Author: john mcgowan

Joseph North Five—The Aesthetic (Interactive Version)

My first stab at characterizing the aesthetic gave us a weak version of pluralism.  The aesthetic viewed things in a particular dimension, it “saw them as” meaningful, where that term covered their import and their importance.  Significance in both senses of the term: what some thing meant or conveyed and how (why?) that thing was of significance or value, worth caring about and for.

Such an understanding leaves the thing itself untroubled.  In Nicholas Rescher’s book Pluralism (Oxford UP, 1995), he accepts that there are multiple possible descriptions of a thing, what Wittgenstein calls its “aspects,” but insists there is still only one “reality.”  You and I are both seeing the same thing when I marvel at the color patterns in the fire and you worry about the people who might be trapped inside the building.  We are both responding to the fire.

I think (I’d have to go back and check the relevant texts carefully) that Richard Rorty, the most notorious anti-realist of late 20th century philosophy, would still hew to Rescher’s position.  Rorty focuses on “redescriptions” as a site of creativity, and as proof that “reality” under-determines the ways that human understand it, utilize it, and can creatively re-script their relations to it.  As Nick Gaskill points out in his essay on Rorty, one particularly dominant theme is Rorty’s work is anti-authoritarianism.  And that theme extends to “reality.”  Rorty writes against the authority that “reality” acquires in more traditional philosophical metaphysics.  He denies to “reality” the last word; humans can always—and are constantly—saying new things about the world.  And, following Kenneth Burke, we can claim that new things said open up new possible courses of action.

But what if we take a more radically interactive approach?  Such an approach is certainly suggested in the pragmatism of James and Dewey.  Debates about the “two pragmatisms” (H. O. Mounce’s term) in fact often center around the extent to which pragmatism is “realist.”  For Mounce, Rorty is the enemy, and we must return pragmatism to Charles Sanders Peirce’s metaphysical realism. [Howard Mounce, The Two Pragmatisms (Routledge, 1997).]  (Peirce, by the end of his life, was very close to a Platonic realist.)  This battle then gets fought over the body of Dewey; was Rorty’s radical reading of Dewey accurate or not?  And in most of these debate, James (and his radical empiricism) barely figures at all.  He is not taken seriously as an epistemologist or an ontologist.

Today, however, James’s radical empiricism has come to seem a fruitful approach to a variety of writers, none more prominent than Bruno Latour.  In his recent major tome, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Harvard UP, 2018), Latour offers what we might call radical pluralism.  “Modes” is, in fact, a slippery term—and Latour himself often seems unsure just how far he wants to push his ontological claims.  There are mountains of books trying to figure out what Spinoza meant by “modes,” although I think it fair to say there is general agreement that his “modes” are secondary to, dependent upon, “substance.”

Latour quite clearly wants to jettison the notion of “substance” altogether.  But still the term “mode” is never in and of itself sufficient.  It must be a mode of something.  And what we get is “an inquiry into modes of existence.”  But to what does “existence” refer?  The general metaphysical condition (i.e just another name for “reality,” even if that reality is more inchoate, more open to various manipulations, multiple shapings than some other versions of “reality.” It is unclear, since despite the prominence of the term in the title, Latour never explains to us what he means by “existence.”) But he does rely heavily on the term “existents,” and its meaning is quite clear.  Latour wants to substitute “subsistence” for “substance”—and refers throughout his book to “existents” (y which he appears to  mean “things that subsist.”) There are identifiable things (existents) that subsist.  (It seems to me, although Latour only mentions this term once, that he has his own version of Spinoza’s conatus.  Latour seems to posit a fundamental drive to subsist, a fundamental energy devoted to subsisting.)  In this framework, “a mode of existence [is] a way of being that cannot be substituted for any other and that no other can replace” (268).  “A way of being” for what?–presumably for “an existent.”

Where Latour moves toward a more radical, ontological pluralism is in his insistence that to subsist requires change.  If there is a fundamental reality in Latour’s recent work, it is the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of ceaseless “flux,” a Jamesian conceit if there ever was one. [“in fact, there is neither real continuity of courses of action nor stability of subjects” (370).]  Against the relentless tide of time passing, an existent must exert itself to maintain itself.  It must be ever adapting to the novelties that time’s passage throws at it.  So are “modes” different strategies of subsistence?  Latour doesn’t go that way.

Instead—and here is where a Latour inspired version of “the aesthetic” would dovetail with North’s desire that the aesthetic provide us with images of and models for collectivity—Latour focuses on what “assemblage” of participants (“actants”) must work together to allow an existent to subsist. [The “malign inversion” that elevates a persistent “substance” over the struggle for “subsistence” is malign because it “loses the thread of the means that could have ensured subsistence” (279)] In the case of science, concentrating on “the means of subsistence” requires attention to the procedures, the instruments, the experiments—in short, the whole range of interactions between the scientist and both the “thing” studied and the scientific community.  Some existent is only “known” and only continues as an object of scientific discourse when it can be discerned by the procedures/instruments, fit into a causal story that the community (the peer reviewers in the first instance) buys, and remain an object of interest for subsequent inquiries.

Science, in Latour’s terms, grants us “access” to various existents—and it takes a village to secure such access.  But it remains unclear (at least to me) to what extent the “existents” pre-exist these interactions with them.  There seems to be some raw material out there, even if Latour is very specific that he wants to banish the reification called Matter (with a capital M).  Latour’s commitment to the primary flux is such that he battles against all reifications: Matter, Society, Truth, the Economy.  In their stead, he offers processes of assemblage in which “gatherings” (interactions) produce things. It would be better to say “produce states of affairs” (rather than produce things) because things always and only exist in relations. (That’s a major lesson of James’s radical empiricism.)

