the Territory of artistic autonomy

Similar to the Territory of abstraction is the Territory of artistic primacy or autonomy, in which it is assumed that no value is inherent in subjects but that value is conferred upon subjects by the art and the attention of the artist. The subjects of the world are only “raw material.”

Wendell Berry, “Writer and Region” in What Are People For?

I greatly shortened this one up, something I have not done for the others. I did this because I don’t have a lot to say about where Berry goes in this one (about poetry, art, and subjectivity), but I do think his initial point relates back to yesterday’s post.

The autonomy Berry is talking about here is not the autonomy of the artist, but of the work of art itself; it is believed to be autonomous from all meaning or value. The subjects of a work are unimportant other than for assigning value to the work of creating the art. All meaning is stripped from that which the artist observes, and it becomes another form of abstraction. Art in this form can no longer teach us something about the world or experience; it can only be a consumer product, with all meaning tied up into those who consume the art. The artist can’t teach us anything; we can only teach the artist how to create popular art that will have a value in the market place.

This relates to the subject of abstraction in place because it is another example of how modernity works to strip all meaning from existence in favor of an experience of reality that is transactional. This is a thread that runs quietly through all these territories Berry illuminates and that we have spent the last week thinking about. Self-righteousness, historical naivety, despair, global point of view, abstraction: all these are Territories we are ushered into, in order to make us believe that the material, tangible world has no meaning, no hope, or no telos. Thus, we become easier to extract, relocate, and replace; we become commodities in a world of commodities, all temporary and a few hours old at best.

To return to the story that this image is drawn from, Berry’s critique of Huckleberry Finn is that the book does not live up to its potential, but is instead “stunted” by his adventure off into a Territory. As Berry writes,

There is, then, something stunted in Huckleberry Finn. I have hated to think so – for a long time I tried consciously not to think so – but it is so. What is stunted is the growth of Huck’s character. When Mark Twain replaces Huck as author, he does so apparently to make sure that Huck remains a boy. Huck’s growing up, which through the crisis of his fidelity to Jim (“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”) has been central to the drama of the book, is suddenly thwarted first by the Tom-foolery of Jim’s “evasion” and then by Huck’s planned escape to the “Territory.” The real “evasion” of the last chapters is Huck’s, or Mark Twain’s, evasion of the community responsibility that would have been a natural and expectable next step after his declaration of loyalty to his friend. Mark Twain’s failure or inability to imagine this possibility was a disaster for his finest character, Huck, whom we next see not as a grown man, but as partner in another boyish evasion, a fantastical balloon excursion to the Pyramids.

Twain gave no meaning to Huck’s growth as a character in the choices he made in the final chapters of the book; by refusing to show that Huck’s life was different as a result of the virtuous choice he made, he essentially invalidated, or at least made meaningless, that choice, and could have left it out of the novel. Thus, the adventure to the Territory, for Berry, becomes an conscious rejection of maturity.

So, too, our acceptance of these Territories in our own lives is a rejection of our own growth, as people with a place, with a purpose, and with a telos to our lives. Those things – place, purpose, meaning – all require an acceptance of reality as it is, a choice to live in this world, with love and feeling and pathos and tragedy. To escape to a Territory – to despair, or practice self-righteousness, or to abstract all around us – is to refuse reality, to refuse to be a mature people. And this has consequences – for our ability to form relationships and love properly, for our world and our environment, for our cultural and societal structures. To quote again from this essay, a passage I quoted on its own last week: “We want to be free; we want to have rights; we want to have power; we do not yet want much to do with responsibility.”

This is the point of this last week, and why I found this passage in Berry’s essay so interesting, but perhaps I would turn his image on it’s head. I think we are all mostly in the Territories; we need to escape back home. Our lives together and our world depend on us growing up, and not giving in to despair, to self-righteousness, to the tendency to abstract our places and meaning. A key element of life in post-modernity is a crumbling social awareness, and I think Berry identified why that’s happening, more than thirty years ago in an essay about Huck Finn.