Kulturkampf

“ Therefore, the question is, what happens to a cultural force partially predicated on rebellion, when there is nothing to rebel against, no larger force to be resisted, when all cultural barriers have been erased, at least in the minds of those rebelling?
The erasure of all social barriers can be understood as liberating, allowing the individual artist to forge meaning according to the dictates of his or her creativity. ”

“ But I believe that whenever literature and art are good and great they leap over narrow group barriers and periods to make a universal appeal.
The intelligentsia of our southern states may boycott a Negro's book or a Negro's painting. Hitler may burn the creative work of Jews, liberals and radicals, Mussolini may proscribe literature and art that he considers anti-Fascist, the Pope may index works that he interprets as anti-Catholic, and the Communists may damn works of literature and art that appear to them unfavorable to international Communism. ”

“ No doubt it will be asked at the outset, what possible connexion can there be between the practice of so fantastic and gruesome an art as the embalming of the dead and the building up of civilization? Is it conceivable that the course of the development of the arts and crafts, the customs and beliefs, and the social and political organizations—in fact any of the essential elements of civilization—has been deflected a hair's breadth to the right or left as the outcome, directly or indirectly, of such a practice? ”

“ In the arts, the tendency has been to strip each art of its inessentials and to disclose the underlying basis of pure form. In life, the principles of nationality, of racial culture, of individualism, of social development, of Christian ethics, have been discussed, debated, and examined from top to bottom, until at last, in the early years of the twentieth century we find all Europe, from the leaders of thought down to the lowest peasantry, engaged in a mutually destructive war of which few can trace the beginnings and none can foresee the end. ”

“ It is not as sanctuaries from life—sanctuaries devoted to the cult of aesthetic emotion—but as class-rooms, laboratories, homes of research and warehouses of tradition, that museums and galleries become noxious.
Human sensibility must be freed from the dust of erudition and the weight of tradition; it must also be freed from the oppression of culture. For, of all the enemies of art, culture is perhaps the most dangerous, because the least obvious. ”

“ The wretched state of the arts in this country and in Europe, originating in the wretched state of political science (which is the science of sciences) , demands a firm and determinate conduct on the part of artists, to resist the contemptible counter-arts, established by such contemptible politicians as Louis XIV., and originally set on foot by Venetian picture-traders, music-traders, and rhyme-traders, to the destruction of all true art, as it is this day. ”

“ The eye must be turned to find in the great world of movement the desire for culture that is known from the immediate experience of the individual; who must use his own strivings and aspirations as the alphabet to interpret those of humanity. He cannot rest here either, but must go higher. Culture demands from him not only that inner experience, not only the criticism of the outer world surrounding him, but action too to crown them all, the fight for culture against the influences and conventions and institutions where he cannot find his own aim,—the production of genius. ”

“ In other words, a permanent state of exception, a political emergency, was declared, which, together with the disciplinary norms of a propertised control society, was then used to justify and extend the coercive use of state power and repression against an increasingly criminalised culture of creativity. But as we will soon discuss, a growing number of the creative have now moved beyond both conformity and rebellion, through an active resistance to the present and the creation of an alternative creative field for flows of non-owned concepts and ideas. ”

“ It is too much, in the face of superstitions, anxieties, and apprehensions, to expect the attitude of culture to be preserved. In peace-time we are allowed to go outside our own state to enjoy any manifestation of the seven arts; and such violent nationalism as attacked The Playboy of the Western World in New York is at once called “rowdy” and “despicable.” But in time of war it is part of its morality, or immorality, that culture must be subordinate to clamor, and that even national sculpture must become jingoistic, making railsplitters neatly respectable and idealizing long feet. ”

“ A “culture-state” [2] is merely a modern idea. The one lives upon the other, the one flourishes at the expense of the other. All great periods of culture have been periods of political decline; that which is great from the standpoint of culture, was always unpolitical—even anti-political. Goethe’s heart opened at the coming of Napoleon—it closed at the thought of the “Wars of Liberation.” At the very moment when Germany arose as a great power in the world of politics, France won new importance as a force in the world of culture. ”

“ We want an authority, and we find nothing but jealous classes, checks, and a deadlock; culture suggests the idea of the State. We find no basis for a firm State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our best self.
It cannot but acutely try a tender conscience to be accused, in a practical country like ours, of keeping aloof from the work and hope of a multitude of earnest-hearted men, and of merely toying with poetry and æsthetics. ”

“ We are met to inaugurate an Association whose aim and end shall be the encouragement and culture of Art. A most high end—among the highest that men can attempt; an end that never can be entertained except by men of the best breed. There is no art among savages, none among barbarians. Barbarism and art are adversary terms. When men capable of civilization ascend into it, art manifests itself an inevitable accompaniment, an indispensable aid to human development. I will say further, that in a people the capacity to be cultivated involves the capacity, nay, the necessity of art. ”

“ It is not only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the material and the stifling of the idea within him. Every Culture stands in a deeply-symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained—the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual—the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. ”

“ The history that gave rise to the relative autonomy of culture, and to the ideological illusions regarding that autonomy, is also expressed as the history of culture. And this whole triumphant history of culture can be understood as a progressive revelation of the inadequacy of culture, as a march toward culture’s self-abolition. Culture is the terrain of the quest for lost unity. In the course of this quest, culture as a separate sphere is obliged to negate itself. ”