Thus, things emerge out of the flux, take on solidity as a result of interaction–and gain subsistence, plus any identity they might temporarily possess, in and through their relation to others.  Latour is insistent that the path to being is through the detour of otherness; I only become myself through my relations–which are never stable, always unfolding–to others.  But (here’s my nagging worry when it comes to science—and I think Latour actually is inconsistent on this score) what then are these existents, with their will to subsist?  It seems as if he posits not just an originary flux, but also some existents lurking within the flux.  Now we might say those existents are inchoate; he does at times use the term “articulation.”  So we could say that existents are articulated, take a specific form, through specific processes of assemblage.  And then we could say those specific forms are “modes.”  But that would still mean they are “modes of” something more primitive—of a non-solid stuff (substance?) that needs a lot of help to keep subsisting.  And that non-solid stuff has a will to subsist.  Specific objects emerge from communal processes, but those processes work upon some mysterious stuff called “existents.”

But the aesthetic (to get there at last) may not have science’s handicap.  There is little reason to think the aesthetic object pre-exists the act of artistic creation.  Certainly, in the kind of common sense view that Latour is at pains to validate against the wrong-headed metaphysics of “the moderns,” that artist works upon her material (words, musical sounds, marble etc.) and shapes it into her art work.  The interactive model works perfectly here.  The material offers various affordances and resistances.  It is hardly, as every artist knows, a passive participant, supine before the artist’s vision.  It has its own contributions to make, its own ways of frustrating or enabling the artist’s desires.  So this is not the Wittgensteinian interpreter who is seeing or highlighting “an aspect” of the finished thing he contemplates.  Rather, it is the very creation of that thing through an interactive process.  And it is not just the creation of the art work, but also the creation of this person as “an artist.”  You don’t get to assume the identity of artist until you have done the act of making.  It is not a pre-existent identity, but an emergent one–and it depends not just on the act of making but also on the community’s recognition of what you have made as a “work of art.”

Such a description immediately raises the question of whether or not there is a strong distinction between the aesthetic as experienced/practiced by the creating artist and the aesthetic as experienced/practiced by the audience.  I am going to leave exploring that question to my next post.

Today I just want to finish up by expanding (as Latour would certainly urge us to do) our account of the interactions that characterize the aesthetic.  In order for even that basic act of artistic creation to occur, there needs to be much more in place than simply the artist sitting down to work.  That act hardly takes place in a vacuum.  The artist has been trained in her craft, has received feedback and encouragement (or discouragement) of various forms, has learned something of the tradition of that craft, and has some idea of the possible places for display of her work.  Once the work has been created, its subsistence is radically dependent on practices of display—and institutions (museums, schools, theaters etc.) for “showing” works.  Roland Barthes, in an epigram I love, said “Literature is what gets taught.”  The canon is one way works of written art subsist.  A poem is dead, has not succeeded in subsisting, if it never gets read.  Similarly, “the art world” is a subject of so much fear and loathing precisely because an art work lives or dies by its ability to negotiate the various intricacies, procedures, and institutions that characterize that “world.”

In short, as Latour is always trying to get us to see, the number of actants involved in the subsistence of any activity and its products is almost always more numerous than we first suppose.  And thus the outcome—the artistic work that emerges from this activity—is always shaped by inputs from all of these actants.  No wonder artists continually dream of “artistic freedom.”  Images of heroic individualism push back against the inevitable entanglement in complicated webs (networks) of relationships that defeat any idea of mastery, of sovereignty over, the field.

The aesthetic, precisely because it entails the creation of new objects, seems particularly suited to serve as an instance of radical pluralism.  Its conditions for creation can be specified—and can be seen as distinct from the conditions of existence in other fields (such as science or, to cite some of Latour’s other examples, politics, law, and economics.)  Those conditions can be described (Howard Becker’s work is exemplary here, but we can also think of Bourdieu as well).  And we can even take a stab at trying to describe the factors that contribute to making judgments about the quality, importance, and/or significance (in all its senses) of aesthetic works.  That’s where I want to start in my next post.

 

 

 

Today I just want to finish up by expanding (as Latour would certainly urge us to do) our account of the interactions that characterize the aesthetic.  In order for even that basic act of artistic creation to occur, there needs to be much more in place than simply the artist sitting down to work.  That act hardly takes place in a vacuum.  The artist has been trained in her craft, has received feedback and encouragement (or discouragement) of various forms, has learned something of the tradition of that craft, and has some idea of the possible places for display of her work.  Once the work has bene created, its subsistence is radically dependent on practices of display—and institutions (museums, schools, theaters etc.) for “showing” works.  Roland Barthes, in  a epigram I love, said “Literature is what gets taught.”  The canon is one way works of written art subsist.  A poem is dead, has not succeeded in subsisting, if it never gets read.  Similarly, “the art world” is a subject of so much fear and loathing precisely because an art work lives or dies by its ability to negotiate the various intricacies, procedures, and institutions that characterize that “world.”

 

In short, as Latour is always trying to get us to see, the number of actants involved in the subsistence of any activity and its products is almost always more numerous than we first suppose.  And thus the outcome—the artistic work that emerges from this activity—is always shaped by inputs from all of these actants.  No wonder artists continually dream of “artistic freedom.”  Images of heroic individualism push back against the inevitable entanglement in complicated webs (networks) of relationships that defeat any idea of mastery, of sovereignty over, the field.

