Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004

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Mathews, Pamela R. and David McWhirter. Ed. Aesthetic Subjects. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pp. 499. ISBN 0-8166-3992-2 – ISBN 0-8166-3993-0.

Reviewed by

Pramod K. Nayar

Aesthetic Subjects is a survey of the late twentieth-century phenomenon – the return to aesthetics. Exploring the relation between subjectivity and aesthetics from approaches drawn from history, philosophy, art history, literary studies and cultural anthropology, the essays exhibit a certain discomfort at the purely ideological interpretation of aesthetics. The experience of aesthetic pleasure has been subsumed under questions of ideology, politics and regulatory regimes of power. As Mathews and McWhirter point out in their excellent introduction, we need to expand the notion of aesthetics as an artistics, explicating the concept of art with particular attention to beauty, to include the range of aesthesis in everyday life, science, politics, art and so on (xvi). The first part of the volume is a set of densely argued essays, dealing primarily with the varieties of aesthetic and subjective experience.

Martin Jay argues that to see aesthetics as simply ideology or politics is to separate it from the work of art itself. Looking at the implications of the disinterestedness for the art objects, Jay suggests that this becomes a question of differentiation of value spheres. Mapping the history of this idea of the aesthetic from Kant to Duchamp, Jay is careful not to suggest a ‘promiscuous aestheticization of the entire world’ (18). However, he is categorical about the idea that ‘aesthetic experience … cannot be entirely freed from a consideration of which objects and events may justifiably evoke it, or else it courts the charge that it produces a theodicy of beauty, which is no less problematic than its ethical counterpart’ (19). Alphonso Lingis focuses on two prisoners – lovers, drug-addicts, one a transvestite, both HIV-positive, and one already a full-blown AIDS case – and the construction of a subjectivity in prison. Exploring lust, emotional attachments, adoration, guilt and pain (especially one that Wayne suffers) Lingis’ scintillatingly threads subjectivity and pleasure through the experience of beauty and lived life.

 

Kay Bea Jones shifts focus to architecture, exploring the poetic constructions of Zaha Hadid. Hadid’s porous constructions that call into question boundaries that distinguish inside and outside, are a metaphor that radically redefine spaces of subjectivity. The ‘inclusive, nonhierarchical, and multiple’ constructions are about ‘social innovation’ (64), and harness a political agenda (feminist) to aesthetics. Judith Stoddart’s reading of sentimental art in nineteenth century England begins with the role played by the spectator in the creation of the genre itself, where the sentimental was frequently the ‘privileged perspective created by the eye of the artist’. Stoddart explores the ‘technologies’ by which sentimentalism negotiated between the popular/mass and the (elitist) aesthetic realms. Sentimentalism, as Stoddart demonstrates through a reading of Thomas Hall and Richard Redgrave’s paintings, cast the spectator as a site of physical sensation while simultaneously working with traditional notions of art’s special status. It became, as Stoddart puts it, a means of representing and responding to new ways of seeing. Leo Bersani and Ulsse Dutoit read Caravaggio’s art to argue that the aesthetic does not necessarily lead to the unconscious or a subject’s interiority. It maps the unmappable ‘extension of being’, what they term a ‘disseminated spatial concealment’, encoded into the famous decapitation images of Caravaggio.

 

Part II of the volume presents essays that are concerned with the ethics, economies, and social contexts of aesthetics. Susan Bordo’ virtuoso reading of Nabokov’s Lolita works with the literary text and the film versions of Kubrick (1962) and Lyne (1998). The representation of the so-called seductive power of the ‘child’ Lolita, in both versions, for Bordo, is an ‘ideology driven mythology’ (126), lulling us, as she puts it, into ‘comfort with the eroticization of immature bodies’ (149). Joseph Litvak’s essay on Shelley Winters argues that the assimilationist rhetoric of films such as The Balcony, and the memoirs of Winters herself, is about universalizing Jewishness itself.  Maureen Harkin turns to the eighteenth-century aestheticians, Lord Kames and Alexander Gerard to argue that aesthetics was a significant mode in proclaiming and retaining the bourgeoisie’s cultural domination. The theorizing of aesthetic response was actually an increasing consciousness about the popular or crowd responses, and which sought to defend the response of the upper-class subject. Douglas Mao’s essay, originating  as a critique of Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, reads the concept of beauty as integrally connected, in very peculiar ways, to notions of justice. Focusing primarily on the labor theory of beauty, Mao argues that people are increasingly troubled by the ‘ascent of the supermodel’ because it seems to subvert American ideals of equality, social justice and democracy in its obvious preference for the beautiful. Mao writes: ‘when we feel a certain uneasiness about beauty’s rewards we always gesture … to the possibility of a more radically just society’ (220). Lee Edelman’s essay which queers aesthetics and subjectivity, proposes the term ‘sinthom-osexuality’, where sinthome (via Lacan) suggests the ‘inexpressible singularity of the subject’s existence’ (231), the irreducible symptom of jouissance itself. Noting that the homosexual is always the antithesis of aesthetic ideals, Edelman argues persuasively for an ethical resistance to heterosexual aesthetic sublimation.

