20 Learning from Aesthetics Old Masters and New Le: Ons Grant H. Kester In the Aesthetic State everything—even the too! which serves—is 2 foe citizen, having equal ights with the noblest and the mind, which would force the patient mass beneath the yoke ofits pur poses, must here fst obtain its asset. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 17921 T hae essays inthis issue of Art Journal explore some of the ‘complex meanings generated by the concept of the aes thetic within contemporary art and culture. The contribu tors pursue the aesthetic through a range of sites and domains from the sivered corpse of Joseph Jemigan floating inthe ether of cyberspace, tothe multimedia spectacle of the Holocaust Memo- lal useum in Washington, D.C. tothe creation of walsized di ital montages in London's Docklands. There is a common interest ‘throughout in expanding the conceptual scope of the aesthetic beyond the sanctioned domain of the soltary artist and work of art to include a range of practices and conditions that inform everyday We “The idea for this issue began with my interest in the much heralded “retum™ to beauty in art making and art erticsm a few years ago. This movement was catalyzed by Dave Hickeys infu tential book The invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1953) and soon grew into a torrent of interviews, special issues of maga Zines, and assorted commentaries* Hckey's book, and the general Interest in beauty that followed from i, did much to refocus the attention of artist, erties, and art historians on the sensual and somatic dimension of aesthetic experience, which had been neglected under the arid regime of the “anti-aesthetic.” In responding to this neglect, however, many of the proponents of beauty seem to have abandoned in turn some of the valuable Insights into the contingency of the aesthetic provided by critical, theory and postmodern act practice during the lat decade and a half. Thus the “ground” of beauty, as Peter Ounn and Loraine Leeson have nated, has all too often been ceded to those who speak on behalf of the body and the aesthetic from a highly trad tional, and in some cases even conservative point of view! The essays heroin seek a return to the aesthetic that preserves it fll complexity asa cultural, poltical, and sensual form of experience ‘This has led many of the contnbuters to reexamine the origins of the aesthetic in early moder philosophy. What they have found there is a concept of aesthetic knowledge that is rooted in both the private body and the body politi. In fact, itis in the very nature of the aesthetic that itis located at the intersection between the experience of subjective autonomy and the subject positions provided by a dominant culture Hickey’ book did much to reignite interest inthe powerful visual experience provided by the work of at, but his argument loses its focus at precisely the point at which this experience engages with broader forms of discursive knawledge and public subjectivity. Hickey begins his book by evoking a nightmarshly (Orwellian scenario in which a politically correct thought police dominate a well-funded network of “alternative” att spaces. This liberal elite, painfully out of touch with the vox popull of good old-fashioned bodily experience, have shackled the subversvely beautiful art object in the basement in order to satisty their fiendish desire to improve and infantilze the museum-gomng pub- lic. Hickey establishes a curious parallel between the altemative arts sector and the word of private galleries and auction houses. Thus, a “massive vil service" of arts administrators in charge ofa vast apparatus of "publicly funded” exhibition spaces is juxt posed to a “handful” of beleaguered dealers and gallery owners, who, if somewhat too ready to “nibble canapés on the Con: are at least honest about their relationship to the market corde, and are more than willing to embrace the ambiguous pleasures of aesthetic desire“ The fact that this characterization could be per suasively advanced at atime when iterally dozens of nonprofit exhibition spaces, publications, and media centers were being, forced to close owing to drastic funding, cuts and conservative political attacks suggest the emotional power of Hickey's underly ing message for mary inthe at world Hickey’s essays deploy all the accouterments of classic bbohemianism: “the strect i a persistent point of reference, along, with sneering relerences to scandalzed “church ladies." We find him rifling through Mapplethorpe's “X" portfolio in 2" dealer's penthouse,” oF evoking the origins of Mapplethorpe’s ‘cokework in "smoky, crowded rooms with raw brick walls [and] saw= horse bars."