 

The aesthetic, precisely because it entails the creation of new objects, seems particularly suited to serve as an instance of radical pluralism.  Its conditions for creation can be specified—and can be seen as distinct from the conditions of existence in other fields (such as science or, to cite some of Latour’s other examples, politics, law, and economics.)  Those conditions can be described (Howard Becker’s work is exemplary here, but we can also think of Bourdieu as well).  And we can even take a stab at trying to describe the factors that contribute to making judgments about the quality, importance, and/or significance (in all its senses) of aesthetic works.  That’s where I want to start in my next post.

 

’t go that way.

 

Instead—and here is where a Latour inspired version of “the aesthetic” would dovetail with North’s desire that the aesthetic provide us with images of and models for collectivity—Latour focuses on what “assemblage” of participants (“actants”) must work together to allow an existent to subsist.  In the case of science, that means thinking about the procedures, the instruments, the experiments—in short, the whole range of interactions between the scientist and both the “thing” studied and the scientific community.  Some existent is only “known” and only continues as an object of scientific discourse when it can be discerned by the procedures/instruments, fit into a causal story that the community (the peer reviewers in the first instance) buys, and remain an object of interest for subsequent inquiries.  Science, in Latour’s terms, grants us “access” to various existents—and it takes a village to secure such access.  But it remains unclear (at least to me) to what extent the “existents” pre-exist these interactions with them.  There seems to be some raw material out there, even if Latour is very specific that he wants to banish the reification: Matter (with a capital M).  Latour’s commitment to the primary flux is such that he battles against all reifications: Matter, Society, Truth, the Economy.  In their stead, he offers processes of assemblage in which “gatherings” (interactions) produce things (probably saying “produce states of affairs” would be better).

Thus, things emerge out of the flux, take on solidity as a result of interaction.  But (here’s my nagging worry when it comes to science—and I think Latour actually is inconsistent on this score) what then are these existents, with their will to subsist?  It seems as if he posits not just an originary flux, but also some existents lurking within the flux.  Now we might say those existents are inchoate; he does at times use the term “articulation.”  So we could say that existents are articulated, take a specific form, through specific processes of assemblage.  And then we could say those specific forms are “modes.”  But that would still mean they are “modes of” something more primitive—of a non-solid stuff (substance?) that needs a lot of help to keep subsisting.  And that non-solid stuff has a will to subsist.  Specific objects emerge from communal processes, but those processes work upon some mysterious stuff called “existents.”

But the aesthetic (to get there at last) may not have science’s handicap.  There is little reason to think the aesthetic object pre-exists the act of artistic creation.  Certainly, in the kind of common sense view that Latour is at pains to validate against the wrong-headed metaphysics of “the moderns,” that artist works upon her material (words, musical sounds, marble etc.) and shapes it into her art work.  The interactive model works perfectly here.  The material offers various affordances and resistances.  It is hardly, as every artist knows, a passive participant, supine before the artist’s vision.  It has its own contributions to make, its own ways of frustrating or enabling the artist’s desires.  So this is not the Wittgensteinian interpreter who is seeing or highlighting “an aspect” of the finished thing he contemplates.  Rather, it is the very creation of that thing through an interactive process.

And it is not just the material the artist works with that is transformed in the process. So is the person doing that work.  Her identity as “an artist” only emerges through doing that work–and depends not only on what she produces, but also on how others are willing to view her.  We all know people who want to call themselves “writers,” but who do not feel entitled to claim that self-description because the community has not yet bestowed it on them.  That identity can only be achieved through the “means” of the others–the material worked on, the community to whom the work is presented.

Such a description immediately raises the question of whether or not there is a strong distinction between the aesthetic as experienced/practiced by the creating artist and the aesthetic as experienced/practiced by the audience.  I am going to leave exploring that question to my next post.

Today I just want to finish up by expanding (as Latour would certainly urge us to do) our account of the interactions that characterize the aesthetic.  In order for even that basic act of artistic creation to occur, there needs to be much more in place than simply the artist sitting down to work.  That act hardly takes place in a vacuum.  The artist has been trained in her craft, has received feedback and encouragement (or discouragement) of various forms, has learned something of the tradition of that craft, and has some idea of the possible places for display of her work.  Once the work has been created, its subsistence is radically dependent on practices of display—and institutions (museums, schools, theaters etc.) for “showing” works.  Roland Barthes, in  a epigram I love, said “Literature is what gets taught.”  The canon is one way works of written art subsist.  A poem is dead, has not succeeded in subsisting, if it never gets read.  Similarly, “the art world” is a subject of so much fear and loathing precisely because an art work lives or dies by its ability to negotiate the various intricacies, procedures, and institutions that characterize that “world.”

In short, as Latour is always trying to get us to see, the number of actants involved in the subsistence of any activity and its products is almost always more numerous than we first suppose.  And thus the outcome—the artistic work that emerges from this activity and “the artist” who also emerges from it—is always shaped by inputs from all of these actants.  No wonder artists continually dream of “artistic freedom.”  Images of heroic individualism push back against the inevitable entanglement in complicated webs (networks) of relationships that defeat any idea of mastery, of sovereignty over, the field.

The aesthetic, precisely because it entails the creation of new objects, seems particularly suited to serve as an instance of radical pluralism.  Its conditions for creation can be specified—and can be seen as distinct from the conditions of existence in other fields (such as science or, to cite some of Latour’s other examples, politics, law, and economics.)  Those conditions can be described (Howard Becker’s work is exemplary here, but we can also think of Bourdieu as well).  And we can even take a stab at trying to describe the factors that contribute to making judgments about the quality, importance, and/or significance (in all its senses) of aesthetic works.  That’s where I want to start in my next post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

R.I.P.: American Democracy

The flags should all be flying at half-mast today.  American democracy died last night.

