Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 12 Number 2, August 2011

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Locating the Abject in the Third Critique

By

Ryan J. Johnson

 Duquesne University

One Among Many Definitions of Art

The goal of this paper is to address one issue: the possibility of developing different forms of the aesthetic experience out of and alongside the Kantian notion of beauty (Schönheit).  To do this I will move back to the end of the eighteenth century, to Kant’s Critique of Judgment.  In this work, the third and final Critique, Kant develops an aesthetic philosophy by retaining the architectonic structure of his overall transcendental philosophy.  But what is unique about this book is that Kant, building on the previous Critiques, examines different forms of non-meaning, or to be more precise, forms of non-conceptual or non-cognitive meaning.  In so doing, Kant develops an aesthetic account of beauty, the sublime, and the teleological emergence of organic beings.  For the aims of this paper, however, we will only focus on the first of these forms of non-meaning: beauty.

In his examination of the status of beauty, Kant provides an architectonic structure with which one can expand theories of art to include other forms of aesthetic experience.  Although a few leading commentators have noted the importance of the inclusion of other forms of aesthetic experience in this structure, I contend that they do not go far enough. Henry Allison, for example writes that it is important for Kant’s aesthetics to claim that “negative judgments must have the same status (as judgments of taste) and the same claim to validity as their positive counterparts.”[i] Although these commentators have noticed the importance of including these other forms, their ways in which they have argued for such things as a Kantian account of ugliness have ultimately been unsatisfying. Moreover, since Kant’s time, there have been drastic reformulations of the nature and practice of art.  What now counts as art has certainly changed many, many times, and will most likely continue to change with increasing rapidity.  The point, then, is to see whether or not it is possible to maintain the Kantian architectonics in order to theorize the changes in the definition of art.  Is it possible, in short, to ground, ever so lightly and delicately, the aesthetic experience of appropriation art, of kitsch, of institutional critique, of simulation art, and, most importantly for this paper, of abject art?  Beauty and the sublime are certainly two valid kinds of aesthetic experience, but are these the only kinds of legitimate encounters with art? This paper will argue, first, that these two forms are only a few among the many different experiences of art that are possible in the twentieth and twenty-first century art world; and second, that this project is possible within the Kantian framework.

A Short History of Abjection

Since the 1980s, abject art has been embodied, actualized, and practiced in many different forms.  From the very materialist, matriarchal sculptures of Kiki Smith, to the performative and sardonic appropriations of masculine and feminine role-playing of Mike Kelley, to the discomfiting voyeuristic masquerade of Cindy Sherman’s later photographs, different artists have practiced what was eventually termed abject art.  But what is most intriguing about these new forms of art is that there was an abrupt jump from the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s theorization of the concept of abjection to artistic experimentation and practice.  What is missing is the aesthetic theoretical link between a philosophical/psychoanalytic concept to the actual works of art that have become so famous and trendy in twentieth century art; that is, the link between concept and practice.  Although Kristeva said many things about different writers and their use of the abject, she did not develop a full aesthetic theory of the concept, which is exactly what I will attempt to explore.  This paper, then, will try to fill in this gap by using the logical structure of the Third Critique in order to offer a proper justification for considering abject art as a legitimate art form.  This logical form functions as the four borderlines, the four parts of a loose structure, the four posts of a theoretical frame: quality and quantity (the mathematical categories) and relation and modality (the dynamic categories).  The purpose of maintaining this structural methodology is to link up older forms of aesthetic theory with newer artistic practices, something that Paul Guyer, Henry Allison, and the other leading Kantian scholars do not address.  It is my hope, then, that we will begin to broaden and stretch the aesthetic field so that other kinds of art, most importantly abject art, will find justifiable grounds in aesthetic theory.

On the Definition of Ugliness, the Multiplicitous Opposite of Beauty

Kristeva’s theorization of abjection is, on the face of it, quite simple.  Etymologically, it functions as the unspoken, indeterminate void lying in between the subject/object divide: the abject is that which has been thrown from or thrown forth, discarded, jettisoned; with ‘ject’ referring to the act of throwing, and ‘ab’ implying an outward direction, a pushing or pulling from the orbital center of motion.[ii]  But the implications of such a notion begin to chip away at and possibly undermine a strict division that has plagued philosophical discourse for a very long time.  Although many writers have described the concept of the abject – including Dante, Bosch, Goya, Rabelais, Balzac, Céline, Dubuffet, Artaud, and Bataille – the effect of theorization and the delicate placement of a subversive concept inside the philosophical cannon have recently brought the effects of Kristeva’s move to the forefront.[iii]

            The concept of abjection encompasses the excessive or degraded corporeality of everyday existence.  The abject, as was said, is that which is thrown from the body: for example, excrement, vomit, semen, urine, blood, etc.; this fact alone would make it seem that this base yet necessary materiality should have been confronted other than negatively.  From the juridical proscriptions of the Levitical code to the defiled and anathematic status of the body in some factions of religions practices to the obsession with pasteurized and sanitized life in contemporary society, abjection has always been merely passive, always forced to don the negative X that locates its placement on the edges of society.  Yet what is so interesting about the abject is that it is not exactly outside the body.  In fact it is simultaneously inside and outside the body; and even when it is actually outside the body, it is still recognized as once having been part of the body.  Its very necessary organic status – the fact that excrement and urine could only have been produced by a living entity – always already forces a confrontation with our very profanation.  The abject, once it is displayed in all its grandeur and grotesqueness by the very mechanisms that strive to prohibit it from being recognized as necessary for organic existence, forces us to confront the inner workings of “our personal archeology.”[iv]  The abject is loathsome, repugnant, shameful, and fascinating.  It is that which is a part of me, a necessary process of existence, but, at the same time, that which pushes me to a hallucinatory depth, a dreadful encounter with myself.  The question that will then be asked is what happens when the tables are turned and the abject is thrown directly into view, lying there, amorphous and ambiguous, yet immediately identifiable, an opening onto ourselves by way of ourselves.  It is a something, a nothing, some part of nothing, yet also no part of something.  The goal, then, is to see what happens when abjection is placed in the most holy of places, on the most sterile of surfaces: the pristine architectonics of the Third Critique?

