What if there were no such
thing as the aesthetic?
What if there were no such thing as the
aesthetic? I want to ask this question seriously. My aim is simple but
immoderate. It is to leave nothing undone that can contribute to the discrediting
of the category of the aesthetic and the aesthetic discourse that sustains
and is sustained by it. Nothing worth the having is to be hoped for from
the aesthetic.
I want in particular to do three things. First of all, I want to show how
regularly unsuccessful attempts are to define the nature of art or of the
aesthetic. I want to convince you, though without too much fuss, that attempts
to specify what art and the aesthetic are and do turn out to be insufficiently
exhaustive or insufficiently exclusive. That is, they all fail to include
important forms of activity and effect that bear upon the experience of
art, or fail to exclude forms of experience and effect that belong to nonaesthetic
experiences.
Secondly, I want to consider some apparently more sceptical, and less essentialist
accounts of how the aesthetic is defined, and the consequences of these
definitions: institutional and functionalist theories of art, the principal
names being Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton.
Here, I will consider a special use of institutional arguments to rescue
art and the aesthetic as a category in the work of Lyotard. The gloomy
advance news is that these accounts turn out to depend on or troublingly
to revert to attitudes towards the aesthetic that are just as reified and
essentialist as those of serious aesthetic theorists.
Thirdly, having established, I hope, that there is indeed no such thing
as the aesthetic, and that it does us no good at all to carry on allowing
ourselves or other people to suppose there is, I will wonder what the consequences
might be, for thinking about contemporary art and questions of contemporary
aesthetics. My conclusions will be deflatingly cautious. I will also risk
some generalisations about some more general gains to be had from the withering
away of aesthetic discourse. Here I may see more grounds for being of good
cheer.
The reach of the aesthetic
To what kinds of things do we typically refer when we speak
of the aesthetic? I think they can be divided into three, or at a pinch
four. We typically refer to aesthetic feelings; to aesthetic qualities;
and to aesthetic objects and processes (for all the hoo-hah that there
has been about the move away from the aesthetic object, it seems that nearly
all the things that could be done and said with aesthetic objects can be
done and said in much the same ways with aesthetic processes, however abstract,
virtual or immaterial they may be). The difficulty in being sure about
what kind of thing we are actually talking about when we are talking about
the aesthetic is not the least of the problems attaching to the term.
Here might the place to respond to an objection mounted by John Armstrong
when he heard a version of this paper as part of the Formation of Contemporary
Aesthetics seminar he mounted for the School of Advanced Study in the University
of London. John objected to my continual running together of the aesthetic
as a particular mode of judgement, as first substantially defined by Kant
in his third Critique, with discourses about the essential source
or nature or effect of the work of art. It is indeed a surprise for anyone
who has heard so much about Kantian aesthetics in the interpretation of
works of art to go to the Critique of Judgement and find that there
is so little there that has to do essentially with art, or indeed, any
other recognisably human activity. Kant knows too well, in fact, how crippling
such an association would be for his whole argument. His argument is not
psychological but transcendental, in that he aims, not to characterise
a particular faculty but rather to specify the conditions which would have
to be met for it to exist. Aesthetic judgement would have to be that kind
of judgement in which no considerations of the significance or purpose
or interest of the object under judgement operated, and therefore in which
the action of judging encountered itself directly, prior as it were to
any kind of contingent circumstance. Kant is, in my view completely unanswerable
in this phase of his argument, partly because he is working within so austerely
tautological a structure. If the kind of absolutely disinterested judgement
that Kant thinks there might be were actually to be possible, then it really
would have to be governed by the extraordinary restrictions Kant imposes
on its operations. Furthermore, if such a form of judgement were to turn
out to be possible, then it would indeed be able to claim universal validity.
John Armstrong's point is that all of this has nothing necessarily to do
with judgements relating to works of art. And this is not just an accident:
it is necessary, not to say vital, to Kant's purpose that there should
be no necessary relationship between aesthetic judgement and the judgement
of a particular class of object, since if there were such a necessary relationship,
then the action of aesthetic judgement would not be encountering itself
alone, but would be being refracted by some alien element. It is part of
the meaning of aesthetic judgement that it should have nothing essential
to do with art and should be absolutely imperturbable by considerations
having to do with art. And this means that John Armstrong is quite right
to suggest that I was failing to acknowledge the aesthetic on its own terms
in bringing forward the evidence about the functions and understanding
of art that I do. The idea of 'the aesthetic', meaning Kantian aesthetic
judgement, could never be significantly molested by the evidence of art or the
ways in which the discourse of art functions, any more than it could be
reinforced by them, since the constitutive irrelevance of such considerations
is a necessary part of the coherence of the concept of aesthetic judgement.
I have two replies to this, depending on whether or not one accepts not
only a) that the aesthetic would have to be what it is said to be to exist
(I don't think anyone can not accept this) but also b) that, bearing all
this in mind, that it actually does exist. The first is to say that, since
this kind of judgement would have no relevance or interest or bearing on
anything else at all, least of all on questions to do with art, truth,
value, feeling, or any of the other things to which it is taken to have
relevance, then it and those devoted to its characterisation could safely
be left to their own, fastidiously fine and private devices. If I am to be told that I must accept the
existence of 'the aesthetic' on its own (Kantian) terms, then I am indeed
prepared to allow its existence on those very terms - which are that 'the
aesthetic' may exist but can have no relevance to anything else but itself.
Indeed, I will insist on those terms. What this means, more bargingly put,
is that if aestheticians agreed to stay indoors, and keep rigorously out
of the way of the rest of us, as the definition of aesthetic judgement
seems to me to require them to do, then there is no reason for me to hunt them down or seek their extermination, though plenty of reasons to decline invitations
to go round to their place.
But there is another reply possible, which would prise apart the conditions
a) and b) specified above. My view in fact is that, given a), b) is not
possible, Given the conditions that would have to be met by the thing Kant
calls 'aesthetic judgement', there could not ever be such a thing. To borrow
the elegant and, as it seems to me, decisive formulation of Barbara Herrnstein
Smith:
The kinds of purity that Kant's logic posits as necessary for objective
judgements of taste do not, however, appear possible at all, at least not
for sublunary creatures...Contrary to the key requirements of Kant's analysis...our
interactions with our environments are always and inevitably multiply contingent
and highly individuated for each subject: our "sensations" and
"perceptions" of "forms" or of anything else are inseparable
from - or, as it might be said, thoroughly contaminated by - exactly who
we are, where we are, and all that has already happened to us, and there
is therefore nothing in any aspect of our experience of anything that could
ever be, in the required sense, pure.