“ Culture requires liberalism for its foundation, and liberalism requires culture for its crown. It is culture that integrates in imagination the activities which liberalism so dangerously disperses in practice. ”

“ But our development is lamentably one-sided; we have merely groups of cultivated people, just as older civilizations had them, not the great communities animated by ideals of nobility and beauty that we were promised.
In the many matters which we of the West shall be obliged to consider with reference to the nation and the rest of the world as soon as Kultur and its insolent presumptions have been disposed of, culture, in its ancient and honorable sense, is quite likely to make a poor fight for attention. ”

“ Cultural work is more delicate than revolutionary work because through it the intelligentsia is placed at the service of the people while through revolution it is transformed into a heartless experimenter. ”

“ The failure of social controls, the effort to justify the most extreme forms of aberrant behaviour as primarily civil rights issues, and an almost universal celebration in the arts and media of degeneracy and violence—these and similar manifestations of a condition approaching moral anarchy suggest a future that paralyzes the imagination. Against the background of this desolate landscape the intellectual vogue of the age, seeking to make a virtue out of grim necessity, has adopted for itself the appellation and mission of “deconstructionism”. ”

“ We ought to realise for all humanity the idea of the old Latin adage,—Mens sana in corpore sano. Thus socialism, which current prejudice interprets as a negation of art for art’s sake, is, on the contrary, the most direct route to it, and the affirmation of it.... We wish to raise the masses to the noblest artistic conceptions.... The people have a right to beauty, to science, to an unutilitarian culture of the mind, to whatever, in a word, can enlighten and ennoble it. ”

“ But will their civilisation be of a kind to invite such reflection? It will be, if the present movement is not altogether abortive, a civilisation of security, equity, and peace; where there is no indigence, no war, and comparatively little disease. Such society, certainly, will not offer a field for much of the kind of Art that has been or is now being produced. The primitive folk-song, the epic of war, the novel or play inspired by social strife, will have passed irrecoverably away. ”

“ There has not before appeared a race like that of civilized Europe at this day, thoughtfully unproductive of all art—ambitious—industrious—investigative—reflective, and incapable. Disdained by the savage, or scattered by the soldier, dishonored by the voluptuary, or forbidden by the fanatic, the arts have not, till now, been extinguished by analysis and paralyzed by protection. ”

“ The persistent attempts to reduce literature and poetry and art to a barbaric realism, dragging into light lusts and passions which modesty, culture, and religion hide from view; the disposition, which seems to increase, to make the boundaries of States and empires coincide with kinship of race, and thus to limit men’s interests and aspirations to their own nationalities; the multiplication of armies and the conversion of kingdoms into camps, in which every citizen must be a soldier; the fearful increase of destructive dynamitism and anarchy ”

“ So, too, Jacobinism, in its fierce hatred of the past and of those whom it makes liable for the sins of the past, cannot away with culture,—culture with its inexhaustible indulgence, its consideration of circumstances, its severe judgment of actions joined to its merciful judgment of persons. "The man of culture is in politics," cries Mr. Frederic Harrison, "one of the poorest mortals alive!" Mr. Frederic Harrison wants to be doing business, and he complains that the man of culture stops him with a "turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action." ”

“ We remarked in a former lecture that the State regards itself as the exclusive realm of Culture, and in this character stands in natural warfare with Barbarism. So long as Humanity received but a one-sided Culture in different States, it was to be expected that each particular State should deem its own Culture the true and only civilization, and regard that of other States as mere Barbarism, and their inhabitants as Savages;—and thus feel itself called upon to subdue them. ”

“ It is one of unrelenting hostility to everything that impoverishes man's imagination—to mean cities, to commercial interests, to a culture that arises out of material organization. He dwells forever upon things that arouse the imagination—upon swords and cities, upon temples and palaces, upon slaves in their revolt and kings in their unhappiness. ”

“ The nation of Lessing, Goethe and Schiller schools its children in a gospel of hate toward the nation of Shakespeare and Milton and a long line of glorious poets from Chaucer to Browning. The refining and organizing influences of art have given way to the brutal instincts of malevolence and greed, and a lofty idealism that bound the nations together in a golden chain of beauty finds the precious chain rudely broken. Art, like the other binding forces, has apparently failed in its work of unification. ”

“ A breach was opened there which has gone on widening ever since, and which has been as harmful to our culture as to our politics. On the one side it has been left to anti-culture to control all which is indigenous and “American”; and on the other hand American culture has been like a plant in a thin soil, given over to a sickly dilettantism and the slavish imitation of foreign models, ill understood, copied for matters of form, and, as often as not, imitated for their worst defects. ”

“ Every writer, again, knows clearly the difference between gain-seeking and doing good work, and few there are who have not at times done something, as they say, “to please themselves.” Then in the studio, for all the non-moral protests of Bohemia, there is a tradition, an admirable tradition, of disregard for mercenary imperatives, a scorn of shams and plagiarism that triumphs again and again over economic laws. The public services of the coming civilization will demand, and will develop, a far completer discipline and tradition of honour. ”