The (Im)Proper Place of Beauty and Abjection in the Third Critique

            In the first half of Critique of Judgment, in the Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant attempts to develop an aesthetic theory so far as it fits his brand of transcendental philosophy.  Using the four functions of logical judging that were available to him during the writing of this book – quality, quantity, relation, and modality – as the delimiting device of his theory, or as the paragon of his presentation, Kant finds a means for developing a version of aesthetics that coheres with and even, perhaps, corroborates the work of the prior two critiques.  These four logical functions frame the Kantian conception of the beautiful, the very heart of his philosophy of art; and these four posts of the frame correspond to four elements of this theory.  For quality, there is the notion of disinterestedness; for quantity, Kant develops the idea of the universal liking/ validity of beauty; for relation, there is the famous notion of purposiveness without purpose or finality without ends; for modality, Kant closes the frame with the notion of necessary subjective finality.  Although these four bars of the frame are quite complex – so complex, in fact, that a suitable explication of these aesthetic functions would take us far beyond the confines and interests of this paper – this does not prevent us from witnessing the introduction of the “opposite” of the beautiful into the perfect linings of Kant’s theory.[v]

            After, and even during the explication of these four limits of Kant’s aesthetics, I will begin to introduce, quite appropriately, the notion of the abject into the system.  The abject will enter the Kantian conceptual architecture sometimes with a convulsion, a paroxysm, or a jettison, and sometimes with a drip, a dribble, or an ooze. At first this might seem like a bit of a stretch, for, one may say, why would you conflate two disparate philosophies – Kant’s and Kristeva’s – without good reason?  Yet without recourse to unnecessary philosophical acrobatics, I believe there is sufficient reason to draw such a transversal line.  Throughout Kant’s admirable theoretical excursions on his way to a full aesthetic theory, he develops his argument wholly one-sidedly.[vi]  That is, Kantian aesthetics only deals with the beautiful and the sublime; it leaves out  almost every other aesthetic experience; such as the ugly, the grotesque, the hideous, etc.  It is not exactly clear why Kant chooses not to clearly articulate other possible implications of his of aesthetical theory, but it does not take much to begin to make sense of such flagrant omissions.  For one, Kant, like many of his philosophical predecessors, chooses to argue for a single aim: the good, the rational, the clear and distinct, the founded, the certain, or the necessary conditions for possible experience.  Yet, in the course of the development of each of these accounts, an aporia is left wide open, gaping, sticking straight up out of the mud.  This aporetic element, an unintended effect of most philosophical structural delineations, is the abject.  For our concerns, the abject will take the place of the “opposite” of the beautiful, namely, the ugly. 

            Many assumptions and clarifications must be made right away. First, we must assume, as Kant seems to do, that beauty is particular, individual, and homogeneous.  Although such a claim might now seem quite archaic, the door will not be closed for further elaboration on the multiplicitous forms that the beautiful can take.  Second, I must clarify my meaning of the notion of the “opposite” of the beautiful.  Although I take Kant at his word, and assume beauty to be non-multiplicitous, beauty’s opposite is by no means particular.  Even if we assume that beauty represents one pole of the aesthetic spectrum, a claim that I do not intend to defend, that does not entail that its opposite picks out one and only one term.  The aesthetic spectrum is not merely a one dimensional line running from beauty to its opposite, but more of a multidimensional color field of discontinuous movements and gapping fissures located all over the plane.  Even with the immaculate Kantian architectonics in play, there is no possible way to sweep such a landscape of mines and cracks in a single blow.  Thus, everywhere one may look, there are opposing poles to the beautiful. Many commentators have unfortunately merely assume that ugliness is the opposite of beauty. Garreth Thompson, for example, wrongly argues that Kant offers two options: either “beauty and ugliness would be contraries” or “ugliness would be a mere lack of beauty.”[vii] Aesthetics, I contend, cannot be reduced down to such a binary scheme, for it is not that simple, and Kant, in other places actually talks about a trichotomy of aesthetic categories.[viii] Yet although Kant does allow for a multiple aesthetic categories, he does not go far enough, for the three aesthetic cargories are beauty (positive) ugliness (negative) and non-beautiful (neutra). Rather than restricting ourselves to a binary or ternary account of aesthetic categories, however, I argue that abjection is actual the dissolution of categorical division. The ugly, as the abject, then, is not an individual category or concept, but the very subversion of conceptual divisions, the destabilization of subjects and objects, and the introduction of flux, flows, and fluids. The abject thus will assume the place of the ugly, the multiplicitous and heterogeneous opposite of beauty.

            Finally, it does not exactly matter why or that Kant did not interrogate the logic of the ugly, because it is the aim of the whole of the Third Critique to investigate different forms of non-meaning or excess; and to charge Kant with being overly myopic in his search for the good in practical reason or the beautiful in reflective judgment is simply misguided.  Kant investigated the logic of the beautiful, he looked at the logic of the sublime, and he even tried to limn out a means for investigating the logic of emergence as seen in organic life; since Kant was bound by the conceptual technologies and status of art and literature of his time, he focused on what was immediately pressing on him.  Kant himself does seem to at least hint at an account of alternative aesthetic categories in the very first and last sentences of Book I: he says, “to decide whether something is beautiful or not…we use the imagination (perhaps in connection with understanding) to refer the presentation to the subject ahs his feeling (Gefühl) of pleasure”; then later he says, “taste is the ability to judge an object…by means of a liking or disliking.”[ix] Kant certainly did not explicitly address other forms on non-meaning and non-conceptuality, but he created just enough room for us to pick up and utilize many of the conceptual tools that he left lying around his tool shed.  It is thus the goal of this paper to try to operate within in this space in order to flesh out, in all its corporeal disgust, the logic of the ugly by means of the logic of the abject.