I know many will say it has been on life-support for many a day now.  Others will say, “you fool, it never existed in the first place.”

But it did exist so long as the path forward, the way to bring about the changes and reforms one desired, was electoral politics.  If you could swing, through all the devices of persuasion, a majority to your side, you could take over the government and pass the legislation you deemed necessary.

Yes, that is simplistic and ignores all the veto points, all the obstacles put in the pathway of change.  And it ignores how the system always excluded certain people—people who had to resort to extra-electoral tactics (civil disobedience and its various forms of protest) to make their needs and desires felt.

But the great social movements of American history, the women’s movement and the civil rights movement, aimed for the vote.  They put so much emphasis on gaining the vote precisely because they associated the vote with power, the power to effect change.  They believed that we had enough of a democracy, no matter how imperfect, that it made sense to engage in electoral politics—and that electoral politics was the road to reform.

Perhaps that belief was a delusion, but 2006 and 2008 seemed to bear it out.  The country rose up against the lies and incompetence of the Bush administration—and grabbed the government back.

Now, however, we have a Republican Party in power that is determined to never let another 2006 or 2008 occur.  Their simple plan is to render “free and fair” (that old cliché) elections impossible. Emboldened by the nation’s acceptance of Bush v. Gore,  they have deployed every means at their disposal; they keep people from voting or nullify electoral results: voter suppression, gerrymandering, judicial or legislative over-rides of election results (taking away powers of elected officials if they are Democrats, as has happened in both Wisconsin and North Carolina).

Still, I will admit to having thought there was a limit to their willingness to turn elections into farces worthy of the so-called “people’s republics” of yore.  Surely, even the Republicans needed the cover of “legitimacy” that elections provide in a democracy.  Various pundits kept claiming that John Roberts was the bulwark against complete Republican destruction of our democracy.  He cared, they said, about the integrity of the Supreme Court, about its standing above partisan politics.

Quite evidently not.  The Supreme Court last night authorized a Wisconsin election in which thousands will not have their votes counted.  The situation is Kafkaesque: in order to be counted ballots must be returned before they have been received.  But the court’s decision is as straightforward as could be: we will validate election results even though thousands are prevented from voting.

I am heartsick.  If electoral politics are a sham, are rigged from the outset, the only way forward is non-electoral politics.  As Martin Luther King saw very clearly, that means either a “persistent and unyielding” non-violent mass movement or a resort (always, necessarily by a much smaller number) to violence.  King insisted that violence could not succeed; not only were the odds against it too great because you will never get large numbers to join your violent movement, but also because violence breeds more violence as it creates bitterness and the desire (almost impossible to ignore) for revenge.  It also turns off those sympathetic to your cause, but opposed to violent means. (I am channeling MLK’s essay, “The Social Organization of Nonviolence” here.)

The Republicans have learned (it would seem) over the past few years that they pay no price for their destruction of democracy.  I venture to guess that life for most people in this country is just comfortable enough to keep them from endangering what they have by devoting themselves to a long, persistent struggle.  Endangering their leisure time, their peace of mind, their jobs and livelihood.  The reasons may range from petty to dangers to economic and physical well-being.

It seems that the death of democracy will occur amidst various howls of protest, but little more than that.  The officials elected in today’s Wisconsin election will take office—and continue to wreak the damage that has been the platform of Wisconsin’s Republicans for the past ten years.

Unless a strong and effective dissent is lodged—and such a dissent will require sacrifices of time, comfort, and well-being—democracy will not return.  Or, if you prefer, democracy will not be seen for the first time in this land. I do not see where that dissent will come from, where that movement will arise.

Joseph North Four—The Aesthetic

I thought I was only going to have three posts on the North book, but find I must add a fourth. (Warning: a fifth is now lined up.]

North, basically, accuses the baby boomers of abandoning the aesthetic when they moved over to historicist critique.  Just as he wants to reclaim a distinctive disciplinary status for literary studies, he wants to reclaim a distinctive identity for the aesthetic.  And he then wants to claim that establishing that separate category of “the aesthetic” has “radical” political consequences.  He makes two fuzzy steps along the way to this position.  The first is his continual claim that his aesthetics are “materialist” in a way that liberal aesthetics are not.  What he means by materialist is far from clear.  He certainly can’t (or certainly shouldn’t) mean that aesthetics are materially or economically determined—because if that is the case aesthetics would be hard-pressed to be radical.  They would just (in a vulgar Marxist determinism sense) serve the dominant class.  So he must mean something like: aesthetics are a manifestation of certain concrete practices that either stem from a collective aiming to resist the dominant economic order or aesthetics are instrumental in the formation of a resistant collective.

The second leap, of course, is the idea that aesthetics are inevitably “radical.”  This position, it seems to me, is akin to the leftist insistence (in some quarters) that if we had “true” democracy, a really fair expression of the people’s will, that will would turn out to be socialist.  In other words, there is a refusal to credit that the people might not desire socialism; that its will is accurately reflected in the current unsatisfactory (from the leftist point of view) state of affairs.  In this scenario, the left refuses to accept that it has rhetorically failed to make its case, and blames a corrupt democracy for its failure.