 

In part III, the focus is on the use of aesthetics vis à vis bodies, minds and selves. Barbara Maria Stafford’s essay on aesthetics and neurobiology argues that understanding is a ‘combinatorial’ mode, causing disparate things to converge. Thus imagination and imaging arts have a central role in analytic philosophy, computer programming and neurobiology, through the use of analogy. Stafford concludes that ‘art … assists in locating a point of contact between a juxtapositive mass of precisely firing neurons and our cloudy atmosphere’, and analogy helps us ‘discover not only how the mind seeks out and connects linear with nonlinear arrangements’, but ‘binds compound selves into a single self in moments of consciousness’ (265). Kathryn Bond Stockton explores the trope of ‘sartorial sacrifice’ in Freud, Bataille, Genet and others, to argue that clothing is central to the construction of group fantasy and aestheticized socializing. Audrey Jaffe’s reading of Oscar Wilde, likewise, deals with group relationships, and argues that ideas of beauty and ugliness inform such ‘kinship’. Jaffe, in an argument that aligns itself closely with that of Stockton and Harkin in this volume, gestures at the significance of aesthetics in the creation and dissemination of identity politics. Jaffe suggests that group identity is here eroticized and idealized as the projection of an imaginary body. The unbelievable beauty of Dorian – as opposed to the incremental ugliness of the decaying ‘portrait’ – ‘signals the illusory achievement of an identification with culture itself; it is the beauty of identity as wish fulfillment, a fantasy of experience invested with value’ (309). Howard Horwitz makes a significant shift in looking at postnational subject formations, and suggests that Homi Bhabha’s notions of the hybrid and multiple subject are prefigured in the ‘ontological idealism’ and aesthetic formalism of none other than I.A. Richards.

 

In part IV, Beatriz Colomina explores the architecture of Charles and Ray Eames to suggest that their aestheticization of the interiors of constructed space was predicated on a view that the interior encounter with people and objects constituted intersubjectivity. Robert Kaufman’s analysis of Fredric Jameson’s commentary on Adorno (who is reading Kant), concludes that aesthetics is not opposed to the material, but can actually provide a base from which a (Marxist) critique of material and cultural conditions can be launched. Bill Brown’s extraordinary reading of ‘things’ via Virginia Woolf, argues that Woolf’s story rejects the state approaches when it offers aesthetics as a counter to utilitarian re-assembling of objects. Brown offers a theory of ‘misuse value’, which he defines thus: ‘the aspects of an object – sensuous, aesthetic, semiotic – that become legible, audible, palpable when the object is experienced in whatever time it takes … for an object to become another’ (399). We need to discover, ‘in the history of objects, material desires, or the desire for the material, that will be forever lost in the histories of consumer society or ethnographies of cultural exchange’ (423).

 

Kathleen Stewart’s meditative essay-performance is about the ‘arrest’ of images, the affect of aesthetic encounters. Noting the ‘visual fascination’ we experience when faced with signs – of various kinds – Stewart presents the idea of a ‘subject surging to bear an affect, or surging toward an actualization’ (442). Michael Taussig’s essay is also about affect. He speaks of the ‘public secrecy’, an ‘active unknowing’ or ‘knowing unknowing’, which consists in knowing what not to know’ (457). Here the child’s imagination is the ‘imagined reservoir’ for the adult fantasy of daily life – where the child, present at a conversation between adults, is treated as both an object and subject. Adults lowering their voices so that the child does not overhear their conversation: thus treating the child as ‘part eaves-dropper, part idiot, part fairy’, where the adult imagines the child imagining (454-5). For Taussig the emphasis on secrecy is crucial in understanding both aesthetics and ethics.

 

This is an indispensable volume for any student of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. The essays map aesthetics at its borderlands, treating aesthetics as the mestiza, one that is in continuous circulation in the in-between spaces of politics, ethics, art and science. Though consumerism – and its concomitant condition of the aestheticization of everyday life in the form of ‘state-of-the-art’ consumer objects/products/lifestyles – is not addressed directly, essays by Bill Brown, Stockton, Stewart and others do problematize the uneasy relation between objects, use value, aesthetics, consumption and the production of identities. The social circulation and gradual accretion of value to objects has a lot to do, as several of these essays demonstrate, with the ideology of production-consumption, their use value, and the aesthetic appeal (pleasure) of the object-as-artifact. It is this sense of the aesthetic dimension to objects, identities, and of everyday life, that the essays emphasize. The link between art, art criticism, the philosophy of interpretation and the objectification of human states such as sentiment or sensibility, is best discussed by Jay, Stoddart, Bersani and Dutoit, Harkin among others (and parallels the work of Peter de Bolla on the sublime, and Janet Todd on sensibility).

 

The essays refreshingly eschew the (excessively?) ideologizing mode of looking at aesthetics, preferring, rather, to see how even commentaries such as Eagleton’s or Jameson’s assume a certain form of aesthetic appreciation, and a certain notion of the work of art. Calling attention to the active pleasure of beauty while not ignoring the ethico-political implications of such unquantifiable states such as beauty or pleasure, essays such as Susan Bordo’s provide an extraordinarily dense agenda for future work in the areas of philosophical aesthetics. Aesthetic Subjects is a crucial intervention in contemporary debates about identity, aesthetics, subjectivity and politics.