What is a Judgment?

            In order to locate a foothold in the first moment of the Third Critique, we turn to a quote from the fifth section: “A judgment of taste…is merely contemplative…it is a judgment that is indifferent to the existence of the object: it considers the character of the object only by holding it up to our feeling of pleasure.”[x]  First of all, what is a judgment of taste?  A judgment (Urteil), for Kant, is the establishment of a relationship between a particular and a universal.  In the first Critique, Kant dealt almost solely with one kind of judgment: determinative judgment.  In this type of judgment, the faculty of the imagination presents an undetermined object to the faculty of the understanding, the power of concepts and generalities.  The understanding then takes this presentation and subsumes it or places it under a general concept or universal.  The object is eventually seen as this or that type of thing, and the entirety of conceptual experience is governed and legislated by this form of subsumptive determination. (Bestimmung)  In regards to abjection, determinative judgment is seen as the imposition of the symbolic order, in terms of a “prohibition, rule or law”; that is, determinative judgment, “assuming the form of the symbolic, attempts to transfer to its own account, what has thus been overdrawn.”[xi]  Primal, indeterminate encounters are separated, categorized, and determined according to the law of the father, the rule of the understanding.

In the Third Critique, however, Kant introduces a new type of judgment: reflective judgment (reflektierend Urteil).  This type of judgment is quite complex, and a proper handling of this concept is beyond the scope of this paper. It will, however, suffice to say that there is no determination, fixation, subsumption, or imposition in reflective judgment.  Immediately, it is clear that Kant begins to cut down on the reach of the earlier Critiques.  With reflective judgment Kant has located a ground of indeterminacy, an ambiguous in-between or “primal pulsation” that was left out of his prior transcendental philosophy.[xii]  Reflective judgment, unlike determinative judgment, is how and where aesthetic activity occurs.  To say that a painting is beautiful does not involve the imposition of determinate concepts; for beauty is not locate in the property of a painting, but is, instead, a feeling that arises in the subject himself.  The pleasure in witnessing a beautiful painting, however, is also not a mere sensation, but something reflective, the reflection on the presentation of the painting in the subject.  In this way, a judgment of taste or an aesthetic judgment is merely contemplative, not interested in or dependent on the object’s existence.  That is, the judger is not interested in the object’s existence in that the object does not cause the judgment of taste or the feeling of pleasure, but merely acts as the opportune occasion on which a judgment of taste can be made. With aesthetic judgment, in short, the judger is free to judge aesthetically and is not causally determined to feel pleasure. With abjection, the hold of determination or symbolic signification is released; the circumscribed position located in between the legislative domains of the faculties is transgressed: “the abject shatters the wall of [determinative] judgments.”[xiii]  Perhaps the most important matter of concern for aesthetic reflective judgment is the feeling of pleasure (Lust)or displeasure (Unlust)in the subjective experience of the painting. 

The Fourfold Frame of Aesthetic Judgment

1. Quality: Pleasure, Displeasure, or Something In-Between?

The first moment of the Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment, following the four logical category headings, is quality.  The inference of this first moment is: “Taste is the ability to judge an object, or a way of presenting it, by means of a liking or disliking devoid of all interest”; thus aesthetic judgment is, first of all, disinterested.[xiv]  Rather than falling into a long discussion about the exact meaning of disinterestedness, for a proper analysis of this complex idea would take too long, we will merely focus on the status of the general idea of this moment.[xv]  First of all, disinterestedness refers to a lack of any personal interest; that is, there is no liking of an object that occasions one’s experience such that this liking differentiates one subject from others.  Since I have no particular interest in the existence of the aesthetic object, I can claim that all beings with similar mental machinery should judge as I do.  Secondly, to say that an aesthetic judgment is disinterested is to say that there is no concern about the existence of the object.  Whether the object exists or not is of no concern; but as was said, we are only concerned with how one is affected by the presentation of the object within the subject’s experience, however ambiguous that claim may be.  Immediately, we can see that there is a blurring of the strict distinction between subject and object in aesthetic judgments, which will help the argument for reading the abject into Kantian theory.  As we saw, this affection can cause feelings of pleasure, pain, or some other kind of aesthetic sensation, and it is here that we will begin to chip away at the grip on aesthetic judgments about beauty.  

In order to get to an analysis of pleasure and pain, we need to return to the difference between determinative and reflective judgments, which will be done by way of an artistic example.  Perhaps the best way to imagine this difference is to think of the difference between, on the one hand, looking at a Jackson Pollock painting, say Full Fathom Five, and, on the other hand, navigating the way through a new room.  When you enter an unfamiliar room, you can easily distinguish a chair from a table, or the floor from the stairs.  In this case, each object in the room is categorized and determined to belong to the respective category.  The chair is delimited as a chair, useful for some determinate purpose but not for others.  With the case of the Pollock, however, the situation is quite different.  Looking at the swirls and spirals twisting into and out of each other along the surface of the painting, nothing is determined as it was with the foreign environment.  Once in a while you may think that you see a face or the shape of an animal, but upon further investigation such attempts at conceptual determination fail.  It is as if the mind were trying to navigate the painting in the same way as you get around the room, but it keeps running into blockades, trying to unlock missing doors.  Reflecting on the painting, in the end, offers nothing more than a feeling of pleasure, or a quickening of the mind as it tries to search for definite meaning.  Yet unlike the experience of the unfamiliar room, the non-existence of determinative objects in the painting does not matter.  While you need to determine the existence of the chair in order to avoid it, in an aesthetic experience, you can let the mind play with itself, more or less, hence the “narcissistic crisis” of aesthetic judgments.[xvi]  The mind skims along the surface of itself in its own presentation, flirting with the seemingly endless possibilities for interpreting the painting.

