Another of the surprising things that Shulamith Firestone’s ‘The Dialectic of Sex’ claims is that in the future post-revolutionary society, there will be no art and no culture. That of course sounds distinctly grim, but what is really meant is that there will not be the distinctions between art and science, and between culture and everyday life.
I’m going to try to lay out where Firestone is coming from, but I should confess in advance that I am not very artistic. I very rarely find art galleries more than slightly interesting, and my response to poetry has often been something along the lines of ‘why not just write that in prose?’ So my perspective is likely to reflect that.
Anyway, here’s the set-up. Some of our activities, like almost all the activities of other species, are non-cultural in that they respond more or less straightforwardly to our surroundings: we see the task that needs to be done, and we do it; we see the food and we eat it; we get told to go away and we go away. ‘Culture’ is when we formulate an idea far removed from reality, and then try to do something with it. Firestone describes this as the attempt to “realise the conceivable in the actual”.
