2/14/2023 0 Comments Germ the poducer![]() That means that the correct political tendency includes a literary tendency. I want to show you that the political tendency of a work can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct. For I hope to be able to show you that the concept of tendency, in the summary form that it usually occurs in the above-mentioned debate, is a completely inappropriate instrument of political literary criticism. Yet you want to advance the study of fascism with such a proof?’ That is indeed what I have in mind. ‘That is’, you will perhaps object, ‘a very peculiar, not to say farfetched, subject. I ask your attention for an attempt at this proof. But at the same time I refuse to decree it. The second formulation is not uninteresting. We can also decree: a work which exhibits the correct tendency must necessarily exhibit all other qualities. We can say: a work which exhibits the correct political tendency need demonstrate no further qualities. Of course we can simply decree what this relation is. Naturally this formula is unsatisfactory as long as we do not understand the connection which really exists between the two factors: tendency and quality. It has never broken away from the boring ‘on the one hand – on the other hand’: on the one hand we should demand that the poet’s work conform to the correct political tendency, on the other hand we have the right to expect that his work be of high quality. It is well-known to you, so you also know how fruitless it has been. There you have the key word about which there has long been a debate, as you well know. He directs his energies toward what is useful for the proletariat in the class struggle. His decision is determined on the basis of the class struggle when he places himself on the side of the proletariat. An advanced type of writer acknowledges this alternative. ![]() So you show him that even without admitting it, he works in the interests of a particular class. The bourgeois writer of popular stories does not acknowledge this alternative. You believe that the current social situation forces the poet to choose whom his activity will serve. You are not inclined to accord him this autonomy. But you are all more or less familiar with it as the question of the poet’s autonomy: his freedom to write whatever he may please. Certainly it has rarely been posed in this form. Since then, the question of the poet’s right to exist has not often been stated with the same insistence but it is today. But he considered it destructive, superfluous – in a perfect community, needless to say. He had a high idea of the power of poetry. In the interest of the community, he does not allow them to live there. You recall how Plato treats the poets in his projected State. II s'agit de gagner les intellectuels “la classe ouvriere, en leur faisant prendre conscience de l'identité de leurs de-marches spirituelles et de leurs conditions de producteur. Walter Benjamin 1970 The Author as Producerįirst Published: New Left Review 1/62, July-August 1970 The Author as Producer by Walter Benjamin 1970
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