Given that aesthetic judgment is not interested in the existence of the object, and given that such experiences deal only with the mental activity of the subject, what happens in the moment of aesthetic experience, in the contemplation of a beautiful or ugly/abject presentation?  According to Kant, what is going on in the experience of an aesthetic moment when the subject is feeling pleasure is a “quickening of his cognitive powers.”[xvii]  Kant means that since the faculties, here the imagination and the understanding, are not engaged in determining one thing as this or that type of thing, the mind, as it were, spins its gears, speeding itself up to a pleasurable degree.  As Kristeva might put it, this moment of aesthetic pleasure is almost an autoerotic moment, a time of conceptual foreplay prior to any conceptual determination; or, in terms of abject aesthetic experience, there is a “moment of narcissistic perturbation.”[xviii]  This pleasure, then, aims “to keep us in the state of having the presentation itself, and to keep the cognitive powers engaged in their occupation without any further aim.  We linger in our contemplation of the beautiful because this contemplation reinforces and reproduces itself.”[xix]  Thus it seems that the feeling of pleasure in an aesthetic experience leads me to preserve the state of pleasure and to linger in this state.[xx]

         This seems to imply that the “opposite” of beauty, the abject, occasions a sense of displeasure, and further, that we do not want to preserve this displeasureable state but end it as soon as possible.  This, however, involves two unwarranted assumptions.  First, the abject, the opposite of beauty, does not necessarily entail a sense of displeasure or lack of pleasure. One problem with claiming that ugliness occasions a sense of displeasure is the confusion with the sublime, which is characterized, as Kant says, as resulting in at least an initial feeling of displeasure.  There is surely something else going on in the experience of ugliness, and while it might not be exactly the same as the pleasure offered by the judgment of beauty, this does not mean that I am feeling only pain or displeasure in the sense of a lack of pleasure.  As Kant himself says, the aesthetic experience of such things as ugliness is “indeed something that is positive in itself and not merely the contradictory opposite of pleasure…[it is] more than a mere negation.”[xxi] Rather, the feelings associated with the abject stem from an even more ambiguous source than those associated with the beautiful.  The abject is not solely tied to the object, for the smell of a decaying body or the feeling of the skin of warmed milk against the lips are not harmful to me.  Instead, the place of interrogation resides solely in the effect of the object on my subjective status.  That is, aesthetic abjection is as disinterested as claims of taste about beauty, for the source of the feeling of repugnance or disgust is not important, what is of concern is the effect on the viewer, the subjective reaction of the subject.  Moreover (and this may depart from the Kantian account) although the presentation of abjection seems to begin solely within me, it suddenly leads me out of myself.  As I confront what was once wholly mine, totally contained in my subjective state, I confront something neither other nor self, neither object nor subject.  The abject “lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.”[xxii]  The excrement or saliva that just left my orifices blurs the strict ontological and epistemological divisions, leading, perhaps, to an even more visceral experience than is the case with beauty.  My whole body is quickened, filled with a sense of life, but such a sense is invigorating, a sort of “indefinite catharsis...[or] a quick shore of contemplation.”[xxiii]  There is no longer a speaking, definable subject or object, but the insertion of the body into a moment of ceaseless flight away from and towards itself.  The subject is no longer opposed to the object, nor the other way around, rather there is a continuous spark arching and flitting back and forth between the fragile entities along an abject texture of non-meaning.  Abjection cannot be determined or signified, for it is nothing but free play or, perhaps more accurately, endless games of autoerotic torture.  The aesthetic experience, either beautiful or abject, does not play by the rules of any game.  The abject is a “‘something’ that I [barely] recognize as a thing.  A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me.  On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me.”[xxiv]

It is clear, then, that there is certainly a unique type of quickening of the body and the mind: with beauty, the faculties are sped up, freely spinning in a disengaged experience; with abjection, the whole body, including the mental machinery, is violently shoved forth, forced to engage what is left open prior to complete conceptual determination.  In aesthetic judgments of beauty, the power of the imagination and the power of the understanding enter into a harmonious dance, with neither partner taking the lead role; in abject aesthetic experiences, the whole body is left wide open, “dancing on a volcano,” with its partial body objects strewn along the mountain crest at different intervals.[xxv]  It seems clear, therefore, that the requirement of aesthetic experience as it appears in the first moment, the function of quality, is retained in reflective judgments about beauty or about abjection.  When witnessing abjection, the feeling that arises is even more ambiguous than the feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Pleasure certainly hastens the feeling of life, but the abject also hastens the feeling of life, and even forces us to confront our very materiality, in all of its pleasure and pain.  Finally, the sense of wanting to linger over the pleasure of beauty is paralleled in the abject.  One is as enrapt by the aesthetic experience of the beautiful as of the abject.  In fact, one may want to linger even longer over a decaying item of food, or a piece of dung, semen, or defilement.  We are simultaneously fascinated and horrified by the power of abjection; and this experience is wholly aesthetic.[xxvi]

2. Quantity: Singularities and Universalities

            Put simply, the requirement of aesthetic judgments offered by the second moment, quantity, is that a judgment of taste is singular.  One judges a singularity; one calls this very presentation beautiful or abject, only one thing, only this painting, only this pile of dung, only this strand of spittle.  For to say that some, all, or no object is beautiful would be to make a logical judgment, a determinative judgment; and aesthetic judgments, as was said, are indeterminate, making no recourse to the help of concepts, laws, or rules.  An aesthetic experience is not about all paintings or the totality of sewage, but about the very presentation that I am experiencing at this moment.  Put differently, beauty and abjection are singularities, which are wholly unique, as Kant says.  “For since I must hold the object directly up to my feeling of pleasure or displeasure, but without using concepts, these judgments cannot have the quantity that judgments with objective universal validity have.”[xxvii] 

