In the tradition: Amiri Baraka, black liberation, and avant-garde praxis in the U.S

African American Review, Summer-Fall, 2003 by Daniel Won-gu Kim

In the seminal debates on the politics of avant-gardism, Lukacs, Brecht, Adorno, and Benjamin each premised his aesthetic position on the way he assessed and theorized the contemporary status of capitalism and the status and function of culture within it. Each advocated for a given aesthetic strategy (abstract art vs. agit-prop, realist vs. anti-realist) and a terrain of struggle (engaged with the masses and mass culture vs. positioned radically outside or beyond them) on the basis of its effectiveness at weakening the specific cultural logic of a specific historical moment of capitalism. Their different aesthetic positions reflected very different--competing--theories of the state of the world political economy, the state of the social actors (nations, classes) within it, and the relationship of culture to both. Adorno, for instance, saw a monolithic "administered capital" in which class struggle was defunct and mass culture was pervaded with its instrumental rationality, rendering hermetic abstract art the only aesthetic praxis that might escape cooptation and keep the distant hope for social transformation alive. Brecht disagreed fundamentally and posited the continuing importance of organized working-class struggle and, therefore, saw workers' experimental theater as a crucial sphere of aesthetic praxis. Because avant-garde politics and aesthetics are self-consciously theorized and strategized as relational (and not intrinsic to each other), their aesthetic choices cannot be properly understood without also understanding each artist's political and strategic choices.

Turning to Baraka, there are two political questions that are fundamental to understanding his Third World Marxist aesthetics. (14) The first concerns audience: Are the masses of people the leading force for revolution? Baraka clearly aligns with Brecht on this question:

   BARAKA: ... to me the most important
   thing is reaching the working people
   the best way you can--which is
   propaganda distributed in factories.
   But revolutionary [avant-garde] culture
   has to play a role in that.

   INTERVIEWER: Is there a temptation
   to a certain kind of condescension,
   when you have identified a group that
   you are writing for, which prevents
   you from having the kind of sophistication
   your art formerly had?

   BARAKA: No, I don't think so.
   Actually I need to develop a different
   kind of sophistication.... I think plays
   should be direct, poetry should be
   direct, what you say should be direct
   and not obscure. But I think the sophistication
   in trying to link up what is
   direct with what is advanced actually
   requires another kind of skill, which I
   still have to develop. Because I believe
   that even the most simple statement
   should contain the most advanced
   understanding, and the most advanced
   understanding should contain the simplest
   kind of statement. That you have
   to raise a dialectical relationship
   between making things popular and
   raising people's standards. You don't
   make things popular just because you
   want them to be simple, but because
   you want people to understand them.
   But when people understand things,
   then they demand more. And so I
   think the question is, how do you combine
   the advanced with the popular?
   ("The Theatre" 141-42)