The parallel here is to think a “true” aesthetics must needs be radical.  But that is to assume a much more direct link between the aesthetic and the political than actually exists.  That link—if it is to exist—must be forged.  And it must be forged in a context where other links to other political positions is possible—as is the absence of any link at all (i.e. an apolitical art).  In short, no guarantees.  Everything must be produced—and produced in a field rife with competitors and obstacles.  No bridges without hard labor—and the bridges require constant defense against those who would dismantle them or turn them to other uses.

All that said, what I really want to do in this post (and it is going to require two posts) is consider the nature of the aesthetic.  Because I am one of those baby boomers who has found the category of the aesthetic so befuddling that I have found it easier to do without it.  I have never found it analytically useful to identify some phenomenon as “aesthetic” in some way that is denied to other phenomenon.  Yet I haunt art museums and read bushels of novels.  So perhaps I really need to come to terms with the aesthetic.

As should be clear from the previous posts, I cannot locate the distinctiveness of the aesthetic in a certain kind of object. Anything and everything is a possible object for “close reading,” I have argued.  Instead, I am inclined to evoke Wittgenstein’s notion of “seeing as.”  He writes: “I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another.  I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently.  I call this experience ‘noticing an aspect’ (Philosophical Investigations, p. 193.)  He goes on (after giving us a figure that could be viewed in two different ways—not yet the famous duck/rabbit which comes on the next page): “we can also see the illustration now as one thing now as another. –So we interpret it, and see it as we interpret it”(p. 193).

This way of “saving” the aesthetic is familiar enough.  It is possible to see things “aesthetically.”  Traditionally, to see something aesthetically has usually been categorized as abstracting away from its uses or its consequences to focus solely on its appearance and its form.  Thus, the painter who thrills to the majestic vision of the building on fire without a thought to the people who are perishing within is seeing aesthetically.   The aesthetic in this sense has often been accused of a cold-blooded heartlessness, a kind of narcissistic monomania on the part of the artist, who abstracts away from ordinary human cares.

I am inclined—in this book about meaning that I keep claiming I am going to write—to say (instead) that seeing something “aesthetically” is to focus on its meaning.  The aesthetic, first of all, is a call to focus.  The aesthetic says: “pay particular attention to this thing, to this phenomenon” and let’s consider what it means.  The aesthetic enhances what it touches (makes it more significant, more worthy of attention) by augmenting its meaning.  If we take the time to pause over this thing, we will discover depths (I find myself pushed to use this word even though I hate the surface/depth metaphor) we did not previously suspect.  The artist makes us notice things we hadn’t seen before.  Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi”:

God’s works—paint any one, and count it crime

To let a truth slip. Don’t object, “His works

Are here already; nature is complete:

Suppose you reproduce her—(which you can’t)

There’s no advantage! you must beat her, then.”

For, don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love

First when we see them painted, things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

And so they are better, painted—better to us,

Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;

God uses us to help each other so,

Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now,

Your cullion’s hanging face? A bit of chalk,

And trust me but you should, though! How much more,

If I drew higher things with the same truth!

That were to take the Prior’s pulpit-place,

Interpret God to all of you! Oh, oh,

It makes me mad to see what men shall do

And we in our graves! This world’s no blot for us,

Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

 

We, of course, hardly share Lippo’s faith that “it means good.”  But it is, I think, fair to say that aesthetics is committed to the insistence that “it means intensely.”  The aesthetic vision intensifies—or, as I said two posts back about close readings, that vision quickens.

Is that quickening radical?  I think that it, at least, provides another stance to assume.  Commercial culture is reductive and rushed.  Reductive in the sense that things are processed in terms of their equivalence, their exchange value.  Rushed in the sense that “getting and spending” is a frantic business.  We don’t dwell on things, and we don’t focus on their singularity, their difference from the other things on offer in the market.

Perhaps even more important is (going back to what I said about judgment in the previous post) the way the aesthetic calls us to contemplate alternatives.  A “creative” artist surprises us, projecting meanings and possibilities that had not previously occurred to us.  There is more here than I, at first, thought there was.  We could move on from here along an unexpected path.  To the forces of necessity, the stern taskmasters who assure us “there are no alternatives,” the aesthetic says, “not so fast.”  It refuses to tolerate the failures of imagination that offer “false necessities” in the stead of proliferated possibilities.  It helps us to “go on” (Wittgenstein’s phrase) otherwise.

Seeing aesthetically, then, I am saying consists in a) a call to attend closely to this thing or situation, b) an attempt to call forth—through an act of imaginative interpretation—“aspects” of that thing or situation hitherto unnoticed or neglected, and c) the projection of “an attitude” (now I am drawing on Kenneth Burke) toward the thing or situation in question.

Burke calls art “the dancing of an attitude” and every attitude “an incipient action.”  The artist is not indifferent to the meanings her work displays; the work stages an attitude, a stance, toward its subject matter—whether that be delight, indignation, curiosity, or a fascination with the technical difficulties of aesthetic representation itself.  And the work solicits a response from its audience.  It woos the spectator (to return to Arendt on Kant), inviting her to try on (at least for a time) that attitude as well.  And, thus, if Burke is right, to imagine the actions that would follow from adopting such an attitude in her own life.

Here we get to the crux of my position, the crucial crossroads where meaning passes over from import (what this situation conveys, the affordances and resistances it presents) to value (why I should care about and for this thing or situation).  The artist’s lack of indifference (the opposite: her passionate attachment!) is what she wishes to communicate, why she struggles to grab her audience’s attention.