Kant only
makes one significant mistake in the 'Analytic of Beauty'; it is that,
having established with such exemplary and unflinching thoroughness the
necessary conditions for aesthetic judgement to exist, he then declares,
in one of the most daring and amazing feats of magical fiat to be
found in all philosophy, that all the things that he has shown would have
to be, must in fact be. I would prefer to take Kant's arguments
much more seriously than he does himself. Nobody shows more decisively
than Kant himself that the conditions required for 'the aesthetic' to exist,
cannot be met.
Now, as it happens, the kind of aesthetic judgement specified by Kant has
become inextricably tangled up for us with arguments about the nature of
art. In showing that these considerations inevitably compromise the definition
of 'the aesthetic', I am not, I think, denying Kant's logic, but confirming
it. The aesthetic cannot exist, because any and every exemplification of
its operations (whether in relation to art or anything else) fatally compromises
its claim to existence. The instant you take the aesthetic seriously, which
is to say, consider it as something that could appear in the life of any
mortal creature whatsoever, you have to give it up as a bad job.
So my response to John Armstrong is to say: you either accept that the
aesthetic as defined by Kant has something to do with ideas about art,
in which case it cannot exist in the way Kant says it does, or you maintain,
following Kant more rigorously, that 'the aesthetic' has nothing to do
with art, because it has nothing to do with anything, which either makes
it trivial or, again, compromises the claims for its existence.
It once seemed important to be able to characterise a distinct class of
feelings or responses that might be called aesthetic emotions. The consensus
for a long while was that an aesthetic feeling was a curiously disinterested
kind of feeling, a feeling characterised only by its dissimilarity from
any of the more familiar states of feeling, all of which are to be thought
of as interested in some way or another, or orientated towards the achievement
of some kind of gratification or yield. Where other states of feeling installed
one in one's world - the world of human needs, desires and interests -
aesthetic feeling was supposed to separate one from that whole realm of
passions, beliefs, commitments.
It is more common in the history of aesthetic thought however to fuse such
reflections with reflections on the kinds of object most commonly believed
to stimulate aesthetic emotion. Those objects do not have to be artistic
or made objects, but they do seem to have to exhibit certain aesthetic
qualities, the most important of which has at certain times been said to
be beauty, which has sometimes been defined instrumentally, by reference
to its capacity to provoke aesthetic feeling, and therefore tautologically,
and sometimes by reference to certain particularised values - especially
unity, balance, the cooperation of parts and the whole, and so on. The
arbitrariness of this criterion is disclosed from the work of Nietzsche
onwards, which begins to persuade many people that qualities of energy
and intensity are much more interesting and valuable than qualities of
marmoreal repose (the Dionysian over the Apollonian). A certain strain
of dominant, but uninspected postmodernist aesthetics has tried hard to
sweep away beauty and form in favour of the values of ugliness, deformity,
or melancholy dissolution in various sorts of process, event or action.
Until the Nietzschean revelation of the delights of the 'spare, counter,
strange', it seemed unthinkable that anyone could base a theory of the
aesthetic rather than just a slightly perverse preference on the claims
of the unformed or deformed. One might therefore see this as a postmodernist
assault upon the aesthetic as such, were it not for the fact that what
postmodernism deploys against the Kantian aesthetics of modernism is another
version of aesthetics, the Nietzschean. However, once this view started
seriously to be held, it proved extremely difficult to reconcile with the
former view, and extremely difficult to know how to mount absolute claims
for either criterion. Some works looked beautiful and calm, others were pleasantly tumultuous, neither seemed any more to point to a satisfactory
definition of their shared aesthetic nature.
There are, of course, many other candidates for the definition of what
art essentially is and does. I will briefly mention some of them.
'Art takes us out of ourselves'
'Art...affords us pure delight in the independent existence
of what is excellent.'
'What
we do when our experience is aesthetic retains a common element. We attend
to intrinsic features in the belief that this attention will be rewarded
by delight. Thus, delight in what resides intrinsically in something is
a mark of the aesthetic generally.'
'The paradox of art 'after the sublime' is
that it turns towards a thing which does not turn towards the mind, that
it wants a thing, or has it in for a thing, which wants nothing
of it.'
Art may often do things like this, and creatures like the kind we currently
take ourselves to be, may well sometimes find them satisfactory and desirable - though not,
I would contend, under all circumstances. For example, there might be certain
conditions of depleted selfhood, one might imagine, in which the self may
not appear to be such an intolerable burden that to be relieved of its
weight is an indisputable good. It is certain that there have been times
and places where this value has not had the same force as it seems to for
us. Thus, it is no good to base a definition of the aesthetic as such on
such a criterion. (Quite apart from the fact that there are plenty of experiences
of art which don't seem to meet these conditions, and plenty of non-aesthetic
experiences which do. The response here is usually to suggest that in the
first case, we are dealing with art that is not really art, and in the
second with a form of life that secretly is.)
'All art is quite useless'
One of the more surprisingly successful definitions of art and
the aesthetic to come out of the Kantian tradition is the claim that the
aesthetic is that which is useless, and non-instrumental. This makes the
aesthetic marginal, so the argument goes, in a grimly instrumentalist world.
If the aesthetic is that which is marginal, that which is ignored, left
over or set aside as surplus, does that in itself give it value, meaning
and power? The irrelevance or marginality of art has often been associated
with its autonomy, and its power therefore to stand out against dominant
values. This, of course, is the Adorno option, out of Walter Pater and
Oscar Wilde. All art is quite useless, but in a grimly instrumentalist
world, this is quite useful. Here is a representative recent sample of
this Adornian strain of argument:
The experience of aesthetic negativity is sovereign - not because
it is a compatible dimension "in interplay," interacting with
nonaesthetic practices and discourses - but because it is a disruptive
crisis...this insight opens one's view to those contents of the autonomous
experience of aesthetic negativity which are sovereign vis-à-vis
the nonaesthetic dimensions of reason because they cannot be recognized
without being reduced. Aesthetic negativity, taken seriously in its sovereign
enactment is in no relationship of interplay with nonaesthetic reason but
is instead in a relationship of interminable crisis.
Marxist
aestheticians have a tradition first of all of hugely overestimating the
marginality of art in modernity and secondly of identifying that marginality
with potency. In fact, art may not now have the same status as the Catholic
Church in medieval Europe, but then it never has had. It is far from being
considered irrelevant; but, even if it were, this would not make it autonomous.
The assumption in this quotation is that art is wholly separate from the
world of instrumental reason and calculations of needs, purposes and utility;
but that separation is then turned into a significant kind of relation
to that world. But irrelevance is not necessarily a relation, let alone
a negation. That which is unrecognisable by or irrelevant to a system is
not going to throw the system into crisis or threaten it until it has contaminated
the system to a degree sufficient to threaten its functioning. It's not
going to threaten the system by remaining outside it and whispering 'crisis,
crisis...'