At the same time, Kant claims that there is a sort of “general validity” to aesthetic judgments[xxviii]  Aesthetic judgments are generally valid not determinatively, not by way of the imposition of concepts provided by the understanding, but – and this stems from the requirement of disinterestedness – because my claiming that this object is beautiful should hold for everyone with a similar mental makeup who experiences this object.  This is not to say that everyone will or would deem this presentation of the object beautiful, for such a prediction or postulation would assume the form of a logical judgment mediated by concepts.  Rather, in saying that everyone should find this object beautiful there is a sort of normativity at work in aesthetic judgments.  That is, there is something about a judgment of taste that implies the necessity of a community of judgers, and to make this judgment is to speak for all, to assume the voice of an anonymous authority on art, of the master critic.  The surface logic of the second moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful thus claims that an aesthetic judgment is an enunciation of a “universal voice.”[xxix]  The liking of the beautiful implies that it is a universal liking, not peculiar to me and my desires or beliefs, but valid for everyone.  All of this does in fact depend on the isomorphism of my constitution and everyone else’s.  The reason for adopting the claim that everyone in my position who has an isomorphic mental makeup should find this engaged object beautiful is to locate objective ways that a painting succeeds or fails.  Thus aesthetic requirements are the means for articulating the objective characteristics of the object, which thus provides a means for evaluating claims of taste.  Once certain objective criteria are given, then you can begin to share the aesthetic experience with all other rational beings.  For example, one may not exactly appreciate every beautiful work of art upon first sight, for art works are incredibly complex (such as Bach’s fugues), but after proper education and training it is possible to come to appreciate the beauty of the art piece.  Hence a claim of universal or general validity is another requirement of proper aesthetic judgment. 

            The movement to abjection in this moment is very simple.  In short, to claim that an abject presentation is ugly is to speak in a universal voice; it is to claim that everyone of a similar makeup, both mentally and corporeally, should find the vomit, grime, or blood repulsive.  This is the requirement of universal communicability of judgments of taste. Like beauty, Allison rightly notes, “ugly objects could provide an equally viable occasion for communication, since human beings can obviously unite on the basis of their dislikings as well as their likings.”[xxx] As Kristeva says, “I am only like someone else: [that is, there is a] mimetic logic of the advent of the ego, objects, and signs.”[xxxi]  There is no recourse to concepts, no way of fully explicating the reasons for feeling a certain way, no means for logical determination; rather there is only a loose set of structural requirements that seem to contribute to differentiating between claims of taste and other types of rational or cognitive judgments.  In the face of abjection, despite my particular beliefs, likings, and desires, I undergo an aesthetic experience, in this case, an aesthetic experience of the ugly: abjection.  Claims of taste, whether of beauty or of abjection, imply a mimetic logic: a logic of repeated experience, both a pleasure and a pain, both a liking and a repulsion.  In making such a claim, abjection further enters into the aesthetic domain; not merely as the opposite of beauty, for we have seen that neither beauty nor the ugly have opposites, but more of long stretches of variations of aesthetic judgments, more as the relatively open plane of aesthetic experiences that include beauty, ugliness, kitsch, disgust, sublimity, confusedness, and awe, to name only a few.  Kant has certainly given a clean argument for a particular definition of beauty and the sublime, but in doing so he implicitly covers up the whole of aesthetic experience.  This is not to say that he has prevented the possibility for developing different definitions and accounts of aesthetic experience, but that although he has only offered a limited number of accounts of the experience of art, he still has provided useful tools for furthering an examination into the complexity that is aesthetics.  In the end of the moment, the requirement of universal validity is a requirement of mimesis, the aesthetic maintenance of universal assent.

3. Relation: Aesthetic Agnosticism

            In the third moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful, Kant, building on the first two moments, argues for a notion of subjective or formal purposiveness or finality as that criterion by which objects can be judged as beautiful.  The goal of the third moment is to claim that beauty is found in the object’s form as purposive or directed toward some end or telos but that the actual purpose or end toward which the object seems to be aimed cannot be given.  Thus, the notion of purposiveness without purpose or finality without end is inferred from the third moment.  But a few ideas must be explicated before the moment is concluded.

            The first idea that Kant brings up in the third moment is the notion of a purpose or end (Zweck).  Kant’s initial definition of a purpose is: “the object of a concept insofar as we regard this concept as the object’s cause (the real basis of its possibility).”[xxxii]  What does this mean? It means that a purpose is the product of an action, but this product is of such a nature that it could only have been produced according to a process that includes a representation of its nature prior to its existence.  Thus the conceptual representation of the object in the mind of the agent is the cause of the object, and the object is the purpose or end that is conditioned by the concept.  For example, think about an artifact, say an urn.  In order to bring about an urn, one needs to manipulate clay, sand, water, etc., and the concept of an urn is the cause of the urn’s production, which also guides that process of making an urn.  Thus calling something a purpose or end is to claim that the process of producing the purpose (urn) is such that it seems to require a concept governing and conditioning its appearance. 

            The idea of purposiveness or finality (Zweckmäßigkeit)is derived from Kant’s definition of purpose or end.  An object is said to be purposive or is described as purposive if it seems to have been produced according to a purpose, thus according to some driving force or plan.  That is, to attribute purposiveness or finality to some object is to say something about the causal history of the object’s production, namely that there was initially a certain goal in mind that guided the production of the object and is thus the cause of the object. Thus purposiveness is the drive or inner tendency to go toward this purpose or end, or to bring about such an effect.  Thinking again of the urn, the urn was the purpose or end that the causal process was directed towards, thus the urn can be attributed purposiveness or finality.  The urn is of such a nature that it could have been produced only by means of a prior concept or idea of it. In short, without the idea of the urn, there is no urn.  Thus an object (the urn) is purposive because it seems that there must have been an intention or plan in someone’s mind in order for it to have been produced.[xxxiii]

            The main point of this moment, however, is in the idea of purposiveness without purpose or finality without end (Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck).  In short, when I come across a certain object, but I am not sure what purpose or end this object is intended to serve, I can still see it, due simply to its design or formal qualities, as purposive, because it appears to me that there must have been some intention or plan behind the production of this object.  Thus purposiveness without a purpose means that an object or thing may or may not have a purpose behind it, driving it along, but in the absence of such a purpose, or due to my lack of knowledge about the exact purpose of the object, I can still talk about it or think about it as if it had a purpose, that is, it has purposiveness of form.  Put differently, Kant claims that certain objects have an appearance of complex design, an appearance of form that leads us to imagine a designer for them.  This means that due simply to the nature of the object’s design one can consider the object to have a certain form of finality or purposiveness in it.  This does not mean that this finality is in the real, objective causal history of the object, but simply that, independent of its color or tone, an object can be called purposive on the basis of its formal organization even when we cannot truly know the cause or end of this form.  Thus we can attribute to certain objects purposiveness without actually knowing the purpose: hence, purposiveness without purpose.

