Alison wrote: "Your questions are far from naive and (to my mind)
absolutely to the point. Rebecca also has raised the same questions in
a different
way. These are genuinely difficult issues, and not easily dismissed
by a reference to a "heirachy of tastes", because that begs the
question: whose taste? And this is not easily, either, untangled
into a question of snobbery or elitism: it is rather more subtle than
that, and I can only refer slantingly to what Helmut Lachenmann, the
composer, calls the "cultural machine" in order to signal the
complexity of what I'm talking about. Women have always been accused
of being in "bad taste": this is one of many common methods of
silencing. Which is why a woman such as Mary Coleridge barely
figures on the map of 19C poetry, although - objectively speaking, in
terms of her skills with language - she is at least as good as many
far better known poets of her time. "Standards" are a game where the
rules change. And for centuries the rules have been set by men in a
highly gendered society. This is such an inescapable and unarguable
fact, that I do wonder why it is so often so easily ignored in these
arguments."
Hierarchies of taste and judgments of quality emerge over time.
Certainly the desire of particular ruling classes to maintain their
power influences their taste and thus the taste of the classes who
support them. But taste is also influenced by feelings and values of
classes (and other groups) in revolt. In the long run I think - with
Harold Bloom, and against Lachenmann or Bourdieu or Eagleton - that "the
aesthetic" is not merely an ideology; that considerations of artistic
quality are distinct from those of social justice. It is as bad to say
"it's far more complex" as it is to say "it's all very simple" if either
is said automatically. In the present case, I see two alternatives:
there is an ideal of what is artistically good (which is constantly
adapting to absorb "new" ideas from "other" groups and cultures); or
there is one art (and, a fortiori, truth) for gays, one for white men,
one (or ultimately two?) for blacks, one for straight women, one for gay
women. And beneath whatever poststructuralist obfuscation, the argument
for this latter ideal will be: you don't see my work as good (or are
incapable of seeing it as good) because you're male, straight, white,
etc.
Standards are not merely an exclusionary, ideological "game"; people
hold them earnestly. And it's certainly true that "for centuries the
rules have been set by men in a highly gendered society." Nowadays
academics are trying very hard to make room, redress the historical
wrongs, however you want to put it, of Aphra Behn and Mary Coleridge and
Artemisia Gentileschi etc. But the fact that they were unjustly ignored
and degraded does not make them better than they were. Nor should one
have to prove his progressive bona fides by saying they were.
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