Art and Politics

“The difference between appropriation and appreciation is intention and knowledge of the culture” said the wonderful body music musician Antwan Davis at a recent workshop I attended. I have been increasingly concerned and upset by too-casual charges of appropriation by the woke crowd that ends up sending us all back to the corners of our tribe, cowering in fear of the “gotcha!” atmosphere created by people who should know better. My entire life is based on the notion that we are all inter-present in each other, awaiting the spark of inspiration that a particular artist or whole culture can awaken in us so that a 7-year-old boy born in Bali and living in Java can hear a Thelonious Monk recording and four years later, is on stage playing jazz piano with Wynton Marsalis in New York. That kids in San Francisco are playing taiko drums and kids in Tokyo are playing bluegrass banjo. That I can help host a course called Orff-Afrique and every person we encounter in Djodze, Ghana happily invites us— music teachers from Iran, Brazil, Spain, Australia, Thailand, China, South Africa, the U.S. and beyond— into the dancing circle or lets us sit down to drum even in the midst of an indigenous trance dance ceremony. That’s the world I live in and love in.

But I note that so many of the people ready to pounce on the artist’s experience of constant borrowing are not artists themselves. And to be clear, there are hundreds of examples of artists inappropriately co-opting another’s music and getting rich and famous for it because of their white privilege. I speak out constantly about this, but we have to be able to distinguish between the levels of borrowing and the intention. Indeed, it’s the literal one-size-fits-all thinking of non-artists, whether from the Right or the Left,  that is the problem. No room for nuance or subtlety. I believe in the power of the arts and I also believe in the necessity to be politically aware and active, but the two don’t always blend easily (see my recent Jazz and Freedom post).

But in re-reading Philip Roth’s novel I Married a Communist, I found a stunning passage that lays bare the difference between the two. I’ll resist comment and let his extraordinary words speak for themselves. (Note that when he says “literature,” he could easily say music/dance/ poetry/ visual arts/ theater— in short, the arts.)

“Politics is the great generalizer and literature the great particularizer. And not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other—they are in an antagonistic relationship. To politics, literature is decadent, soft, irrelevant, boring, wrongheaded, dull, something that makes no sense and that really oughtn’t to be Why? Because the particularizing impulse is literature. How can you be an artist and renounce the nuance? But how can you be a politician and allow the nuance? As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify…to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself— for life as it might itself prefer to be publicized.

During the first five, six years of the Russian Revolution the revolutionaries cried, ‘Free love, there will be free love!’ But once they were in power, they couldn’t permit it. Because what is free love? Chaos. And they didn’t want chaos. That isn’t why they made their glorious revolution. They wanted something carefully disciplined, organized, contained, predictable scientifically, if possible. Free love disturbs the organization, their social and political and cultural machine.. Art also disturbs the organization. Literature disturbs the organization.

Not because it is blatantly for or against , or even subtly for or against. It disturbs the organization because it is not general. The intrinsic nature of the particular is to be particular, and the intrinsic nature of particularity is to fail to conform. Generalized suffering: there is Communism. Particularizing suffering: there is literature. In that polarity is the antagonism. Keeping the particular alive in a simplifying, generalizing world—that’s where the battle is joined.