            The third moment, then, offers another set of criteria, on top of the criteria of the first and the second moments – disinterestedness and universal liking of the beautiful, respectively – namely that objects of aesthetic judgment must have the formal quality of purposiveness without purpose or finality without end.

            Turning to abjection, this idea, that the form or design of an object leads us to believe that such an object could only have been produced by an intelligent agent (read here: a complex, most likely organic, entity), and the correlative notion of finality without end, both lead directly into an aesthetic definition of the ugly as it is conceived of as abjection.  Perhaps the best way to broach such a discussion is to turn to Derrida’s The Truth in Painting.  In aesthetic judgments, according to Derrida, every work of art “seems organized with a view to an end.  Everything about it seems finalized as if to correspond to a design…and yet there is something missing from this aiming at a goal – the end.”[xxxiv]  The aesthetic experience is characterized by a conspicuous gap, a necessary lack, the deficiency of an end, a purpose.  The whole of the aesthetic object seems to be oriented toward this end, a sense of “attraction without anything attracting, fascination without desire [that] have to do with this ‘experience’: of an oriented, finalized movement, harmoniously organized in view of an end which is never in view, seen, an end which is missing.”[xxxv]  What is important here, in this description of finality without end, is unfortunately lost in the English translation.  In French, the ‘without’ (ohne) in the middle of the phrase ‘finality without end’ is translated as ‘sans,’ which is homophonic with ‘sang,’ meaning blood.  All of a sudden, in the gap that separates purposiveness and purpose or finality and end, in that cut, in the severing of any tie to a presentation of that end toward which the object seems to be oriented, there is the thin, ever so frail, notice of a trace, a trail of blood.  This long, thin strand of blood, a perfect example of abjection, is evident.  What is peculiar about this trail of the without (the sans), a leading strand from a necessity (finality) to a necessary lack (end), is the tenuous character of the strand.  As Derrida puts it,

[f]inality alone is not beautiful, nor is the absence of goal…It is finality-without-end which is said to be beautiful…So it is the without that counts for beauty; neither finality nor the end, neither the lacking goal nor the lack of a goal but the edge in sans of the pure cut, the sans of the finality-sans-end.[xxxvi]

That is, the most important aspect of the third moment, the presentation of the requirement of finality without end for aesthetic judgments, is the in-between, the nonsensical separation that is also a tie; it is the cut of the without, that which is enclosed by the concepts of finality and end.  It is clear that this connection, the ohne, the without, the sans, is wholly abject, neither subject nor object, neither purposiveness nor purpose, but that which is thrown forth.  And this is exactly Kristeva’s notion of abjection.

The trail of blood is the evidence of a cut and a tie, a separation and a connection that is necessary for aesthetic experience.  The blood is quite literally and quite figuratively thrown forth, leading from the subject to the objective world, from the I to the it.  But it is apparent that the blood, as an example of abject materiality, is caught in-between.  It was once part of the body, and there is a lot of blood that still is part of the body, necessary for its continued existence; but now, since the blood has left the body, since it has been thrown from the subject’s corporeality, it lingers in the place between subject and object.  It is no longer a part of me, yet it is still not yet a part of the exterior world.  The abject trail of scalding red ooze is what “disturbs identity, system, order.  What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous.”[xxxvii] The blood is not yet an object for me, it is not yet an other, so in the paroxysm of the abject experience, I throw myself forth. 

“I” am in the process of becoming an “other” at the expense of my own death.  During that course in which “I” become, I give birth to myself amidst the violence of sobs, of vomit.  Mute protest of the symptom, shattering violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer to it, it reacts, it abreacts.  It abjects.[xxxviii]

Using Derrida as a helpful “leading thread” into the abjection implicit in Kant’s examination of aesthetic experience is certainly quite useful.  Amidst one of the most intriguing of Kantian conceptual constructions – finality without end or purposiveness without purpose – it is possible to locate one of the best examples of abjection.  At this point, it should already have begun to become clear that abjection is a justified aesthetic experience: one, among many, definitions of the phenomenology of artistic encounters that deserves to sit alongside Kantian claims of taste.

            One final observation that corroborates the introduction of abjection as ugliness into the aesthetic spectrum is the status of its material form.  In Kant’s requirement of beauty in the third moment he focuses on the design or form of the aesthetic presentation.  The finality or purposiveness that Kant attributes to works of art has to do with the formal qualities of the piece: the lines, the shape, the design, the structural relationships, etc.  Thus aesthetic objects occasion the feeling of pleasure or pain due to the form of the object.  Flipping things over and approaching abjection on these same terms, the form of the abject object is quite different than the assemblage of lines and shapes of a work of aesthetic beauty.  It is not right, as Allison rightly notes,  to “simply identify the ugly with such formlessness, since Kant connects the sublime with the latter, and he certainly did not wish to regard the sublime as a species of the ugly.”[xxxix] Moreover, the ugly/abject is not formless like the sublime, because, in that case, the formlessness of the sublime extends beyond the capabilities of the imagination, on towards infinity.  In the case of abjection, on the other hand, the pile of dung or the trail of blood does not extend to an infinite limit; the imagination does not fail to meet the demands of the faculty of reason to complete the series.  Rather, the abject material is finite, retaining an ambiguous form, but complete.  What is unique about the abject is that the form of the object does not necessarily resemble the form of the beautiful art painting or sculpture.  In some cases, of course, excrement or vomit can be molded and manipulated to resemble a classical form; perhaps the ancient Greek form of the human torso or the intricate design of Roman architecture.  Yet while these cases are certainly interesting, and do contribute to this argument, one of the more common characteristics of abjection is the lack of form; or perhaps more accurately, the abject is ugly, not beautiful, not only because it lacks form, but because the absence of form leaves only matter, the putrid assemblage of non-rationality and indeterminacy. In short, the abject is neither formal (like the beautiful) nor formless (like the sublime); rather, it is informal: capable of assuming different forms, in the process of coming into form, without being reduced down to a finalized form. 

