art and literature
A knowledge of art and literature is to complete the 'trilogy of the
superstructure' consisting of practices which give rise to different types
of cognitive appropriation of reality. We can see here just how much of
the legacy of aesthetics is unquestioningly taken on board by Althusser.
That 'art' exists and has a specific nature is simply taken for granted.
Furhermore, in simply subsuming 'literature' under the general category
of 'art', it is clear that what is being sought is some 'effect' which
all art forms might be said to share in spite of the fact that they differ
both in material form and in respect of the relations of production within
which, as different artistic practices, they are set. To put the objection
simply : why should there be any common features shared by poetry, novel
writing, painting, sculpture, music and drama which would justify our
regarding them as 'art' in this sense? In failing to ask this question
and to ask this question is only means of breaking with the concern of
aesthetics - Althusser simply assumes that there is some such set of
common features which must be described and analysed.
Given this, the specificity of art is said to consist in the essentially
mid-way, equivocal position it occupies between science and ideology.
'Art' as such hovers between 'science' as such and 'ideology' as such.
Whilst it does not form 'knowledge' in the strict sense, art - 'authentic
art', that is, 'not works of an average or mediocre level - is said to
occupy a special relationship to science in that it enables us to 'see',
'perceive' or 'feel' something that alludes to reality. That 'something'
is 'the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which
it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes.
