That Crusty Old Marxist
Posted on March 7th, 2005 in musings and
Teaching what I hope is a critcal art appreciation course at a local community college, I find John Berger’s Ways of Seeing to be very useful in challenging beginning students of art to consider works of art in relation to a broader field of cultural images. While some of Berger’s critique can read a little dated (circa 1972), his retro-edgy marxism is really salient, especially given that my students know nothing of marxism much less any formalized critique of cultural, social, economic, or political institutions and conditions. (Not that they have no critical theory of their own–many of the students do, only in a vernacular form.)
There are moments in the text when Berger really shines and the marxist critique revs up and all you want to do raise a fist and take to the freakin streets. Try this on:
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, amongst other thing, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams.
Hell yeah! (Read a longer excerpt here)
