The concern of art is essentially morality, it's one and only effort is to distinguish goodness from badness. But art is not therefore knowledge, since knowledge is the attempt to make a distinction between two types of things (such as goodness and badness)
in the world. Art recognizes the difficulty of such a distinction, it recognizes that all oppositions can be deconstructed, in the very precise sense: "the practice whereby one demonstrates that the two elements of an opposition are not flat but hierarchical, and that the lower one is in fact present essentially in the higher one". But this is precisely why art continues, art is
moral yet not deconstructible -- in other words, it forms an opposition yet this opposition cannot be deconstructed -- because art always
continues to think. Art therefore never finishes elaborating this opposition, it never claims that its opposition has a concrete reference in the world. In other words, the incompleteness of art is not a half-assed effort (and what I derisively term "half-assed effort" is otherwise known as as "provocation", "inspiration", "groundwork") but rather ends up being about it's own difficulty in elaboration, what it's fighting against in attempting to make this effort, what aids it, and so on. In other words, art is not an attempt to insist on this opposition by piling up information (as is the tendency of bad scholars and bad artists) but rather, it is rather much more focused, it is constantly thinking of itself, the difficulty of forming or maintaining this opposition, and so forth. In other words, the reflexivity of art is the essence of art, it is the attempt to think about why one cannot even make the smallest baby step towards real work, to define the problem so that one can even attempt to begin to work, one cannot even begin to rise up against badness because the problem is not merely a matter of willpower or discipline, but rather of the inability to even define this issue.
Art is therefore always two components: the attempt to define good and bad, and the performance of the inability to define this, which then reflects back on what good or bad is. For instance, if we argue that badness is pretentiousness, we are arguing that badness is precisely the thinking that one has succeeded in distinguishing goodness from badness. But there are more interesting arguments out there -- and this will be our effort in the next few days, regarding Keats.
(Basically, it's possible to substitute the word "thinking" and "art" in the passage above, I make no distinction between art and thinking at the present.)
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