ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE:
Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation

a Manifesto of the OmniCircus

VIII. THE CLASS NATURE OF ART

Since the advent of class society, art has had a class character. For every important artistic tendency there is a social layer that gave birth to it and nourishes it spiritually and economically. Each of these social layers has its own conception of art, architecture, and social design based on the historical role of the class, its place in production, and corresponding modes of consciousness. As Sergei Eisenstein put it when talking about filmmaking, "The final order (of the film composition) is inevitably determined, consciously or unconsciously, by the social premise of the maker of the film composition. His class-determined tendency is the basis of what seems to be an arbitrary cinematographic relation to the object placed, or found, before the camera."

The moving force behind social (and thus artistic) evolution for the last 6,000 years has been class conflict - a struggle between the privileged and the oppressed. But the unseen force accompanying these dramatic events, like the drone of the tamboura in Indian classical music, has been material production.

Underlying the "subject matter' of the art of class society there exists the language of design to which the works show allegiance, which is the expression of certain relations of production. These relations of production can be divided into two opposing aspects.

1. The means of production, the technical forces by which the society meets its material needs.
2. The modes of production, the legal forms of ownership and control of the means of production.

The basic forms of the work of art result from these social farces in conflict, in the same sense that speech arises form the relationship between the technology (tongue, voice box) and the need to project a meaningful sound.

Arising on top of this material foundation are the ideas and emotion expressed in the so-called "subject matter" of the work. The real content of an artwork is much more profound than just its ideological subject matter, because the cultural creation is always a reflection of, or participant in, the social dialectic - the conflict in society between the means of production and the forms of ownership of the means of production.

Political, religious, ideological and aesthetic notions that are expressed in the subject matter of a cultural work are arenas in which humanity becomes conscious of the underlying social dialectic and fight it out. These struggles are ultimately subordinate to the conflict between means and mode of production, and for the same reason the subject matter of an artwork is historically subordinate to its design language, its language of form, which is not abstract at all but is based on the concrete conflicts between the development to technology and the nature of the ruling class that controls it. It is a huge mistake, therefore, to look at the content of art only in terms of the subject matter directly expressed in the work.

When social struggles create the need for new forms of expression (new languages), in whatever mode of the social sphere, they arise first in art. This implies that a 'socially progressive' artwork must not only have a progressive content but must also express itself using a progressive form language. First "alphabetical symbols", then "equivalent human utterances", "words", and finally "syntax" must be created before great and new thoughts can be manifested via language. Artists - those magical infants, shamans and prodigies who we sacrifice like old toys in our inexorable quest for mammon - made these tools! This, then, is the social function of art - it acts as the "genes" of social evolution, the trigger for new forms of mass culture in the unceasing and inexorable evolution of societies. Far from being purely personal, art is the most collective (albeit unconscious) form of cultural consciousness: it is the Vulcan Forge of the modes of expression of practical life.

Shakespeare wrote his plays in a time when the English dictionary contained less than 10,000 words. He wrote his plays using over 15,000 different words - he created words as well as plays (ex. - critical, monumental, obscene, majestic) and sculpted the English language. The reason we use his words is that he invested them with great emotional power and thus sent them on wings of fire into mass culture. He examined the human psyche on a level of clarity and resolution that was needed by the bourgeois (individualist) revolution of his day, and not before. And he helped make the cultural identity of the British nation, in the same way that Dante, who helped create the Italian language, also therefore laid copestones for the eventual nation of Italy. James Joyce led a veritable phalanx of modernist writers who have experimented with making new language. The underlying evolutionary function of literature is to create new language, and the primeval purpose of the 'masterpiece' is to act as the vehicle, implement new and progressive language from the laboratory of art into mass culture.