A Return To Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, And Postmodernism - Couverture rigide

Loesberg, Jonathan

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0804751153 ISBN 13 : 9780804751155

Editeur : Stanford University Press, 2005

Synopsis

A Return to Aesthetics confronts postmodernism's rejection of aesthetics by showing that this critique rests on central concepts of classical aesthetic theory, namely autonomous form, disinterest, and symbolic discourse. The author argues for the value of these concepts by recovering them through a historical reinterpretation of their meaning prior to their distortion by twentieth-century formalism. Loesberg then applies these concepts to a discussion of two of the most significant critics of the ideology of Enlightenment, Foucault and Bourdieu. He argues that understanding the role of aesthetics in the postmodern critique of Enlightenment will get us out of the intellectual impasse wherein numbingly repeated attacks upon postmodernism as self-contradictory match numbingly repeated defenses. Construing postmodern critiques as examples of aesthetic reseeing gives us a new understanding of the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment.

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

Jonathan Loesberg is Professor of Literature at American University. He is the author of two previous books: Fictions of Consciousness: Mill, Newman, and the Reading of Victorian Prose (1986) and Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida, and De Man (1991).

Jonathan Loesberg is Professor of Literature at American University. He is the author of two previous books: Fictions of Consciousness: Mill,Newman, and the Reading of Victorian Prose (1986) and Aestheticism andDeconstruction: Pater, Derrida, and De Man (1991).

À propos de la quatrième de couverture

"...this is a forward-looking and vital contribution to aesthetics. In a convincing account, which masterfully links careful historical analysis with contemporary debate, Loesberg offers what is badly needed: a way out and beyond the ideological impasse between the alleged foundationalism of aesthetics and the supposed anti-aesthetics of postmodernism."—British Journal of Aesthetics
"A Return to Aesthetics offers a fresh and interesting approach to the classical concepts of the aesthetic theory, namely autonomous form."—Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

A Return to Aesthetics confronts postmodernism’s rejection of aesthetics by showing that this critique rests on central concepts of classical aesthetic theory, namely autonomous form, disinterest, and symbolic discourse. The author argues for the value of these concepts by recovering them through a historical reinterpretation of their meaning prior to their distortion by twentieth-century formalism. Loesberg then applies these concepts to a discussion of two of the most significant critics of the ideology of Enlightenment, Foucault and Bourdieu. He argues that understanding the role of aesthetics in the postmodern critique of Enlightenment will get us out of the intellectual impasse wherein numbingly repeated attacks upon postmodernism as self-contradictory match numbingly repeated defenses. Construing postmodern critiques as examples of aesthetic reseeing gives us a new understanding of the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment.

À propos de la deuxième de couverture

A Return to Aesthetics confronts postmodernism s rejection of aesthetics by showing that this critique rests on central concepts of classical aesthetic theory, namely autonomous form, disinterest, and symbolic discourse. The author argues for the value of these concepts by recovering them through a historical reinterpretation of their meaning prior to their distortion by twentieth-century formalism. Loesberg then applies these concepts to a discussion of two of the most significant critics of the ideology of Enlightenment, Foucault and Bourdieu. He argues that understanding the role of aesthetics in the postmodern critique of Enlightenment will get us out of the intellectual impasse wherein numbingly repeated attacks upon postmodernism as self-contradictory match numbingly repeated defenses. Construing postmodern critiques as examples of aesthetic reseeing gives us a new understanding of the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment.

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A RETURN TO AESTHETICS

Autonomy, Indifference, and PostmodernismBy Jonathan Loesberg

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5115-5

Contents

Introduction..................................................11 Aesthetics and the Argument from Design.....................142 Indifferent Embodiment......................................743 Foucault's Aesthetics.......................................1454 Bourdieu's Aesthetics.......................................197Notes.........................................................237Bibliography..................................................274Index.........................................................285

Chapter One

Aesthetics and the Argument from Design

At some point in the seventeenth century, God designed the world in such a way that anyone who looked at it in good faith could see clear evidence of both his existence and his moral intentions. Everyone noticed, at least everyone concerned with design, namely theologians and writers on aesthetics. Somewhere toward the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth century, God evidently gave up the job of designing as a bad business. At least, although philosophers and aesthetic theorists still thought that the order of art offered a good model for talking about the order of nature, they were no longer sure in either case that the internal order of an object needed an external creator of that order to make it explainable. That intellectual history marks the shift from Ralph Cudworth's True Intellectual System of the Universe in 1678, Shaftesbury's Characteristics, and Bishop Butler's Analogies in the eighteenth century (among numbers of other texts); to Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, Kant's central discussions of both natural theology and aesthetics in The Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781, substantially revised in 1787, and in the Critique of Judgment, in 1790.