'Art is special'
The most emphatic argument I know along these lines is put forward
by Ellen Dessanayake in her What Is Art For? (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1988) and Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From
and Why (New York and Toronto: Free Press, 1992). Dessanayake argues
that suggests that the urge to set things apart from the ordinary run of
experience was so compelling in human history, that humans developed a
series of autonomous processes for bringing about the sense of the special,
and that this is the origin of art.. This would make the aesthetic anything
that is held apart as special or sui generis. It would be the category
of the uncategorisable. It would include or overlap with such instances
of setting apart as the sacred, the transcendent and the otherwise unspeakable.
The aesthetic would consist in just this capacity to hold life in suspension,
to frame it, or hold it at a distance from itself, to create imaginary,
or virtual spaces, to make worlds of the as-if. The discourse of the aesthetic
would then perhaps be exculpated from the charge of simply inventing what
it claimed to describe. The discourse of the aesthetic would in fact have
been elevated to the source of the aesthetic itself, and would be the purest
expression of the human desire that there should be such apertures of apartness
in the world. Considered in this way, aesthetic discourse would become
primary, and its objects or occasions merely secondary. The discourse which
takes it for granted that such a thing as the aesthetic exists and is to
be evidenced by particular works, actions, feelings or qualities, is itself
an aesthetic act of fiat: let there be art's power to say 'let there
be.'
Such an account can of course be taken in a positive or negative sense
- as either deludedly solipsistic, or as a kind of sanative wishful thinking.
The problem with either way of making the claim for art and aesthetic discourse
as the special power of declaring and making special, is that there are
plenty of other ways of enacting or encountering apartness or uniqueness,
the counterfactual fold in the givenness of things - we do this not just
when we write a story or go to the cinema, but also through trauma, illness
or narcosis, when we fall in love, or go mad, or on holiday, or to sleep,
when we masturbate, graduate, or give birth. The capacity and desire to
hold existence self-consciously apart from itself is a common and pervasive
feature of individual and social life. But it is not possible either to
singularise or to generalise the processes whereby we create such forms
of apartness. We may want to regularise such processes. Dessanayake thinks
that art comes precisely out the various specialised processes developed
by human groups to perform this function of making special on a regular
or routine basis - ritual, for example. But she mistakes a specialised
function for a special function. There is no special way of setting things
apart from themselves that can itself be set apart as a special sort of
impulse, organ or behaviour, nor is there any golden thread running unbroken
through all the different ways we have had and currently have for creating
specialness or apartness. The kinds of apartness we are able to create
are different kinds of apartness (not absolutely different, otherwise they
wouldn't be comparable enough to be recognised as different in the first
place), that stand apart in different ways, at greater or smaller distance,
from different kinds of background, more or less sustainedly, and achieved
through many different actions and circumstances, including through some
of the things that get called art, culture or the aesthetic, but not necessarily
involving them at all. Manufacturing out-of-the-ordinary things is one
of the things we ordinarily do. Once again, as in the claims for the absolute
uselessness of the aesthetic, or the claims that the aesthetic remits the
mesmerising hold of our egoity, that which has been seen as a power that
is specially active in the creation or response to works of art or artistic
of cultural activity proves to be so pervasive as to provide no ground
of definition for the aesthetic.
Anything can be aesthetic
Now, I don't have any logical way of proving this next point, and
in a way it is important for my argument that there is in fact no purely
logical or non-empirical way of proving it: but in lieu of proof I am going to promise you
that the more candidates I brought forward for the essential nature of
the aesthetic (some more will in fact appear a little later), whether applied
to feelings, qualities, objects or actions, the more irresistibly you would
feel the tug of the conclusion that there are no essential and invariant
features of the aesthetic, and no features that could lead us necessarily
to include any phenomenon under the heading of the aesthetic. All the features
ascribed to feelings, qualities, objects and actions that are said to be
aesthetic are to be found without effort and in abundance in feelings,
qualities, objects and actions that are assumed not to be aesthetic. Less
damagingly, perhaps, but still tellingly, all experiences of art or aesthetic
experiences crawl with discreditably unaesthetic features. Aesthetics
has made it its business to try to squeeze these elements out of the aesthetic
experience, suggesting that the longing to possess Monet's Water-Lilies
could have nothing essential to do with one's pleasure in looking at them,
but the more honestly and unflinchingly (which is to say non-aesthetically)
one looks at so-called aesthetic experiences, the more vigorously they
have to be policed, in order to detect vulgarly utilitarian considerations
and escort them from the premises before they can do any damage.
Pragmatist Aesthetics?
I should perhaps protect myself from one misconstrual of my
argument. I am not arguing for the wide diffusion of the aesthetic instinct
or aesthetic responses. My scepticism about claims for a specifically aesthetic
response is based on the fact that I do indeed believe that many of the
same kinds of response as are employed when contemplating or consuming
works of art are manifested in other kinds of activity. A viewer in a gallery
becomes absorbed in the play of light and form of a painting; a child becomes
fascinated by the patterns made in a pile of mud, a crossword enthusiast
is swallowed up in his problem, I become absorbed in the repetitions of
this sentence. I might be more absorbed in the work of art than the child
with its mudpie, but I might not, and it is certain that nothing, not the
form of the work of art, not its hushed environment, not any form of institutional
or conventional pressure can guarantee that my absorption before the work
of art will be more encompassing or of a fundamentally different kind than
my absorption in other kinds of activity. Becoming absorbed is an ordinary
feature of human life; and there is no single, all-purpose calculus that
will enable us to take the measure of the completeness or value of different
forms of absorption. They will be valuable in different ways according
to changing contexts.
In fact, aesthetic theorists have been quick to acknowledge that the experiences
they regard as essentially aesthetic are to be found in everyday life. But I find that they typically do so in order to sustain
a fundamental distinction between minor and major, nascent and mature kinds
of aesthetic experience. You can find bits of the aesthetic experience
in the child's relation to its blanket or its cotton-reel, in the attentiveness
of someone listening to a joke, or in the mathematician's delight in fractal
recurrence, but for aestheticians, these are as it were fragments of the
True Cross, scattered and fugitive hints of the true and complete experience
of the aesthetic that is to be had only with the best works of art, in
which aesthetic experience is to be found absolutely and unmixed (the absence
of mixing is part of the post-Kantian definition of the aesthetic). But
when we find someone feeling or behaving like they feel and behave in the
presence of works of art, it is not because something of the aesthetic
has strayed across from its proper context, or because our essential craving
for an aesthetic relation to things is finding infant expression. It is
because, given that there are no essential constraints at all on the ways
in which we behave or respond with works of art (there are always, of course,
constraints, just as there are always interests at work in our response
to art, but these constraints are contingent, and not essential: I am writing
an essay on this painter, I want to show off in front of my mother, I want
to behave properly in the theatre, I want to behave improperly in the theatre,
I am in love, my feet hurt, I am a bit drunk), we are likely to respond
to works of art in the full range of ways (including therefore all the
imaginable ways of being contingently constrained) in which we respond
to things both that are like works of art and that are not very much like
them in the real world. You can find aesthetic experience everywhere, not
because of the leaking of some portion of aesthetic quiddity into non-aesthetic
contexts, but because the things that are routinely picked out as constituting
aesthetic experience neither originate nor essentially inhere in the experience
of works of art at all.