That’s why “the aesthetic” as a category has no inherent politics.  It is the content of any particular artistic work, not the fact that it is art, that makes it “radical” or not.  Yes, I do think that art proposes an alternative form of valuation from that which prevails in the marketplace.  But that alternative need not be radical in any leftist sense.  There are, as I have argued in previous posts, worse things in the world than market societies.  And there have been artists passionately attached to those more terrible social orders.

Of more interest to me right now is this insistence that art involves values.  The art work makes a case about “what we should care about.”  It says: “here is significance, here is value.  Life will be enhanced by paying attention here, by caring for this matter, by pursuing the possible course of action suggested by these attitudes.”  A fuller, better life is what art seeks, what it (in its more confident moments) gestures toward, even (at its most manic) promises.  (I am, as always, influenced by my mentor, Charles Altieri, when dwelling on such issues.  For Altieri, the aesthetic approaches value through attention to “qualities.”  The meanings the aesthetic makes available are complex and non-reductive precisely because so attuned to the specific textures, emotions, and relations that constitute the “feel” [often hard to capture in any kind of direct statement or presentation] of an experience, a “feel” that potentially changes understandings of both self and world.)

I will end today by saying that aesthetic value is different from moral, economic, and political.  If, in a Nietzschean fashion, the aesthetic is in the service of a passionate, intense, fully lived life, then it (at best) may be tied to ethical value—where ethics is understood as concerned with the question of the “good life,” how best to solve the conundrum of how to live on this troubled planet.

I have already suggested how economic value is distinct from aesthetic value.  Political value (I would argue) concerns the creation and maintenance of a political community that manages to find a modus vivendi that serves needs well enough to prevent civil war. (Obviously, lots more needs to be said about this.)  The prime political values are freedom, justice, and security (peace); deny people freedom and they will take up arms; treat them unjustly enough and they will take up arms; fail to secure them the possibility of living their life and they will have no reason to accept the impositions of order.

Politics overlaps with morality, since I take morality to encompass the ways we organize our relations to others, both human and non-human.  Morality takes in relations that stand outside of politics per se, but most political questions (questions about how to arrange matters within the political community) are moral questions.

In sum, I have taken here the position that “the aesthetic” is the place where we attend to questions of value that pertain to the “meaning” of things, including the meaning of life.  That focus encompasses the questions of “what should I care about?”; “what possibilities does the life I have been given (into which I have been “thrown” as Heidegger puts it) afford me?”; and “how can I best live this life, to what should I attend; to what should I devote my energies; what should I strive to nourish, protect, and enable to flourish?”

All of this—and now I hate to tell you that I am not convinced this is an adequate account of the aesthetic.  It does two things I like: one, pushes the question of value front and center; and two, makes the aesthetic an attitude, or way of seeing, that refuses to locate it in a specific place, practice, institution, but disperses throughout all the sites of human life.

Which is not to say art should be anti- or a-institutional.  I have already argued that things we cherish sorely need institutions to sustain themselves, so I am all in favor of institutions that shelter the aesthetic attitude.  Similarly, I am not against identifying a range of practices that cultivate and enact the aesthetic attitude.  I am with North in believing that the aesthetic sensibility (and what have I been describing here except a sensibility?) needs to be cultivated; it is not “natural” any more that “trading and bartering” is natural.

But—I am not fully convinced I am on the right track here, so will try another version of “the aesthetic” in my next post.

Joseph North Three:  Sensibility, Community, Institution

Now we reach the point in my discussion of Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Harvard UP, 2017) where I mostly agree with him.  I am simply going to take up some of his key terms and goals and inflect them somewhat differently.  I think what I have to say runs parallel to North, not ever much meeting him on his chosen ground, but not running athwart his formulations either.

Here’s three of North’s descriptions of his project.

The first comes from a footnote on Raymond Williams and features North’s “scholarship/criticism” divide.  “Of course, none of this is to say that Williams was not deeply committed to ‘practice’ in other fields of endeavor; I merely mean to observe that he understood his disciplinary work in scholarly terms, as cultural analysis, cultural history, and cultural theory, rather than understanding it in critical terms as the systematic cultivation of sensibility.  Naturally the two are not finally distinguishable, and any powerful work of scholarship moves readers to try on different ranges of sensibility, etc. etc. But the ‘practice’ of scholarship, conceived of as cultural analysis, is necessarily neither direct nor systematic in this respect” (pg. 233, fn. 18).

The second is notable for its raising the issue of institutions.  “I only want to add that the problem facing the discipline is not an entirely new one, for in a broad sense it is much the same problem that the critical revolution of the 1920s managed to solve: the problem of creating a true paradigm for criticism—the problem of how to build an institution that would cultivate new, deeper forms of subjectivity and collectivity in a rigorous and repeatable way” (126-27).

In the third passage, he faults the work of D. A. Miller and Eve Sedgwick for its “lack of any prospect of a true paradigm for criticism—the lack of any hope of putting together a paradigmatic way to use the literary directly to intervene in the social order” (173).  Two pages earlier, he describes what I think he means by “direct” intervention.  “My point is simply that it really does make a difference to the character of the work produced by an intellectual formation when those involved feel strongly their responsibility to the needs of a fairly well-defined larger formation beyond the academy—a larger formation defined not simply by its ‘identity’ but by its character as a living movement—which is to say, really, a formation defined by its always limited but nevertheless real ability to define itself by determining, collectively, the trajectory of its own development” (171).

