The basic foundation of Artistic epistemology is care (in all its forms: for others; for self; for nature; for the environment; for beauty etc.), thus, truth is that which provides for the greatest equality, for the greatest justice. The ‘demand’ is that we use of knowledge to further these ‘ends’. The imperative in creativity is, therefore, to expose injustice (as an overall term here, including inequality), to illustrate connections between disparate things in the web of life and “tease out” (in some cases; this is not a necessary part of creativity) solutions. It suggests that the purpose of living, of being a human person, is to care – to be consciously part of a community. In this, it can stand in direct opposition to what we think of the “free person” able to make “free choices”. In other words, it stands in direct opposition to the capitalist concept of “the individual”. My freedom is contingent on caring for others: on the effect it has on them and the ways in which they live. To live in any other way is not ‘free’. As Sartre says, we are either all free or no one is. If I live my life without thought for others, then my life is not free, but a continual string of selfish actions. It is, in fact, not a life but a blind existence.