It follows from this, as well, or perhaps it just accords with it, that,
just as the aesthetic-type experiences we have in ordinary life are not
necessarily weaker or more diffuse than those we have in more credible
aesthetic contexts, so aesthetic responses are not necessarily heightened
or more complete forms of everyday experiences. This is the prejudice which
spoils John Dewey's otherwise generous and (to me) comfortable view, in his Art
As Experience of 1934, of the continuity of aesthetic and ordinary
kinds of experience and his edifying irritation with the spiritualisation
of art. He begins well:
In order to understand the aesthetic in its ultimate
and approved forms, one must begin with it in the raw; in the events and
scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man, arousing his interest
and affording him enjoyment as he looks and listens: the sights that hold
the crowd - the fire engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous
holes in the earth; the human fly climbing the steeple-side; the men perched
high in air on girders, throwing and catching red-hot bolts. The sources
of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense
grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight
of the housewife in tending her plants, and the intent interest of her
good man in tending the patch of green in front of the house; the zest
of the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and in watching
the darting flames and crumbling coals.
But, even if one leaves aside the hilarious
sentimentalising of these examples, there is something ominous in that
opening phrase about the aesthetic 'in the raw'. We seem already to be
in the world of Yeats's pseudo-recantation of the aesthetic, when he speaks
of having to 'lie down where all the ladders start/In the foul rag and
bone shop of the heart'. Dewey ends up depressingly with the following
questions:
How is it that the everyday making of things grows into that
form of making which is genuinely artistic? How is it that our everyday
enjoyment of scenes and satisfactions develops into the particular satisfaction
that attends the experience which is emphatically aesthetic? These are
the questions theory must answer.
Though Dewey makes an heroic and honourable
attempt to connect so-called aesthetic values and responses to the values
and responses of ordinary, embodied existence. The problem with Dewey's
account is that he remains so besotted with the idea that art is a special
kind of experience, heightened, intensified and somehow more inclusive
and complete.
So, although what I am proposing could be described as something like a
radical pragmatics of the aesthetic. more might have been expected in the
way of intellectual precedents and resources from the tradition of American
pragmatics and from contemporary attempts to revive it like that of Richard
Shusterman in his Pragmatist Aesthetics of 1992.
Surely, I have asked myself, all of this must have occurred to somebody before now? Of course
it has, though not usually to aestheticians, whose professional purpose
is after all to find reputable ways of keeping such suspicions at bay.
One of the most disappointing experiences I had in preparing this paper
was in going to read Morris Weitz's notorious paper of 1955, 'The Role
of Theory in Aesthetics'. Here, I had been informed, was the most thoroughgoing
dismissal of the idea that it was possible to provide any definition of
art or the aesthetic. It is true that Weitz does bring forward some burly
arguments of this kind for the first part of his essay. But then he goes
and spoils it all when he provides us with his reason why the categories
of art and the aesthetic can never be defined. For Weitz finds the cause
of the indefinability of art in art itself. Art is indefinable, he says, not because the aesthetic
does not exist; it is because it is of the essence of art to be uncontainable
by definitions. Weitz concludes therefore, that the aesthetic is not a
non-category, but an open category. It was on the rebound from Weitz's essay that I decided on my policy
of zero tolerance for talk of the aesthetic.
Institutional theories of
the aesthetic
It has occurred to some that it would make more sense to think
of the aesthetic as a category more like that of 'weeds' than of water-lilies:
a psycho-social rather than a natural category (my example is borrowed
from John Ellis). Weeds are plants we don't like in the places where we
particularly would prefer them not to be. It has been suggested that the
aesthetic, or versions of it, such as the category of 'literature', consists
of works and feelings and qualities that we do like - that we do invest
with a certain kind of value, in certain kinds of preferred context. If
literature is just what gets taught, in Barthes's handy pocket definition,
then the aesthetic could anything that got discussed under the rubric of
the aesthetic. The category of the aesthetic is what Searle calls an intentional
category, one in which our judgement as to the nature or value of the things
subsumed in the category is a defining component of it. The aesthetic would
thus resemble the category of 'nice weather'. This sounds more alarmingly
solipsistic than it turns out to be. Though in principle according to my
definition, absolutely anything could get counted as the aesthetic, in
practice not everything does. So this does not mean in itself that the
category of the aesthetic is an empty category, for there are indisputably
plenty of things to occupy it: indeed, it is of its essence that there
should be things to occupy it and thus prove its naturalness and necessity.
Just as there are indisputably such things as dandelions and clover, rain
and snow, there are also such things as operas and action paintings, and
it is, one must concede, handy to have words available to refer to these
indisputably existing things, rather than having to gesture at them in
mute outrage or rapture. But this line of thought does suggest that whenever
we cogitate upon the nature and the possibilities of the aesthetic, or
of aesthetic discourse, there might be advantage in acknowledging that
we are in part discussing the nature and effects of our own acts of description
and ascription.
This outlook on things has produced in analytic philosophers of the aesthetic
what has been called the institutional definition, as it is identified
in the work particularly of Arthur Danto and George Dickie. In 1964, Arthur
Danto declared that 'To see something as art requires something the eye
cannot descry - an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of art history:
an artworld.' Ten years later, in his book Art and the Aesthetic, George Dickie
framed a tighter, and somewhat chillier version of this definition:
A
work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) a set of
the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate
for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain
social institution (the artworld).