® Hickey poses as a kind of etic provocateur, uring his “outrageous” epithets atthe indifferent monolith of the art, establishment” At the center ofthis avant-garde mise en scene is the artwork that magically eludes any deadening “institutional” rmeciation to strike up a direct and spontaneous relationship with the viewer. This exchange may take place in a Manhattan pent- house or in a smoke-filed bar but it certainly can’t occur in a lacial "postmodern ice box."* Just what would a work of art out side of some form of institutional mediation look Ike? And how would we recagnize it? Its the “thetoricl” power of the artwork that marks it off from other cultural objects, according to Hickey; its suasve ability to bring us into direct contact with a radically dif- ferent set of values or model of subjectivity? (On the one hand, by embracing “dangerous” or “trans. gressive” art that is wilfully indifferent to its oven cultural respon: sibilities, Hickey wants to reject what he views as the liberal ddo-goodism of an engaged art that treats the viewer asa child to be educated. At the same moment Hickey cannot entirely aban: don the Enlightenment tradition, which insists thatthe aesthetic hhas a moral function, it nat necessarly a moral intention. He pos: tulates the experience of beauty as an unfolding cognitive opera tion in which we are first drawn in and made receptive by the sensory pleasure of beauty, and then confronted with the presence of a radically diferent subjectivity (e... Mapplethorpe’s renegade sexuality.” Thus the artwork Is an expression of the artist's own “moral and political construction ofthe visual world” that he com: ‘mubicates to the viewer through techniques of beauty that excte ‘visual pleasure." Rather than simply defending the value ofa pri+ vate aesthetic pleasure, Hickey is concemed to identify some rela tionship between “private desire" and “public virtue." It snot the fact that art might have a moral/pedagogical function that Hickey objects to, but rather the means by which this function Is ‘exercised on the viewer. Thus aesthetic experience destabiizes our sense of identity and leads us to an “anxious” consciousness that 's appropriate to the poltical condition of contemporary society ‘After undergoing an aesthetic experience, the viewer's subjectivity 's transformed in such a way that he or she becomes a more capa ble participant in “democratic” discourse." The beautiful artwork induces a kindof therapeutic itertarianism, forcing the viewer to make “moral decisions” without recourse to cultural or political absolutes. This is, unfortunately, the point in Hickey's analysis that is most ambiguous. How does he define democracy? What form of agency do his “anxious” subjects exercise? What is the relationship between the privatized and physical aesthetic lencounter and discursive knowledge? Its precisely this ambiguity that links Hickey's account of beauty to @ newus of questions about the aesthetic that stretches back over two centuries to the writings of such figures as Kant, Lessing, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume. The following, essays seek to bull on, and also complicate, the questions of aes= thetic experience that have been raised by Hickey and others dr- ing the last few years. At the same time they seek to establish a critical rapprochement with the "return to the aesthetic in con- temporary philosophy and critical theory. Thus we might consider Hickey's embrace of beauty in relation to recent work by such scholars as Howard Caygil, David Wellbery, Luc Ferry, D. N. Rodowick, Susan Buck-Morss, and Terry Eagleton, among others. Here the "return" tothe aesthetic is precisely an attempt to recap- ture a broader understanding of the term, prior to its specification to the experience ofthe work of art in the nineteenth century. For Kant the term “aesthetic” Is used in both Critique of Pure Reason, to refer to priori sense-based experience, and Critique of Judg- ‘ment, to refer to a disinterested “reflective judgment” epitomized by the experience of “taste."”” Although Alexander Baumgarten, who coined the term “aesthetic” In his ReHlections on Poetry (1735), was concemed with questions of art making (specifically poetic), he also defined the aesthetic in terms of somatic experi- fence ("the science of sensory cognition”) rather than beauty per se.” The aesthetic aso functions within Enlightenment philosophy (and ater inthe work of Hegel as apolitical figure for the relation Ship between the individual subject anda soca totality, such as the state." Ibis this political dimension of the aesthetic that is exam- Ined by Greig Crysler and Abidin Kusno in their reading of the Holocaust Memorial Museum and its construction of a national subject on the bass of a process of bodly identification aWe can identity both a poitcally symbolic aesthetic and a somatic aesthetic; an aesthetic predicated