The connection between aesthetics and theories of natural theology arose because of the issue of the world's moral significance. In the first instance, evidence of design in nature, in the argument from design, only showed that the world must have been designed by a higher intelligence of some kind. But natural theologians in the eighteenth century, as we will see, also wanted to argue that one could deduce from the shape of the world that its designer must be a moral governor on the order of the Christian God. This case was somewhat more difficult to make for two reasons. First, one needed a theory of how a morality that would be independent of the will of God could be known. Only then could nature be judged by an independent standard to accord with that reality. Second, it really was not always self-evident that the world did look moral. Aesthetics responded to both of these problems. First, it provided an example of harmonious form, the pleasure in which was a universal, primary experience and yet was also not quite naturally caused. It thus modeled an explanation for an innate human moral sense that was also a universal sensation. Second, the way in which complex form in art worked out moral explanations for events that were not straightforward allotments of reward and punishment also showed how one could argue that the world was ruled by a moral governor. In other words, aesthetics was the place eighteenth-century theorists turned in order to broach the most problematic of their claims about the order of nature and morality. For that reason, the aesthetics they developed became the most powerful mode, at the end of the century, for responding as well to the undoing of natural theology.

This history might have been articulated a long time ago were it not for Coleridge's revisions of Kant's, Schelling's, and Schlegel's ideas into the concept of organic form, which has been so vital and contentious an idea in twentieth-century Anglo-American literary theory. In the wake of that concept, there seemed little connection between a theology asserting external, mechanistic design and any idea of art that looked like Coleridge's claim of a special internal ordering. The concept of organic form has been central to the New Criticism and to the various attacks against it and against the ideology of aesthetics in recent years. And these attacks have taken as their target not only Coleridge's concept, but through it Kant's theories and other earlier aesthetic positions. For this reason, tracing the history that leads up to organicism takes on a two-sided theoretical significance. First, by separating the concept of organic form from the various aesthetic ideas of form that it transmutes, one can see more clearly both the philosophical and aesthetic problems with that concept and the difference between it and the Kantian arguments often misinterpreted through its lens. Second, separated from that culmination in Anglo-American formalism, the meditations on the problems of design, form, cause, and purpose among British aestheticians of the eighteenth century and Kant's revision of that discourse will emerge less as ideological mystifications in the service of a rising capitalism and more as in fact the form necessary, first, for the questioning of Enlightenment rationality, and second, for contemporary critiques of aesthetics as part of that rationality.

The necessity of aesthetics to that questioning is both historical and logical. Writers like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Kant are not in the first instance literary artists. They migrated toward the topic of aesthetics, toward the definition of beauty, not out of any interest in understanding an activity of their own, as poets such as Schiller and Coleridge did, but because the goal of giving a foundation to a moral system seemed to lead them consistently to art. In effect, the concept of a harmonious form, simultaneously and contradictorily like and unlike a nature whose own order was ambiguous even when most strenuously asserted, seemed necessary not as an adjunct of reason and morality but as an a priori basis for arguing their existence. This connection gives an ambiguous turn to the concept of aesthetic form that will make critiques of it as ideologically driven seem incomplete, not because they are inaccurate but because they do not recognize their own dependence on that concept. For this reason, simultaneous though it was to the ethical bourgeois society's justifications and economic explanations of its rise, aesthetics nevertheless played a slightly askew role. Its own justification could never coincide with what it was designed to justify without the arguments becoming patently circular. And the very toils of the explanatory maneuvers and processes demanded by the ostensibly unaesthetic project of using aesthetics instrumentally in the service of ethics finally detach themselves from the aims of the specific writers. These maneuvers become the process by which subsequent theorists who want to calculate the ideological intents of large social and discursive structures stand apart from that which they analyze. Marking this detachment in the role of form as part of its role in ideological analysis is also central to my argument.