One of the objections
to the institutional definition of art is that it assumes that the artworld
really is an institution like other forms of social institution, capable
of producing and policing forms of thought. However, it is quite easy to
rescue the institutional hypothesis if one substitutes the idea of an ideologically-formed
and sustained aesthetic disposition for the influence of a specific
institution. The importance of a more diffuse kind of aesthetic disposition
has become particularly apparent in the era of art's immaterialisation
and has probably moved into the space previously occupied by what people
used to call 'aesthetic emotion'. It used to be that a work of art would
have to conform to certain generic or conventional expectations (rhyme
in poetry, resemblance in painting, melody in music). Modernism dissolved
these expectations, substituting the requirement of negation and innovation,
but stabilising the work of art around its material ground or embodiment;
one could be sure that a painting was, at least, unassailably and invariably
the result of pigment applied to a flat surface, just as writing would
be inescapably an act of inscribing words, and making music would be a
matter of combining sounds. Inevitably, the material instance of the work
has itself been subject to erosion, in various forms of intensification
of the modernist logic of privation; in the art of the happening or event,
or the unrealised concept, or the virtual art of the network, there is
no single or permanent inscription or instance of the work. If there is
immaterialisation through temporal evaporation - the event is always on
the point of passing away from existence - there is another kind of immaterialisation
through enlargement; in a hypertext, there is no text that all readers
can have and hold in common, because there are too many texts; in an open
or unconcludable work - Brian Eno's automatic composition that would take
a hundred years to unfold, there is no apprehension of the whole of the
work that could be complete. In neither case is there a possibility of
a space of encounter between the work and its reader or viewer or audience.
For Jean-François Lyotard, this immaterialisation is to be accounted
for in terms of the aesthetics of the sublime, an aesthetics organised
not around the contemplation of anything that could be unambiguously given
to experience and judgement, but around the call of a certain question,
the question of the what is happening? It is clear that for Lyotard,
the aesthetics of the sublime has become aesthetics as such, in the form
of an outlook, disposition or mode of attention. Not only is there no necessary
kind of object available for this mode of attention to be attentive to,
the very question of the availability or not of an object is what forms an
aesthetic mode of attention, which is actually supposed to work against
the tendency of the artworld's institutions to instance and institute.
This anti-institutional definition of the aesthetic, which piggy-backs
on the purely classificatory part of the definition of the aesthetic to
produce an evaluative account (Lyotard is fond of telling us that there
is no way of passing from description to evaluation without violence or
arbitrariness, but he is adept at making the passage himself.) Art and
the aesthetic is to be found wherever art is under threat or in question.
Whenever you catch yourself asking 'is this art at all?', you can be sure
that it is. For such a definition, the gap between the aesthetic and the
artistic is a positive advantage.
A similarly subtle move is apparent in the account of literariness supplied
by Jacques Derrida. The literary is that which poses or causes to be posed
the question 'Is this literature?'.
The exclusionary hypothesis
Lyotard's aesthetics of the sublime and Derrida's aesthetics
of indeterminacy are closely related to what might be called the exclusionary
hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, art and the aesthetic have no
substantial existence in and of themselves, but are given such existence,
precisely by being systematically undervalued or overlooked. It can be
readily agreed that the activities we classify as art have tended in some
quarters to be regarded as less and less important and prestigious. This
argument needs to be treated with some scepticism, of course. The very
period in which art has been disadvantaged - in which artists have struggled
to retain their pride and self-esteem in a world taking less and less notice
of them unless they can pay their way or produce saleable goods for the
market, has seen the growth of aesthetics, the most extraordinarily improbably
theories of anything that human beings have ever come up with. In so far
as aesthetics has exerted a considerable force in the material world, aesthetics
provides ample compensation for the disadvantage suffered by art. But,
this is to the side of what I would want to be my main argument, which
is that, even if it could satisfactorily be shown that art and the very
idea of aesthetic work and feeling had indeed been subject to inattention
or vicious persecution, it would not be for reasons that required the attentions
of a qualified aesthetician. The fallacy here is the suggestion that art
is systematically ignored because of its secret essence, rather than for
a host of more various and contingent and various reasons, which may well
vary from context to context and from instance to instance. A multinational
company may exert pressure on a regime to make hard for a writer who protests
against their exploitative presence in her country. Another culture might
systematically discriminate against certain forms of artistic activity
because it favours efficiency and sees artistic activity as self-indulgent
and wasteful. Those concerned to preserve the possibilities
of art in inhospitable circumstances would do much better to figure out
why art seems undesirable and insignificant in those particular circumstances
than to assume a) that the most salient thing about art is its essentially
aesthetic nature; so that b) it must be the specifically aesthetic things
about art that get up the noses of the authorities, or make art seem redundant
or irrelevant; such that c) the essentially aesthetic features of art -
which are an irritation or an irrelevance - can be turned against the very
forces that exclude art and on the same grounds. It's difficult
to know where to begin unpicking this farrago. One might object to it simply
in terms of the feebleness of its announced strategy. If it is indeed true
that art is excluded by capital because it is irrelevant or non-instrumental,
it is going to do no good at all the rub the noses of our newly-globalised Josiah Bounderbys
in the non-instrumentality of art. It's only because art and the aesthetic
are acknowledged or suspected of having a kind of higher instrumentality
already that their non-instrumentality can be so triumphantly flourished.
Functionalist theories of
the aesthetic
In Dickie's hands, the institutional definition of art is merely
classificatory and not evaluative. It just aims to specify the necessary
and sufficient conditions for something to count as art. If I say that
this definition tells us little about what art does for you, or is good
for, this is no failing on Dickie's part or cause for triumph on mine,
because he doesn't set out to do this. Nevertheless, others have wanted
to press this further to investigate the ways in which the institutional
definitions of art in fact do significantly relate to what art is able
to do, and what it is good for.
It would be perfectly possible to accept the factitiousness of the category
of the aesthetic, to enjoy the collapse of all its grounds and guarantees,
and yet to insist that the aesthetic has a call upon our serious attention,
simply by virtue of the fact that it has had a determinate history and
that that history continues to exert a powerful pull in the present. We
need not be a Harold Bloom to argue that Shakespeare has a special status
in cultural history, just as he does in traditional literary study (though
it is a different special place of course). He has this place because historians
cannot simply pick and choose: they must weigh the is it happening
against the it has happened. Shakespeare, like Plato, Homer and Mary Wollstonecraft, just happen, ineluctably, to have happened.
The cultural history of Britain is not intelligible without some account
of the place in it of Shakespeare and of the aesthetic values that his
work and reputation have been made to subserve.
Such a view of the aesthetic is often thought not properly to belong to
aesthetic discourse itself. Functionalist accounts of the aesthetic have
enjoyed a degree of respect over the last couple of decades. According
to functionalist accounts, the point of the aesthetic as a category, and
the activity of categorisation that it enables, will lie in the other things
that the categorisation causes to happen or happen through it. On this
kind of account, the aesthetic is there to pacify, distract or stupefy;
for Adorno (sometimes), it functions a little like religion, to suggest
that there could be another world, a World of the Blessed in which essence
and accident, totality and particular would no longer be at each other's
throats. Or the aesthetic is there as a displacement of other concerns,
a kind of doodle-pad or dreamwork in which social issues and anxieties
which for often obscure reasons cannot be addressed directly, can be worked
through and resolved (or, more often, left hanging exquisitely in the air).