Even more so, the absence of pre-formation in the process of becoming in-formed, is also the unveiling of matter without borders that leaves a world that is not structured by an end or goal; it is necessarily ambiguous, seeping out unexpectedly, at unexpected times, a rude intruder that shape-shifts depending on the structure from which it was emitted.  That is, the abject often defers to the shape of the orifice out of which it came: the excrement out of the anus, the spit out of the mouth, the milk out of the breast, the blood out of the cut.  The abject does not retain a certain rigid structure, it does not declare a definite form, but twists, drips, curls, and erupts depending on each particular occasion, each wholly singular moment.  In short, the abject strays along the borderline, subtly subverting the subject at irregular times.  The subject is not, however, abruptly cut off, but maintains a sort of uncomfortable distance.  What is left is not free beauty, not pulchritudo vaga, but free ugliness, turpa vaga.  This means that abjection is purposive, free and indeterminate; it is necessary for organic existence, but this purposiveness is without end, this finality has no purpose.  It is this ‘without,’ this ‘sans,’ this ‘ohne,’ that curls back upon itself, upon me, and the form that it takes depends on the end toward which it is directed, toward which it is thrown forth.  Thus abjection, assuming the in-between separating and connecting finality and its innominate end, is already included, perhaps necessarily so, in the Kantian aesthetic account.  All it takes to see that this is so is to open up the field to a multiplicity of other possible aesthetic experiences. 

4. Modality: A Common Sense of Detest

The fourth moment, since it is the dawn of modality, attempts to clarify the necessary status of aesthetic judgments.  This moment builds on the second moment, the time of universal assent in a liking for the beautiful or in the disgust at the abject, in that the declaration of beauty or ugliness necessarily holds for all rational beings.  The normativity of universal assent, the “ought” or “should” that is merely demanded of everyone, is, however, conditional.  It is merely conditional, for if it were unconditionally necessary, then the judgment of taste would be based on a determinate concept, and, as we have repeated, judgments of taste are indeterminate, finding recourse to no concept.  The type of necessity is then a sort of aesthetic necessity.  Thus there must be some other sort of basis in which this necessity of everyone’s assent is rooted. 

What is required for this necessity is a subjective principle, not an objective principle of the understanding; and this principle is subjective because it is justified “only by feeling rather than by concepts.”[xl] This subjective principle, although it is merely subjective, still retains a sort of indeterminate “universal validity,” which Kant calls a common sense  or senus communis.[xli]  Now, common sense should not be taken in the pedestrian mode, that is, it should not mean the sort of intuitive street smarts or everyday mode of getting by in the world, but more of an overarching sense faculty, a faculty of the soul, that is the effect of the free play of the faculties.  To make this clearer, it might be helpful to recall the Aristotelian notion of a higher sense organ that functions as the clearing house for the disparate five sense organs, where all the diversity of the information of the different senses report and are unified so as to allow for a complete and holistic sensory experience.  Since we all have a relatively holistic and unified sensory experience, we can locate the basis for aesthetic necessity in the idea of a common sense.  The common sense then functions as the subjective principle for the attribution of aesthetic necessity to judgments of art.  That is, the common sense is a sort of indeterminate condition or basis that cannot be explicitly stated, in the way that there is no overt rule or formula for creating art works, but it functions as the basis for the necessity of aesthetic judgments so that if a certain work of art does result in a sort of aesthetic feeling – the feeling of pleasure, pain or the something else of abjection – then the object is justifiably regarded as aesthetic. 

Thought of differently, the common sense is a way of attuning our disparate sense organs, as well as the disengaged faculties, to the aesthetic object.  Kant, in the next section, then uses the idea of common sense to locate a means for communicating.  For we could not communicate, Kant believes, if we did not have a means for unifying our different experiences in some way, and the means for this unification of diverse sensations is something that we all have: common sense.  Thus the necessity that is demanded of everyone finds its basis in the shared effect of the attunement (Einstimmung) of the senses in a shared common sense.[xlii]

The way in which the implications of this moment relate to abjection is in the idea of a certain attunement to the aesthetic experience.  Without trying to exactly parallel the idea of a common sense, but still retaining some of its characteristics, it might be possible to locate a sort of attunement on a different basis.  The place where such attunement arises is in the very convulsive convergence of the body, its senses, and the psychological disposition and mental faculties in the presentation of abjection.  The subjective whole is directed toward the filth or defilement that is presented to the subject, linking all the faculties in a disharmonious fashion, yet always through a quickening of the subjective powers: the imagination and the understanding (or reason).  This link is a rope, or better, a whip that smacks the psychological and physical aspects of the subject into a kind of organized chaos.  In doing so, the subject is repulsed, sometimes brought to acute nausea, and such a response is then demanded of everyone.  The repugnance I feel in the presentation of abjection is not unique to me, as a person, but is attributed to the attunement of my faculties on the given object necessarily.  Kristeva accurately describes this effect of attunement in a description of the loathing of abject food:

Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection.  When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk – harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail pairing – I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire…[they] show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.[xliii]

