Introduction

literary activism, clarity and confusion

pp. 1-28

in: Geoffrey A. Baker, The aesthetics of clarity and confusion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

This introduction discusses a twentieth-century exchange between Jean-Paul Sartre and Theodor Adorno that captures the two opposed ways of thinking about political aesthetics first codified by Émile Zola and Friedrich Nietzsche. Sartre (and Georg Lukács and others) represents the aesthetic of clarity, premised on ideas of a knowable world whose problems can be revealed and communicated to an audience in order to spur change. Adorno (and others), on the other hand, sponsors an aesthetic of confusion, premised on a view that knowledge itself is the root of social problems; this aesthetic disarms unpalatable political formations by disabling the logical modes of thought from which they spring. A final section considers theories of the neutrality or inherent apoliticality of art (Oscar Wilde, Marjorie Garber).