Pierre Bourdieu has offered the most austerely economistic view of the
functions of the aesthetic. For Bourdieu, the aesthetic is a kind of sorting
mechanism, supplying an apparently neutral grid on to which distinctions
of class power and privilege may be mapped. '[A]rt and cultural consumption
are predisposed , consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social
function of legitimating social differences', he writes. Bourdieu's paradoxical
reading of the aesthetic which suggests that it is the very functionlessness
of the aesthetic as a category which is the key to its function as a mechanism
of cultural differentiation and exclusion.
As John Frow has pointed out, Bourdieu's account, though certainly the
best and most meticulously substantiated of arguments that we have for
the social function of the aesthetic, is deeply flawed by its monolithic
understanding of the nature of the aesthetic. Frow argues that Bourdieu
first acknowledges the dominance of the idea of an aesthetic disposition
based upon a Kantian aesthetics of disinterest and distance. He then equates
this model of the aesthetic disposition with a certain class experience,
since the aesthetic disposition 'presupposes the distance from the world...which
is the basis of the bourgeois experience of the world'. This allows him to read the struggles over classification
with respect to works of art and cultural forms as a direct index to class
structure. As Frow observes, the problem with this argument is that it
essentialises both aesthetic and class identity (it is plain that Bourdieu
thinks the realist aesthetic characteristic of working-class response to
art is truer than the formalist aesthetic of the bourgeois). Frow finds
two forms of essentialism in Bourdieu's argument. Firstly, Bourdieu assumes
that distinct sociological groups have singular forms of 'class experience'.
Secondly, he assumes that there is a single form of aesthetic predisposition
operating within a particular class experience. Frow does not say this,
but one might want to argue that the problem comes not just from the stratifying
habit of mind characteristic of certain kinds of sociometric analysis,
but also from a tendency to accept too readily the dominance of a particular,
undoubtedly influential model of the aesthetic, and indeed to assume too
readily the existence of a self-consistent realm of the aesthetic as such.
A somewhat different kind of reifying is to be found in Terry Eagleton's
The Ideology of the Aesthetic, a book which offers one of the most
thorough and compelling functionalist accounts of the historical workings
of the idea of the aesthetic. The very power and coherence of this book
is a reason to be suspicious about it. For, like Bourdieu and others, Eagleton
falls into the trap of making the aesthetic seem too substantial and continuous.
Unlike Bourdieu, however, he explicitly attempts to go beyond the functionalist
account of the aesthetic, but reveals in his remarks about Paul de Man's
too absolute dismissal of all aspects of the aesthetic, his own covert
aestheticism:
De Man's later writing represents a bracing, deeply intricate
demystification of the idea of the aesthetic...In what one might see as
an excessive reaction to his own earlier involvements with organicist ideologies
of an extreme right-wing kind, de Man is led to suppress the potentially
positive dimensions of the aesthetic in a way which perpetuates, if now
in a wholly new style, his earlier hostility to an emancipatory politics.
Few critics have been more bleakly unenthused by bodiliness - by the whole
prospect of a creative development of the sensuous, creaturely aspects
of human existence, by pleasure, Nature and self-delighting powers, all
of which now figure as insidious aesthetic seductions to be manfully resisted.
What Eagleton presents as a more flexibly dialectical response
to the aesthetic, which can take its good with its bad, turns out to have
a much softer inside, in this assumption that the aesthetic maintains a
precious link with the Lebenswelt, an assumption that stands out
stickily and unaccountably against his own functionalist demonstrations
of the way in which ideas about the aesthetic have been used to constitute
this imaginary sphere.
A rather commoner, broader and less easily demonstrable position than Bourdieu's
is the view of art and the accompanying discourses of the aesthetic as
mystification or distraction. On this view, art is a fascinating compensation
for the miseries and injustices of existence and as such is to be suspected
and eschewed. Like religion, art allows obscenely for the possibility of
pleasure in the midst of suffering. The Adorno version of this argument
routes it through the experience of the Holocaust. We have heard the question
framed many times: how is it possible for the camp commandant to have spent
his days overseeing the gassing and incineration of Jews and to have spent
evenings listening to Beethoven? A situation such as this one is taken,
quite rightly, as strong evidence against the doctrine of art's benevolent
or humanising influence. But it does not provide very strong evidence for
another kind of claim, which it often seems nevertheless to stimulate.
For the situation is often read from the other end. It is not just that
art is insufficiently humanising or moralising, it is that by failing to
be humanising or moralising, art, or our habits of experiencing art in
certain ways, is actually to blame for the wickedness or injustice that
it does nothing to prevent. This is a denunciation of art and the aesthetic
driven by disappointment; the failure of art to live up to our own (imprudent
and improbable) expectations legitimates the angry analysis of art's responsibility
for everything against which it fails to offer remedy or protection. 'Poetry
makes nothing happen', Auden was writing at the outbreak of the War: by
the end of the War it seemed as though it was the very failure of poetry
to make things happen that had made the worst of all things happen.
The mystery is why anyone should have expected art to have the civilising
or moralising effect that is claimed for it and why it should have taken
an Auschwitz to awaken us to the unlikelihood of art's necessarily moral
or civilising influence. It's not, of course, that art could never have
good effects: it's just that, like everything else, it all depends. Just
as the claim that art must necessarily have good effects can never
be sustained, so, and actually for the same reasons, it is certain that,
under certain circumstances, that are easy to imagine if hard to guarantee,
art will have desirable influences: it will be able to inform, enlarge,
and even ennoble. The reason why art must sometimes be expected to be able
to do these things is that there are no satisfactory ways of cordoning
art off from a world in which many objects, events and experiences can
and do have these effects. Because art and the aesthetic do not exist,
it is absurd to blame art and the aesthetic for failing to avert wickedness;
because art and the aesthetic do not exist, it is also impossible to protect
against the infiltration of the sphere of things we call artistic works
or aesthetic experiences by objects and experiences that do or may have
morally desirable effects. My point is that we should not expect very much
in the way of moral outcomes from discussions of art or the aesthetic qua
art or the aesthetic.
