How Ideology Functions in Art

From a longer thread.

Ideology is not a sauce, that you add to a work, like your values, and if the work is drenched in too much sauce you can’t taste anything else. That’s “didactic.”

Ideology is how we think things work. Any art that has a relationship between two things in it, like X causes Y, will be reflected by how we think that causation works.

For instance, romance. You may be a teen writer who has zero motive to spread to the world your “ideology” or any moral system. You just want to write some good old slash. You happen to believe that asymmetrical traditional gender roles are how romance works best, so you write a lot of erotic fiction about men seducing skittish women leading to a violent explosion of pent up lust. You don’t do this because you think “people should hear this” but because you just think this is how ideal romance works.

A gay critic, or someone asexual, or an egalitarian who believes the only strong relationships were between equals, would read this and feel uncomfortable. Not because it concretely espoused a political platform they disagreed with, but because its understanding of how the world worked read as incorrect to them, so the work would just seem implausible and incoherent.

Similarly you could write a story where the free market liberated from a corrupt king solves everyone’s problem, and the social justice communist would identify ninety nine “inaccuracies” in it. On both sides, ideology is taking place, but neither one has to be “rigid” as you say. Nor would it be very easy to write some art that was simply “free” from ideology. How else can they describe how something works, without holding assumptions about “how things work”.

---

But following thesublemons’s advice, little fandom authors sit down and try to write a story that just feels right to them, without selling some political message. But to us, it reads as terribly ideological, filled with assumptions and values we don’t hold. And so we accuse them of being hacks, and not letting art speak for itself, and they see us as… etc etc.

It’s true there is also bad didactic morality plays out there, like Pilgrim’s Progress, but they really are much less common than the casual assumptions that underlie most literature.

Umwelts/world models are political because they’re what politics are made of. The disconnect becomes more obvious when the world-model of the audience differs from that of the creator in important ways. (This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: speculative fiction and anything with an unreliable narrator basically plays with intentionally warped models of the world that the audience must slowly assimilate, as a means of expression.)

(Of course, when somebody is creating a work for a didiactic purpose, there’s a tendency to emphasize differences to an absurd degree to aid in group membership signalling, and to emphasize any normative elements.)

Our basic problem, though, is that people tend to have most of their life experience through fiction, and they do a lot of this before they understand biases. They will accept, to a certain degree, that models of the world they encounter in fiction over and over outside of contexts that are marked as unrealistic are accurate. 

This isn’t an unreasonable assumption to make, but it’s often untrue, because of selection biases on who creates certain kinds of media and what gets wide distribution. For instance, when I was young, I had the idea that high schools had a strict social hierarchy, that dances were important and meaningful parts of that hierarchy, and that college life was dominated by fraternity-sponsored alcohol abuse and tests; it turns out that none of these things were remotely accurate, but instead were the tail end of TV writers copying what movie writers had success selling in the late 70s and early 80s, largely as a side effect of adapting stories about the 1950s that ran in the National Lampoon magazine in the 1960s. In other words, my worldview was 40 years out of date because of a string of happy accidents that happened to John Hughes and Ivan Reitman.

It’s not like my misconceptions about how high school and college worked did much damage (other than having essentially lost a semester to a misapprehension about how important class attendance was). But, other common patterns have bigger problems. Romance comedies are a major issue: they treat creepy, obsessive, and abusive behavior as ideal, and they normalize things like jealousy and consent violation. It’s not that we shouldn’t tell these stories, but if we have the capacity to be mindful about how we tell them and who we tell them to, we have a duty to try to do harm reduction. (How many really bad relationships have resulted from a pair of people fucking themselves and each other up because they wouldn’t let go of values they learned from Love Actually?)

(I’m probably covering ground already covered in earlier conversations here…)

Nice John Hughes story.

The post directly above is mostly right, but gets a couple things wrong that are worth emphasizing:

The politics of the art isn’t about things existing, like “there is an important high school dance” or “there are frats at college”, but the structure of how they work. Romcom niceguyness isn’t just the statement that “guys who are overly into the girl of their dreams exist”, but also that “stubbornness and devotion will eventually win out.” This structure of how something works, can then be applied to many other different scenarios, which is much more powerful than “in high school there are cliques,” which says little about life outside high school

(Loosely you can think of this as the difference between a metaphor and a simile. A simile only takes advantage of the comparative items properties, but a metaphor shows how one thing is functioning like something else.)

The other trap to avoid is that art rarely infects our mind and forces us to see things a different way. The confusion over what college will be like non-withstanding, trying to predict what people will believe based on what art they have consumed is a mug’s game. We have a lot of resources for analyzing the world at our disposal: non-fiction, our sense of reason, first hand stories from people we know, and sure, fiction. Absence any other information at all, fiction may provide us with our best guess, but it’s not at all clear that people trust fiction over the other resources or any more than they should. There’s no mystic subversion of our reason going on. (One should never enforce a concern about social influence on beliefs until there are actual studies showing the consistency and reliability of this mechanism.)

Instead, the structure in fiction is a pretty good guide to what the author, and the author’s culture believe about how the world works. They’re a reflection of the ideology they exist in. So, in my example, you can tell a lot about what the original teen girl thinks about how romance works for her fic, but you should not worry that they will convince other teens into heteronormativity.

(Lastly, politics or worldview, is not the same as ideology. Everything is political, but ideology is a distinct type of politics.)