As an introduction I would like to use the;

Preface: to Empire by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri.

The following parts are an attempt to formulate a line of thought concerning art and politics in a broad sense;

part 1: The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits.

part 2: "The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself."

part 3: Yet, despite the overwhelming power of Western media and ideology, with their saturation effect, a large variety of alternative cultural strains persist. The problem is that, lacking vehicles of dissemination of their own, these cultural expressions, as with biological diversity, are increasingly faced with extinction. Worse, they are being appropriated as commodities. Variability, essential for the revitalization and innovation of any culture, may be replaced by the monotony of prefabricated and sterile intellectual software.

part 4: There is a breathlessness about this shift from the normal object-oriented activity of the mind to such dialectical self-consciousness -- something of the sickening shudder we feel in an elevator's fall or in a sudden dip in an airliner. That recalls us to our bodies much as this recalls us to our mental positions as thinkers and observers. The shock indeed is basic, and constitutive of the dialectic as such: without this transformational moment, without this initial conscious transcendence of an older, more naïve position, there can be no question of any genuine dialectical coming to consciousness.