Is All Art 'Political'?
NOTE: THIS CONTENT HAS BEEN INCORPORATED INTO PART X OF OUR BOOK (page 8).
Inasmuch as art lives by the life of the artist’s mind[i], inasmuch as his act of subcreation consists in the way he reconfigures the universe passing into his mind, “transforming, moving about, bringing together”[ii], his art will convey what he thinks about reality, knowledge, human nature; these will delineate the possibilities of his work. So any “new type of the beautiful” the artist is able to “discover in things in their endless exchanges and correspondences” before re-composing them in its image[iii] will be filtered through his ontotheology[iv] and integralism[v]. Whatever visual tropes, narrative structures, characters or events it contains, his work will stand as special or participatory mode intrinsically relative to his transcendental vision of being, oriented to his understanding of the good.
Thus Tolkien can say “the primary world of men and elves is the same, if differently valued”[vi]. Even Mao was almost right when he said “there is no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, detached from or independent of politics”. He erred with the journalists in assuming the pre-eminence of political meaning, which in fact derives from an ontotheology, a view on what being, human nature and ends are. We see here how the very transcendence of politics by art, the latter’s instantiation of a view on reality [with universal pretensions], is the source of its political relevance (and can alternatively observe how the politics, which consists in the imposition of form upon the multitude and other practical sciences as matter[vii], is integralist/ontotheological)!
The practical implication is the permeation of art by the political, epistemic and metaphysical ecology it exists within. Thus the sensation that “games are becoming political” is truncated. They are instead being injected with superficially-different political content, which accounts for broader awareness of its presence. Camps opposing the presence of this content incorrently believe in the possibility of politically and metaphysically neutral art, while its proponents genuinely believe in its revolutionary or disruptive nature.
Awareness of the ontotheological constitution of art would inhibit the ability of top-down actors to disseminate new political and metaphysical ideas without the awareness of those on the receiving end. It would also enable us to demand the coherent ontotheology art requires (and bad art lacks[viii]).
[i] A+S 193, 58
[ii] A+S 97
[iii] A+S 47,97
[iv] https://greendragoncvr.com/ontotheology-the-drama-of-being
[v] https://greendragoncvr.com/everyone-is-an-integralist
[vi] https://greendragoncvr.com/a-theory-of-video-game-criticism 6.b
[vii] A+S 234
[viii] https://greendragoncvr.com/a-theory-of-video-game-criticism 6.c