The intent behind proving design can be an extremely conservative project. And writers such as Shaftesbury and Kant surely did mean their aesthetics to support an established order. But focusing on the form of intent, as manifest in aesthetic design, entailed learning to conceive and deploy an analysis of form as sufficient evidence to mark an end or purpose in a structure even while bracketing the question of intent. Seeing the difference between positing a way of apprehending purposiveness in an object without supposing an intended purpose-which will become central to postmodernism-and the objectivist anti-intentionalism of New Criticism and its traditionalism entails seeing the history of aesthetics that stands behind both. In order to understand the postmodern debt to the Kantian definition of autonomous form as purposiveness without purpose, then, we must begin by detaching it from the Coleridgean concept of organic form and see its roots in eighteenth-century natural theology. Starting with contemporary and Coleridgean notions of organic forms, this section will work backward from that concept to the confrontations with design, intent, and form that constitute the real founding ideas of aesthetics and that remain central to our own skeptical attacks on the ideologies in and around literature.

I. Organic Form: From the New Criticism to Coleridge and Kant

As the title for this section indicates, my first aim is to trace the filiations of a concept backward from its theoretical importance to its sources, real and ostensible. Although the idea of organic form has been controversial because of its vital role in contemporary formalism, tracing its history creates a clearer view of the connection between current controversies and the paths that produced the controversial concept. As an example of the importance of organicism in twentieth-century criticism, one may take Cleanth Brooks's essay "Implications of an Organic Theory of Poetry." A consideration of this essay suitably starts the project of defending the concept of autonomous form because it exhibits how the problems that contemporary critics have with it connect so closely with the idea of organic form, with which they identify autonomy. Detaching organicism from autonomy, then, prepares for the recuperation of that latter idea. Brooks's essay uses organic form to address the problem of literature and belief: that the value of literature cannot either easily be connected to or easily detached from one's sense of the truth of the statements contained in a given work. This problem, Brooks argues, derives from a dualistic attitude to the form-content relationship in poetry. If one sees poetry as ornamentally figural statements of propositions that might appear in philosophy, science, or religion, one will, with T. S. Eliot, think that one can only fully appreciate a poem whose beliefs one shares-or at least has sympathy with (Brooks, 54). To escape this position and take poetry out of "ruinous competition with science and philosophy" (Brooks, 55), one could, with I. A. Richards, deny that poetry has anything at all to do with truth and argue that its aim is entirely to achieve emotive effect. But, for Brooks, this leads to a subjectivism that makes criticism impossible: "by locating the values of poetry in certain alleged psychological effects in the reader, Richards severed the connection between the text of the poem and any critical account of it" (Brooks, 56).

The only way Brooks saw to exit from these equally unappealing alternatives was to question the form-content dualism. And hence came the role of organic form, which Brooks also argued was "a description of poetry that would fit the facts." Organic form, in other words, wasn't just a locally useful concept for dealing with the problem of literature and belief. It objectively corresponded to the form of poetry as it is. Form and content are inseparable, Brooks argues, because the relationship of the various parts of a poem is such that one aspect cannot be easily detached from another. It "was organic-not a relation like that of brick with brick or girder with girder, but more nearly like that of cell with cell in a living organism. Such a poem seemed to deny the commonly assumed duality between form and content as these terms are commonly used and, if one wished to do justice to its special kind of unity, to demand another kind of description" (Brooks, 62-63). From here, Brooks could argue toward a version of poetry as providing a truth of coherence whose features were unified complexity and a generalized correspondence to "human responses" and "human nature" (Brooks, 70). Rather than worry about whether Brooks has really solved the problem of belief here or merely veiled it by assuming a set of commonly held beliefs that he groups under the concepts of "human responses" and "human nature," I want to look at the features attributed to the organic interrelationship Brooks asserts.