The problem with these functionalist accounts of art is that they attempt
to derive evaluative arguments from classificatory procedures. They not
only describe the conditions under which works of art get institutionally
and ideologically defined, they also determine the particular kinds of social
and ideological work done by the institutional/ideological idea of the
work of art. Here, they fall short, at least of what I would like, because,
just like the worst kind of aesthetician (and in my book all aestheticians
are the worst kind of aesthetician), they reify the aesthetic. There are
important differences between Paul de Man, Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton
on the one hand and Monroe Beardsley and Iris Murdoch on the other. Aestheticist
aestheticians like Beardsley and Murdoch believe that there is such a thing
as aesthetic experience just because there is, while de Man, Bourdieu and
Eagleton believe that there is such a thing as aesthetic experience because
aesthetic experience is formed and wholly sustained by its institutional
and ideological conditions. Because they borrow so much from the tradition
they claim to oppose, because they are too ready to see institutional and
ideological pressures having made aesthetic discourse into an autonomous
'form of life' (as Richard Wollheim has put it, borrowing Wittgenstein's
term ), functionalist arguments take the aesthetic far too much
at its own account, typically overestimating the power and coherence of
aestheticist thought in ways that are oddly similar to the over-estimation
of the aesthetic as a category by aestheticians. In reducing the uses of
the aesthetic to this or that function (mystification, legitimation, the
maintaining of differences), functionalist accounts fail to get near to
the sheer incoherence and unevenness of everyday experiences of the so-called
aesthetic. They fail to attend to the failures of the aesthetic to make
things cohere, the blatant failure of the aesthetic to work as a model
and ideal of ultimate coherent experience. Functionalist accounts are as
fixated upon the category of the aesthetic as the essentialist definitions
they aim to displace.
The fallacy of counter-aesthetics
The argument that the aesthetic is always, despite appearances,
political, leads, not only to particular kinds of historical and political
analysis of the ways in which the aesthetic works, but also to recommendations
about what alternative work might instead be done with the aesthetic. Indeed,
for many, it seems self-evident that the point of functionalist analysis
is to change the functions of the aesthetic, or at least make it possible
for them to be changed. Unless we recognise what is done to and in the
name of the aesthetic, the story goes, we will never be in a position to
do anything else with it. Of course, one of the options open to us here
is to do nothing further with the aesthetic, in fact to cease to have anything
more to do with it. There was a time when I would have regarded this as
a risible dream, assuming that there is a mysteriously ineradicable pull
towards aesthetic modes of thinking (towards metaphor, narrative, the body,
and so forth, which would have tended to count for me at that time as 'the
aesthetic') that we could never hope to escape from entirely. According
to this view, the aesthetic can never be entirely beaten back, because,
like Japanese knotweed or Hodgkin's Lymphoma, you never know where and
in what form it is going to pop up. Nowadays, I think that the idea of encouraging
a much more complete discrediting of aesthetic discourse and an attempt
to do without it much more completely (though not so much by riskily austere pledges of
abstinence as by turning to a whole lot of different tasks and pleasures)
has more distinct attractions for me, though it is not quite my purpose
at this point in my argument. Rather, I want to try to characterise what
is going on when writers and thinkers and artists begin to conceive and
recommend different, which is almost always to say, more desirable, more
productive, less mystifying or paralysing ways of thinking about aesthetic
experiences, qualities, or objects.
Typically, we are attracted by the metaphor of recoding (the metaphor is
used in the title of an influential book by Hal Foster. Let us take one
area of contemporary aesthetic fascination: the body. In one common form,
the theory goes like this. The body, and especially the female body, has
become the source of fascinated disgust and abjection; it is the opposite
of the aesthetic. Women and men who affirm, by contrast, the positive power
of the abjected body, aim to turn this negativity into positivity; aim
to take the boundaryless, spontaneously combustible, grotesque body of
neurotic bourgeois fantasy and affirm it, not as aberrant, but as central,
therefore making it a value rather than a horror. To those who condone
or countenance counter-discursive strategies in this way, it feels as though
it were possible to identify in the body a faultline or Achilles' heel
in an otherwise impregnable system. If only one could disconnect 'the body'
from previous definitions, redefine it, and then insert it back into the
larger economy of representations, then that economy itself would be bound
to have been changed in some fundamental and desirable way. Patriarchy
has depended in the past upon the disavowal of the female body. Make the
female body something to be affirmed, and patriarchy would find that its
steering wheel, or at least its gearstick had come away in its hand.
The thinking here is often represented as smartly strategic, but I think
it's really just mechanist, by which I mean, of course, magical. The theory
seems to be that it is possible to think of systems of meaning as assemblages
of entirely separable components, each of which is capable of being re-engineered
in crucial ways and then of having crucial effects on the larger mechanism.
The point is that it is not possible simply to extract and recode elements
of a social machine and expect the machine itself to remain unaffected
by the process. If one succeeds in taking a particular component out -
let us call it the body - the whole of which it is a component will already
have been changed in such a way that one could not expect to be able to
predict how it will function when the component is reintroduced. If I take
the loudspeaker out of my hi-fi and use the electrical impulses supplied
from the amplifier to sequence the traffic lights in the Holloway Road,
I will not have made any significant alterations to the performance of
my radio: in fact, I will have made a new sort of machine altogether.
Thus, if I see the value of a certain kind of aesthetic thinking about
the body - a Nietzschean-Bakhtinian tradition which values the ecstatic
features of bodily experience over the idealised aesthetics of a previous
tradition - as lying in the threat it was perceived as having for a certain
system of values, it is bad strategy - mechanical or magical thinking -
to imagine that, once projected into a positive form, it will actually
still pose the threat that it was believed to pose. By the time a Nietzschean-Bakhtinian
strain of thought about the body has become plausible, the system of relations
will already have changed. A rather similar argument might be applied in
the case of what Celia Lury has called the 'cultural essentialism' of certain
strains of feminism. Feminism has undoubtedly been successful to the degree
that it has centred on the politics of culture. Culture became a political
issue for feminism when it was recognised that the sphere of 'culture'
- in the broadest, anthropological sense, I mean - was where women lived
- rather than the world of work, science or war. Culture had to be taken
seriously, because women were relegated to the ghetto of culture. However,
as long as culture retained its minority, it was never going to do any
good to use culture itself - cultural forms, cultural study, écriture
féminine - as a lever, when what mattered was unequal pay and
systematic violence against women. Of course, it turned out to be eminently
possible for culture to be used for political leverage; and it became possible
at the very moment that the analysis which suggested that it was necessary
(because culture was demeaningly identified with the female, and the female
with culture) no longer applied in the same way. The moment it would have
occurred to anyone that it might be possible to use culture as a political
way out of the ghetto of culture, the ghetto would already have started
to transform itself into a fairy palace of opulence and opportunity.
The point here is that what has been called 'the aesthetic' has often been
believed to function in just this way; as a central organising principle
of a system that, once extracted and re-engineered, could be used to disorganise
it. But the aesthetic is not available to be extracted, patched up in various
kinds of ways and put back in to do a different kind of work. This is not
because the aesthetic has a protean and unpredictable essence, it is because
it doesn't exist at all in any one area, like a pancreas or a gearstick,
except in the moments at which it flares into visibility and plausibility
under the scrutiny of aesthetic theorists.
Implications?
What are the implications of the expansion and explosion of
the category of the aesthetic as we have seen it over the course of this
century?