I can’t resist, of course, registering where I disagree with these statements. I have already made clear my skepticism that there is a rigorous or systematic way to cultivate a sensibility.  I am also astounded that North does not recognize feminist literary criticism of the period from 1975 to 1995 as a paradigmatic case of academic work tied “to a fairly well-defined larger formation beyond the academy.”  And if Sedgwick’s relation to the gay liberation movement isn’t a similar instance, may the Lord help the rest of us.  And North’s repeated (as much a tic as his use of the term “rigorous”) use of the words “true” and “really” make him appear more Stalinist than I think he really is.  Does he really intend to shut down the pluralism of intellectual work in favor of the one true path?  Re-education camps for the critics so that they get with the program—and are taught the methods of the new systematic pedagogy.  Surely, one of the delights of the aesthetic sensibility is its anarchism, its playfulness, its imaginative ingenuity, excesses, and unruliness. I suspect that “systematic,” and “repeatable” and “direct” aesthetic education would prove counter-productive in many cases.  At least, I hope it would–with teachers and student both summoning enough gumption to rebel against the indoctrination.

Finally, I want to quibble with his description of “direct” intervention.  Work that stands in support of, proves useful to, “larger” social movements is not direct—at least not directly political.  Here’s Judith Butler in a 1988 essay offering a straightforward description of political acts.  “Clearly, there are political acts which are deliberate and instrumental actions of political organization, resistant collective interventions with the broad aim of instating a more just set of social and political relations” (“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” Theater Journal  523).  That cultivating an aesthetic sensibility might play a role in encouraging someone to join that social movement is not the direct political intervention that the movement attempts through quite different means and actions than what the critic does in the classroom or in her written work.  To confuse the two does no one any good—especially if it lets the teacher/critic deem herself sufficiently political as she advances her academic career.  The teacher/critic’s contribution is valuable, but it also indirect.

Enough with the dissents. I completely agree with North that “sensibility” is the crucial concept for the “hearts and minds” side of politics.  Cultivating a leftist sensibility is necessary, although not sufficient, to creating the kind of society we leftists want to live in.  The caveats here are familiar.  There is no guaranteed path from an aesthetic sensibility to a leftist politics. [Let me also note that the practice of close reading is also not the only, or even the royal road, to acquiring an aesthetic sensibility.  Lots of people got there other ways, which casts doubt of the “systematic” and “rigorous” pedagogy, and on the fetishizing of close reading.] For many aesthetes (Nietzsche, Yeats, and Pound among them), the vulgarity and bad taste of the masses drives them to anti-democratic, autocratic visions of strong, masterful leaders of the herd.  For others (Wordsworth and Coleridge for example), reverence for genius promotes a kind of over-all piety that leads to a quietist respect for everything that is, investing tradition and the customary forms of life with a sacred aura it is impious to question or change.  (This is the aesthetic version—articulated by T. S. Eliot as well—of Edmund Burke’s conservatism.)

But the larger point—and now we are with David Hume and William James in contrast to Kant—is that our political ideas and principles (and our ethical ones as well) are the products of our sensibility.  It is the moral passions and our moral intuitions that generate our political commitments.  James (in the first lecture of Pragmatism) talks of “temperament”—and throughout his work (from The Principles of Psychology onwards) insists that our stated reasons for doing something are always secondary; there was the will to do something first, then the search for justifying reasons.  Indignation at the injustice of others (or of social arrangements) and shame at one’s own acts of selfishness are more secure grounds for conduct than a rationally derived categorical imperative.

James seems to think of temperament as innate, a fated from birth.  North’s point is that education—a sentimental education—can shape sensibility.  I agree.  My daughter was in college at George Washington University when Osama bin Laden was killed.  Her classmates rushed over to the White House (three blocks away) to celebrate when the news was heard.  She told my wife and me that she didn’t join the celebration.  It just felt wrong to her to dance in the streets about killing someone.  Her parents’ reaction was her Friends School education had just proved itself.

Sensibility is akin to taste.  The leftist today finds it distasteful, an offense to her sense of how things should be, to live in Trump’s America.  I will use my next post to describe the sensibility of the right in that America.  But for the left, there is outrage at the caging of immigrant children, and at the bigotry that extends to non-whites, women, non-Christians and beyond.  Fundamentally, it is the shame of living in such a needlessly cruel society, with its thousands of homeless and millions of uninsured.

I don’t know exactly how a specifically “aesthetic” sensibility lines up with this leftist sensibility.  And as I have said, there is certainly no sure path from one to the other.  But I am willing to believe (maybe because it is true at least for myself) that the aesthetic stands at odds with commercial culture, attending to values and experiences that are “discounted” (in every sense of that word) in the dominant culture.  Being placed at odds, in a spot where the taken-for-granteds of one’s society are made somewhat less self-evident, has its effect.  If what one has come to appreciate, even to love, is scorned by others, new modes of reckoning (again in every sense of the word), and new allegiances (structure of feeling) may beckon.

Here is where Hume is preferable to James.  Hume (Dewey and Mead follow Hume  here in a way the more individualistic James does not) portrays sensibility as shaped through our communal relations and as reinforced by those same relations.  In other words, even non-conformity is social.  It is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible (akin to the impossibility of a “private language” in the Wittgenstein argument) to be a solitary “enemy of the people.”  There must be resources—from the tradition, from received works of art, criticism, and cultural analysis, from a cohort—on which one can draw to sustain the feeling that something is wrong in the dominant order.

Education, in other words, can play a major role in shaping sensibility—and it is the community the school offers is as crucial as the educational content.  Young people discover the courage of their convictions when they find others who feel the same way, who have the same inchoate intuitions that school (in both its formal and informal interactions) is helping them to articulate.  The encouragement of teachers (yes, you are on the right path; keep going; keep probing; keep questioning; trust your instincts) and of peers (those famous all-night bull sessions after our student finds her sympaticos).

