PROPAGANDA OR PARTISANSHIP?
41
of the separation of "essentials" and unhistorically made the starting
point for all subsequent analyses.
2. Human activity, i.e. practice, is not taken in its actual, objective
configuration, as concerned with material production and with the
changing of the social order, but in its distorted, inverted, ideolog-
ical reflection (as "morals").
Hence the distorted ideological con-
clusion (again unhistorically) must be converted into the theoretical
starting point.
3. This contrast between arts and morals rests upon the uncritical-
ideological illusion that the individual is an "atom" of society.
It also involves the fetishist concept of society as something "cor-
poreal," something that surrounds man as an "external" reality
(the environmental theory), that is not the sum total, the system,
and the result of human activity (although under capitalism this
result is involuntary and unconscious).
4. The isolation of the work of art from social practice, material
production and the class struggle-the concept of the aim of art
as the realization of an "esthetic ideal"-corresponds
to this rigid,
mechanistic distinction between the individual and society, which
underlies the whole bourgeois scheme of "morals."
5. From this same standpoint art and morals are not the results of
identical
social practice, but the realization of
different.
divergent,
and diametrically opposed ideals ("interest" vs. "disinterestedness,"
as Kant puts it).
What Hegel said of the undialectical concept
of body and soul applies to the solution of the problem of literature
and "propaganda" ("morals"):
"In fact, if both are assumed to be
absolutely independent
of
each other, they both become as impenetrable to each other as
matter is assumed to be impenetrable to all other matter."
("Enzyklopaedie/'
§
389).
Examine any of the writings or literary theories of the nineteenth
century and it will be seen that none could escape the ineluctable conse-
quences of this approach to the problem, which was necessarily condi-
tioned by the social existence of the bourgeois class and, more especially,
of the writer {fetishism and the like).
There were but two altelllatives:
Either the writer deliberately abjured "propaganda" (this abjuration be-
ing merely illusory) and created "pure art," which resulted in a
tenden-
tious
portrayal of reality, and hence "tendency literature" in the worst
connotation of the term.
4
Or the "tendency" was contrasted with the