Undoubtedly, there are implications. but the question of what they are
cannot be answered by an aesthetic enquiry, or one that assumes the determining,
or even the historically determined nature of the aesthetic. One might
have to ask questions framed not within the terms of the aesthetic at all.
The historical investigation of the meanings and functions of the aesthetic
should not be expected to yield too much in the way of positive predictions
about how things are likely to go in a world in which the term comes to
lose much of its plausibility and adhesive power. Indeed, it would be surprising
and perhaps even illogical for an argument that suggested that there was
no necessary form which the aesthetic must take, and no necessary function
that aesthetic discourse must fulfil, to suppose that there are any consequences
that must of necessity flow from the wide acceptance of this perspective.
We might continue to think of the aesthetic as a privileged category, having
found different ways to constitute its privilege or special claims, or
the privilege of a different class of objects, actions, qualities and experiences,
in the teeth even of arguments as irresistible as the ones you've been
reading here. Or the category of the aesthetic might fade away, the field
of human understanding and interpretation slowly being refigured in completely
different ways. But whether or not it did would not depend on the nature
of arguments mounted from within the aesthetic as such, or within the institutions
that sediment its claims. What we do about the aesthetic will turn out to be just as contingent as what we have hitherto done with it
It is tempting to hope that because a climate of experiment with and even
hostility towards the category of art has prevailed in the art of our time,
that an abandonment of the discourse of aesthetics in the manner I am recommending
will attune us more closely to that art, making us better able to appreciate
its challenges and renewals. In an age of anti-aesthetics, we need an anti-aesthetics
ourselves, that kind of thing. Tempting though this idea is, it is a fondly delusive hope. First
of all, one would might simply observe that being able to understand a work
of art is by no means dependent upon being in the same ideological boat
as it. Secondly, and more important really, we will only be in a better
position with regard to contemporary art after talk of the aesthetic starts to seem bizarre and outlandish in the same way as we will be
in a better position with respect to all art of all periods - because we
will be released from the difficult task of editing out all the things
that works of art are and do that are so like what things other than art
are and do. We may then be better able to see the manifold resemblances
and overlaps between so-called aesthetic feelings, qualities, objects and
actions and allegedly non-aesthetic versions of same. To imagine that the
dismantling of the concept of the aesthetic might give us a special insight
into the nature of certain anti-aesthetic works would be to assume still
that the best place to start thinking about contemporary works is the question
of the aesthetic. As we have seen, there are plenty of ways in which to
maintain the privative nature of the aesthetic by embracing negation, by
according a special privilege to the action of self-questioning that goes
on in artistic works. But, as the old joke has it, if you want to get over there,
I wouldn't start from here.
The tenuousness and tendentiousness of all definitions of the aesthetic
is a permanent condition, not a newly-emergent feature of the aesthetic
itself. We have certainly become much more aware of the fragility of these
definitions and the implausibility of talk of the aesthetic, and some of
this uncertainty is no doubt due to certain kinds of debate that have gingerly been broached among philosophers of the aesthetic, as well as within the arts.
But this new climate of doubt will probably only make us better at talking about
the things previously and precipitately assigned to the category of the
aesthetic if we become better at doing without the category of the aesthetic.
As long as we carry on trying to talk aesthetically about the impossibility
of the aesthetic, we will riding the same rails and alighting at the same stations. What I am
recommending is that not repressing our healthy instincts to snort and
jeer when we overhear people, or ourselves, using expressions like
'the aesthetic' will help us to become better at paying attention to the
many different ways in which we pay attention to, respond to, and attempt
to remake our worlds. Spending less time on the aesthetic, or what we
take to be specifically aesthetic questions, might make us better at recognising
and describing the mixed, imperfect and impertinent nature of all the kinds
of things that we misrecognise as the operations and appearances of the
aesthetic; ways of gaining pleasure, ways of complicating and clarifying
feelings, forms of communication, ways of educating ourselves and each
other. We will get better at swerving round the conceptual gridlocks produced
by high-octane aesthetic discourse (my metaphor is taken from bicycling),
and we will be less likely to be satisfied with the smeared and bleared
accounts of these processes that are encouraged by a world in which the
idea of the aesthetic has so much continuing authority.
The unavoidability of overestimation
One of the alternately exhilarating and lowering things about
writing this paper has been how much like shooting fish in a barrel it
is to argue against the category of the aesthetic. Almost any book or article
you pick up by anyone who permits themselves the use of the word 'aesthetic'
in their title is going to come up sooner or later with a more or less
delirious definition of 'the aesthetic', suggesting that the writer has
either never attentively had any experience even approximating to the kinds
of experience said to be aesthetic, or has never had any other kind of
experience whatsoever. I would be tempted to suspect that the use of the
word 'aesthetic' is a mere harmless academic quirk, were it not for this
stubborn compulsion to obtuseness that seems to affect everybody who consents
to use the term. I concluded that there must be lots of people who found
talk about the 'aesthetic' unconvincing and silly; it's just that they
never write about the topic of aesthetics. The only people who write about
aesthetics are people who think there is something there to write about,
and who should therefore be disqualified by their very credulity from doing
so. It is this that convinces me, somewhat against my better, milder judgement,
to argue for urgent purgative measures with respect to this way of talking.
Aesthetics anyone? Just say no.
However, it is not possible for me to mount the kind of argument I have
here without running the risk of falling into precisely the same kind of
hypostasising and reifying as those I claim I am denouncing. Indeed, I
toyed for a while with the idea of offering my own definition of art and
the aesthetic, as the very impulse to overestimation itself, but then gave
it up, when I realised that it was simply a version of the 'art is special'
hypothesis (the impulse to make things special finding its most emphatic
form in the desire to make art itself, the mechanism for making things
special, the most special thing of all). What if the investigation of the
aesthetic were actually a much more various, and a much more particularised
pursuit than I have been suggesting? What if 'the aesthetic' were the name
of a much more complex and uneven set of arguments, that might be perfectly
capable of generating from within its own history and repertoire of problems
sufficiently sceptical and corrosive arguments of its own? What if 'the
aesthetic' had no necessary relationship to questions of art at all? What
if I have been massively overestimating the influence of the abstruse and
specialised arguments that so harmlessly and nonculpably occupy aestheticians?
What if trying simply to turn the page on the metaphysical thinking associated
with aesthetics were itself a metaphysical gesture, doomed to perpetuate
the style of thinking it wished to have done with? What if I were to be
taken at my own word, and were told that, indeed, 'the aesthetic' as such
did not exist, even and especially in the way in which I have had to magic
it into existence in order to denounce it with such arrogant relish?
All I can say is, that if any or all of this were really the case, why,
then everything will either be immaculately irremediable, or in no need
of any remedy at all.