Brooks's discussion of organicism raises two common aspects of the term that are not always so self-evidently apparent. First, in this passage, organicism is a special kind of relationship opposed to another kind, exemplified by the relation between brick with brick or girder with girder. Living beings, Brooks claims, are organized differently from works of artificial human construction. Second, he claims that organic unity is a "fact," a real aspect of nature. The logical point of the comparison is to see that poetry, a human product, is not organized like most human products-the ones made of girders and bricks-but like living organisms. But only if we in fact know how living organisms are organized, how cell relates with cell, can we use that natural relationship to understand poetic unity. This may seem to be belaboring the obvious, but neither claim is as unproblematic as Brooks seems to think, and those problems point us to the specific history of the term organic form. First, for instance, the difference between the two kinds of organization seems more evident on the surface of the analogy than it actually is. If one adds the idea of intention, the distinction will seem to become clearer, perhaps. Buildings are artificial organizations constructed according to human intention. Cells within a body relate as a result of no design but out of the necessities of their own being. This distinction, of course, plays a central role in the New Critical refusal to evaluate a poem in terms of its intention. But without a clearly defined sense of what an organic unity is, rather than what its provenance is or is not, explanations of unity may quickly mix the ostensibly mechanistic with the ostensibly organic. Thus, arguing against evaluating a poem merely in terms of its success at fulfilling its intention, Wimsatt and Beardsley immediately mix the two forms of organization: "Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention of an artificer. 'A poem should not mean but be.' A poem can be only through its meaning-since its medium is words-yet it is, simply is, in the sense that we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant" (Wimsatt, Verbal Icon, 4). Note that the poem starts out like a pudding or a machine and ends as a self-justifying being, but in each case it is an example of a thing that works toward an end. Indeed, Brooks himself, only two pages after invoking the concept of organic unity, immediately returns to the concept of mechanic unity: "in the first place, a poem is something made, a construct. A renewed consciousness of a poem as an object-an artifact-and with a renewed respect for craftsmanship, have been salient traits of twentieth-century literary theory" (Brooks, 65). The problem here is that the only real difference in the unities invoked is that one, organic unity is not clearly the product of a designing intention and thus may have the feel of being deeper and more numinous. But if art can reproduce it through an artist's intention, then it will be addressable in terms of other humanly intended orders.

The second problem results from the same unarticulated assumptions. Since it is not self-evident what the special quality of natural form is or even that it really has an internal order to it, talk about the organic unity of a poem may quickly become talk about unity per se. The concept is then open to the criticism of being inherently artificial and falsifying. Thus Murray Krieger, in a recent defense of the concept of organic form, A Reopening of Closure: Organicism Against Itself, identifies the critics of organicism as arguing against the concept of totalization as repressive: "organicists, true to their sources in German romanticism, too often project the organic metaphor-once literalized-into the realms of history and metaphysics, and use it to read the character of peoples, powers, and nations. ... The consequences of such analogies for reactionary twentieth-century ideologies have long been evident enough.... Indeed, the use of organicism to aestheticize the political, and hence to politicize the aesthetic, has for some time been a concern of enemies of organicism" (Krieger, 35). Now, a committed organicist might easily argue against such criticism that organic unity cannot be imposed from the outside in this form of repression since its very concept supposes an internal quality that is natural to a state. Indeed, Josef Chytry defended the concept of the aesthetic state in just these terms: "Winckelmann's letters constantly refer to freedom as his life's goal, and in his praise of modern Roman life he reverts frequently to the model of a society given to the study of beauty and a freedom 'where no one commands and no one obeys'" (Chytry, Aesthetic State, 27). But Krieger makes no such argument. Instead, he accepts the identification of organic unity with unity per se and argues that organic unity may nevertheless open itself to difference and ambiguity (Krieger, 50-55). Whether or not this is a sufficient defense of aesthetic unity against the attacks of deconstructive skeptics and leftist critics of its repressiveness, it clearly has no specifically "organic" nature to it. The model of something actually in nature has disappeared, leaving Krieger's unity to survive on its own artificial terms.

(Continues...)

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Stanford University Press
• Date d'édition: 2005
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0804751153
• ISBN 13: 9780804751155
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 289
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Pays-Bas