Meaninglessness
Reading through Harper’s April on the plane, I ran into this essay from Terry Eagleton, who I had seen in this Times Sunday Magazine profile, which has made me a bit overly-sensitive of the conversation topics of Atlanta’s brunch scene - at others’ tables and my own (refi-, anyone?) - reviewing a biography of William Hazlitt (no prior knowledge of this guy). Anyway, good thoughts on the meaning of meaninglessness, to comfort our poor narrator and vindicate the outcast Bloch:
Hazlitt, then, belonged to a current of radical Romaticism for which the opposite of oppressive power was the creative imagination. The imagination represented a freedom and spiritual wealth that were not to be found in the wealth that were not to be found in the satanic mills of early industrial Britain. It was a transformative power, and as such had affinities with revoluntiary politics. It testified to the human capacity to project beyond the present, and thus offered a foretaste of utopia. The imagination was boundless, and so it was uniquely precious in a civilization in which everything could be weighed and measured. Art was play, not labor, and it held out a promise of emancipation to the wage slaves of the first industrial capitalist nation in history. The work of art obeyed no law but its own and could therefore be seen as a model of human autonomy. It had no reason or purpose beyond its own self-delight; and in a utilitarian age that judged things in terms of their practical functions, this glorious uselessness carried some subversive implications.
From William Blake to Oscar Wilde, art was an image of what men and women could become in chaged political conditions. They, too, could be gloriously pointless; in fact, this was the whole point of human existence, which the grey-bearded puritans and chill-blooded champions of the work ethic had never understood. Human beings resembled works of art in being ends in themselves. Art for art’s sake was not a retreat from politics; it was a politics all its own.
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