/lit/ - Literature

"It is often difficult for Taine to bring off his explanation of romanticism as the art of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. The question of what the politically revolutionary bourgeoisie has to do with the art of Wordsworth or Walter Scott, for example, became all too obvious. In such cases, the French critic availshimself of the claim that here the political movement has "disguised" itself as a revolution in literary style. This explanatory device is entirely characteristic of the sociological and psychological thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, the economic conception of history employs it in a rather naive fashion when it speaks of the religious or artistic disguise, reflection, or sublimation of economic conditions. Friedrich Engels has provided a paradigmatic case of this phenomenon in his characterization of the Calvinist dogma of predestination as a religious disguise for the relentlessness of the capitalist struggle of competition. But the tendency to see a "disguise" everywhere goes much deeper than this. It does not merely correspond to a proletarian disposition, but is rather of more general significance. To a great extent, all ecclesiastical and state institutions and forms, all legal concepts and arguments, everything that is official, and even democracy itself since the time it assumed a constitutional form are perceived as empty and deceptive disguises, as a veil, a façade, a fake, or a decoration. The words, both refined and crude, in which this is encompassed are more numerous and forceful than most of the corresponding idioms of other times; for example, the references to "simulacra" that the political literature of the seventeenth century employs as its characteristic shibboleth. Today the "backstage" that conceals the real movement of reality is constructed everywhere. This betrays the insecurity of the time and its profound sense of being deceived. An era that produces no great form and no representation based on its own presuppositions must succumb to such states of mind and regard everything that is formal and official as a fraud. This is because no era lives without form, regardless of the extent to which it comports itself in an economic fashion. If it does not succeed in finding its own form, then it grasps for thousands of surrogates in the genuine forms of other times and other peoples, only to immediately repudiate the surrogate as a sham."