Similar to the case with common sense, which acted as an effect of the play of the imagination and the understanding, the attunement on abjection is an effect of one’s very corporeality.  But the difference between the attunement of the individual on the beautiful object and the attunement on abjection is that there is less a necessary inclusion of all rational beings to react or judge in the same way, and more of a necessary exclusion of abjection from the community of judgers.  That is, abject materials – excrement, bile, semen, pus, blood – coalesce on a sort of common sensory repugnance.  All of the corporeal and mental powers and organs find their subjective principle in a feeling of necessary detestation, a universal revulsion at the visual (witnessing a horrid or uncomfortable scene), tactile (touching a warm ooze or pulsating gushing liquid), auditory (hearing a wretched scream or erotic heave), olfactory (the smell of carrion or decaying food), and gustatory (the taste of sour milk or putrefied meat).  Similarly, the mental faculties are at a complete loss, disengaged, and ajar like an open door: the sensibility draws back, the imagination is lost, the understanding is struck dumb and blind, and reason cannot complete the series because there is not even a recognizable series to complete.  This corporeal and mental aversion to abjection, then, functions in the way that the common sense works: as an effect of the disharmonious play of the mental powers that functions as the attuning basis of the aesthetic experience.

Conclusion without End

Critique of Judgment is a storehouse of useful ideas and structures, and this is why I have chosen to draw a line from an older aesthetic theory to one contemporary form of artistic practice.  One of the most common critiques of practicing artists is that there is a sharp divide between artistic practice and aesthetic theory.  In fact, many have commented that all that philosophy and the humanities have offered in response to the artistic developments of the past few decades is secondary criticism, simply more ways of summing up what artists actually do.  But given that I believe that there is no strict division between the different disciplines, or any discipline in general, it seems like a worthwhile endeavor to build bridges from philosophy to art to science and back again.  One goal of this paper, then, was to build such bridges, to fill in these gaps, and to develop a more robust and much richer domain for further conversation on these topics and many more.  The four logical categories – quality, quantity, relation, and modality – have provided a living structure with which to evaluate the status of art in the contemporary scene.

Another goal of this paper was to establish different forms of aesthetic meaning (cognitive non-meaning) other than beauty in terms of the architectonic structure of the Third Critique.  While other commentators have attempted to engage the question of at least one other form of aesthetic meaning, most often ugliness, these accounts remain unsatisfactory. Most commonly, they either argue that Kant cannot account for ugliness with his aesthetic theory at all, the position of such people as David Shier[xliv] and Christian Wenzel,[xlv] or argue that ugliness is not an true or pure aesthetic category but is merely a case of the immoral or disagreeable, the position of Garreth Thompson[xlvi] and Paul Guyer.[xlvii] Taking Guyer as exemplifying one strong flavor of these accounts, although he does not “think those who insist that our displeasure in ugliness must be a pure aesthetic response have produced convincing examples of such cases,” he does, ultimately, leave it an open question.[xlviii] He says, “[u]ntil we have an example of ugliness that can be concussively demonstrated not to displease us merely by being physical disagreeable or morally offensive or failing to meet our expectations for objects in a certain class,” ugliness cannot be a true or pure aesthetic experience.[xlix] In a sense, this paper, through the use of abjection, is a direct response to Guyer’s call to offer an example of ugliness that is truly or purely aesthetic and not merely disagreeable, immoral, etc. Yet perhaps the most obvious problem with these positions is that ugliness is basically excluded as a possible aesthetic category. Contrary to these accounts, we have seen how the four logical categories, while justifying a transcendental aesthetics, also provide enough room and philosophical materials and tools to address other forms of cognitive non-meaning.  Beauty is certainly one form of aesthetic experience, as is the sublime, but these two variations are only a few among many others.  Given the radical shifts in the definition of art in the past few decades, philosophical art theory or aesthetics has lagged behind, offering many useful concepts and structures, but without the kind of justification that Kant offers for beauty.  If at least somewhat successful, this paper has addressed this lag at least to some degree.

Although I have only dealt with abjection and abject art, as Kant focused almost completely on beauty and the sublime, it is my hope that I have furthered the discussion so that others can tie together theories of beauty with theories of kitsch, appropriation art, performance art, institutional critique, etc., thereby developing a vibrant color field of possible aesthetic practices. This is not to say that Kant did not recognize other forms of aesthetic experience besides beauty and the sublime, for he does mention ugliness a few times.[l] In a discussion of fine art, for example, Kant notes that there can be artistic representations of things that in nature would be ugly (häßlich) or displeasing,” such as “the furies, diseases, devastations of war, and the like.”[li] It is no longer enough, however, to merely gesture towards other forms of aesthetic experience. It was thus another goal of this paper to fill out one possible account of the details of Kant’s gesture.

The question still remains, however, about how to use the accomplishments of this paper, whatever they may be, to develop other accounts for these other forms of aesthetic practices.  Since a full account of this more general project is simply too much for this paper, I can only hope to expand discussion on the subject by highlighting the main thrust of the argument.

To focus in on one difficulty, how does this reading of Kantian aesthetics apply to aesthetic practices other than abjection and ugliness, most specifically, the institutional critique of such artists as Allen Kaprow, Adrian Piper, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, the Guerilla Girls, etc.? The most I can say about this question at this point in time is to emphasize the necessary “in between” status of abjection. Abjection, as was said, is located in between two of the most dominant and overtheorized categories in the history of philosophy: the subject and the object. If we can use these two poles as proxies for the dualities that structure much of conceptual thought, then we can see that the abject, as the proxy for the “in between,” can be used as the point of the stylus, so to speak, the movement of becoming, or the initial foothold with which one can begin, for example, an aesthetic practice of institutional critique. In order to avoid simply assuming the opposite side of a fight against the hegemony of institutionalization in the art world, as unwarranted and self-defeating a position as assuming that there were one and only one opposite pole to beauty – the ugly – this “in between” position exemplified by abjection and taken up by an institutional critique can then become the means for the theorization of the other forms of aesthetic experience. Thus, it appears that this tentative theorization of abjection can be used to include these other forms of aesthetic practice.