As Schiller notes, art has the
power to bridge the gap between the factical world as it is and the ethical
ideal of the world as it ought to be, and it can inspire us to act in ways that
mere knowledge or commands. In the modern world, where images and songs are
available to us instantaneously through the use and mediation of technology,
this power to inspire action takes on a different form than it did in the past.
Benjamin and Adorno are right to be wary of technology’s influence on art and
subsequently on culture as well, for the eminence of technology in the
production and distribution of artworks makes them susceptible to the control
and exploitation of those who control the technology of creation and
distribution. The fear that these two have is that art’s power to inspire will
be manipulated by the media and/or the government to control the population.
However, in as much as they are used as propaganda, works cease to be artful,
since they are being used as equipment and they are exhaustible. For art to
exist as art, it can still serve the exhortative function that Schiller sees
while not being totally exhausted.
The
Heideggerian analysis of the nature of artwork reveals how it can come to have
this inspirational power. In viewing the Van Gogh painting of the peasant’s
shoes which Heidegger analyzes, we are made aware of the essences of
things-in-themselves (namely the shoes in this instance) beyond what we are
normally capable. In looking at an actual pair of shoes, we try to understand
what they are made of and how they appear to our senses. In using a pair of
shoes, we have an implicit knowledge of what the shoes are and how they
function, but we are not consciously aware of this. In using the shoes, as with
all equipment, we do not know them while we use them.
In viewing artful
representation, however, we try to grapple with the shoes in a new way. How did
they get there? Who used them? This
process of questioning leads us to understand the connection between the
factical and the transcendent aspects of the artwork. On the one hand, it calls
to mind the thingly nature of the shoes, but on the other, it shows how the
shoes are more than just the matter. According to Heidegger, artwork reveals
truth, but not through facts about the world. Rather, artwork allows for an
“unconcealedness” of being in the world and the tension between the brute
matter of the earth and the world which our perceptions construct upon it. This
αληθεια aligns with what Schiller sees as the power of artwork, particularly if
we allow for the free play of the viewer’s imagination which Kant emphasizes.
Artistic truth as unconcealing provides a meeting place for what is and what
ought to be that is available for the consideration of the viewer. Simply
looking at things as they are is not enough to make this connection from the
“is” to the “ought,” nor is the application of equipment and tools able to
cause this awareness.
The nature of
propaganda, then, is not that of artwork. If artwork opens up the possibilities
of the world and Being, propaganda seeks to conceal in order to effect change
through deception. If we understand propaganda as “material that attempts to
motivate action or to persuade/produce convictions with the intent to motivate
to action, particularly where it employs deception or manipulation,” then it
defies the nature of art in so much as it is used to push a particular agenda
or direct the minds of the audience. If it obscures the relation of the
factical earth and the world or attempts to forcibly conceal certain things,
then it is not artwork, for it is not an unconcealing. Further, propaganda does
not allow for the free play of the imagination, but rather seeks to confine it
to a certain method.
The problems of
propaganda come from a failure to recognize the intention behind them. Rather
than an intention to create (in a general sense), the propagandist intends to
convince and control, and in so far as these intentions are not clear to the
viewer, then the propaganda is successful. However, if the viewer is aware of
the agenda behind it, then the work could be viewed artfully. For instance, in
the modern era, we may view “Triumph of the Will” without the feeling that we
should accept the Nazi regime. We can view it as an unconcealing; we see the
actual events and people of the Nuremburg rallies, and yet we can also
understand there is some story coming across to us from the filmmaker, and we
can ask ourselves the same sorts of questions as we do before the Van Gogh
painting. In this way, propaganda can be diffused, provided that we as viewers
are able to understand the ploys used for convincing and then move past them to exercise our
own imaginative free play.
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