Communities are, famously, ephemeral.  We can idealize them (as arguably Hannah Arendt does in her definition of “the political”—a definition that seems to exclude everything except the excited talk among equals from the political sphere).  Societies are corrupt, impersonal, hierarchical, mechanical, not face-to-face.  Communities are “known” (as Raymond Williams phrased it), informal and intimate.  A familiar narrative of “modernity” sees communities as overwhelmed by society, by the depredations of capitalism, war, and the ever-expanding state. (Tonnies)

This romanticism does not serve the left well.  Communities are not sustainable in the absence of institutions.  And they certainly cannot withstand the pressures of power, of the large forces of capitalism and the state, without institutional homes.  There must (quite literally) be places for the community to gather and resources for its maintenance.  Make no mistake about it: neo-liberalism has deliberately and methodically set out to destroy the institutions that have sustained the left (while building their own infrastructure—chambers of commerce, business lobbying groups, the infamous think tanks—that provide careers for the cadre of right-wing hacks).  Unions, of course, first and foremost.  When did we last have a union leader who was recognized as a spokesperson for America’s workers?  But there has also been the absorption of the “associations” that Tocqueville famously saw as the hallmark of American democracy into the services of the state.  Outsourced welfare functions are now the responsibility of clinics first created by the feminist and gay liberation movements to serve the needs of their communities.  Financial stability has been secured at the price of being experienced as embedded members of the community; now those organizations are purveyors of  services begrudgingly offered by a bureaucratic state that always put obstacles in the way of accessing those benefits.

North is right to see that the neoliberal attack on institutions extends to the university.  The aesthetic sensibility (since at least 1960) has been bunkered in the university, having failed to sustain the few other institutional structures (little magazines, the literary reviews it inherited from the 19th century) that existed in the early 20th century.  Reading groups are well and good (they are thriving and I hardly want to belittle them), but have no institutional weight or home.  Humanities departments are about it, except for the arts scene (again, mostly woefully under-institutionalized) in some major cities.

So there is every reason to fight hard to keep the humanities as an integral part of the university.  I personally don’t think taking the disciplinary route is the way to fight this fight—but maybe I am wrong.  Maybe only claims to disciplinary specificity and expertise can gain us a spot.

More crucially, I think North is absolutely right to believe that our efforts as critics are doomed to political ineffectiveness if not tied to vibrant social movements.

[For the record, here is where I think North’s criticism/scholarship divide really doesn’t work.  Efforts along both lines can prove supportive or not to social movements.  It is the content, not the form, of the work that matters.  And I also think work that is apolitical is perfectly OK.  It is tyrannical—a mirror image of the absurd regimes of “productivity” that afflict both capitalism and the research university—to insist that everything one does contribute to the political cause.  Life is made worth living, in many instances, by things that are unproductive, are useless.]

The problem of the contemporary left is, precisely, the absence of such social movements.  The civil rights movement had the black churches, and then the proliferation of organizations: SNCC, CORE, SCLC, along with the venerable NAACP, and A. Philip Randolph’s labor organization.  It sustained itself over a very long time.  The feminist movement had its clinics, and NOW.  The anti-war movement had A. J. Muste and David Dellinger, long-time veterans of peace groups.  The Democratic Party is obviously no good unless (except when) it is pushed by groups formed outside the party, groups that act on their own without taking instructions from the party. The Bernie Sanders insurrection will only reshape the Democratic Party when it establishes itself as an independent power outside the party–with which the party then needs to come to terms.

The trouble with Black Lives Matter, ME Too, and Occupy is that they all have resisted or failed (I don’t know which one) to establish any kind of institutional base.  Each of these movements has identified a mass of people who share certain experiences and a certain sensibility.  They have, in other words, called into presence (albeit mostly virtually—except for Occupy) a community.  That discovery of other like souls is comforting, reassuring, even empowering.  I am not alone.  But to be politically effective, these movements need legs.  They need to be sustained, in it for the long haul.  And that requires institutions: money, functionaries, offices, continuing pressure at the sites deemed appropriate (for strategic reasons) for intervention.

In short (and now I am the one who is going to sound like a thirties Marxist), the left needs to make the long march through the institutions—a march begun by creating some institutions of its own on the outside to prepare it for the infiltration of the institutions on the inside.  That’s what the right has been doing for the past forty years.  While the left was marching in the street on the weekends with their friends, the right was getting elected to school boards.  Protest marches feel great, but are ephemeral, easily ignored.  Our society’s shift rightwards has come through a million incremental changes wrought on the ground by somebody in an office somewhere, by right wing hacks and business lobbyists writing legislation, by regulators letting oversight lapse, by prosecutors and courts looking the other way at white collar and corporate crime. During the Obama years, the left paid almost no attention to state-level races, ceding those legislatures to the right almost by default–with grievous consequences (not the least of which is a weak bench, unable to provide any potential national candidates between the ages of 45 and 65).

We need leftist social movements that pay attention to the minutiae, that are not addicted to the large dramatic gesture, that don’t engage in the magical thinking that a piece of legislation or a court decision solves a problem once and for all.  It’s the implementation, the daily practices of state, corporate, educational, regulatory institutions (as Foucault should have taught us) where change takes place, in often silent and difficult to perceive ways.  That’s the room where it happens—and the left has all too often failed to even try to get into the room.