on public discourse and an aesthetic predicated on bodily knowledge. Or rather, as | have suggested above, we might say that the aesthetic s located pre cisely between these two points. The complex postion ofthe aes thetic originates in the political and epistemological crisis brought about by the erosion of monarchical and religious authority and the accession ofthe bourgeoisie to political power during the eigh teenth century. These two events threatened to sunder the sign- tying chain of divine right. The social cohesion provided by the feudal system (albeit often by force) was dissolved. But what would take its place? What power could hold the social order together? This question became even more pressing under the impact of the rising market economy in which traditional forms of social organization were subjected to what Marx desctibed as the “everlasting uncertainty and agitation” created by capitalism.” ‘Much of the philosophy ofthe Enlightenment can be read simulta neously as a.critque of absolutism and as a search fora new epis- temoogical foundation to replace it. From Lord Shaftesbury’ je ne sais quoi to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” philosophers were obsessed with uncovering some principle that could bring har mony and coardination to the complex play of interests and classes that made up eighteenth-century European socal order The aesthetic emerges with such urgency during the elgh- ‘teenth century because it promises to reveal a (noncoercve)cogni= tive ground that can guarantee a universal standatd of judgment. It 's through this “anthropological ontology" that Kant discovers a prior unity that can resolve the contradiction between subjective ‘experience and objective judgment. As Kant notes: The cognitive powers brought Jato play by (aesthetie) presenta tion are in tree play, because no determinant concept restricts thea to a particular rule of cognition... This state of tree play of the cognitive powers, accompanying a presentation by which the ‘object is given, must be universally communicable; for cognition, the determination of the object with which given presentations are to harmonize in any subject whatever) s the only way of pre senting that hols for everyone.® “The feeling of (body) pleasure that is produced by the coopera tion of the imagination and the understanding is a signifier for Kant of the underlying correspondence between the individual subject and the “universal voice” (Kant’s variant of Shaftesbury’s sensus communis oF "common sense"). It provides the calming reassurance that we are, beneath it all (ar perhaps, above ital, rational subjects and at least potentially capable of achieving a political consensus by virtue of that fact that we all experience the world through the same basic cognitive operations. The “common sense (Gemeinsinn) achieved by aesthetic reflection evokes a Utopian community in which our most personal and intuitive responses tothe world around us are immediately validated by the collective experience of our fellow eltzens. This “aesthetic state” further presupposes the existence of a “pubic here” (premised ‘on what Kant defines as “publcity") in which free and open debate among equals always results in an absolute but noncoer ‘ive consensus because each subjects able to overcome their own petty diferences and judge from the vantage point of atranscen- dnt greater good.”” ‘Although Kant is concemed to differentiate aesthetic judg- ‘ment from moral juigment by virtue of its noninstumental or dis- interested character, the very experience evoked by the aesthetic, the intuition of a universal voice, clearly has moral and political implications about which one could hardly remain inlfferent. ti, after al, the aesthetic that claims to reconcile the purely subjective ‘experience of beauty with the “objective” conditions necessary {or political discourse and will formation. The unresolved relation: ship between the maral and the aesthetic in Kant’s philosophy is ‘marked by his recourse to a poetis of ambiguity. although theres ‘no causal relationship or “intrinsic affinity” (innere Aftintat) between morality and taste, its nevertheless the case that our sense of beauty is provided with a form of moral “guidance” (Geleitet, a word that also has the connotation of a military escort TAK298)). Thus, despite Kant’s insistence on the neutrality of aes- thetic judgment, there is clearly an active moral and pedagogical clement at work the aesthetic “teaches us to ike even objects of sense freely” (AK3S4), and in the act of experiencing beauty we are conscious of the fact that our mind is “being ennobled” (Weredlung (AK353))* ‘This ambiguity between the moral and the aesthetic is char- acteristic of what philosopher Anthony Cascardi has termed the tradition of “aesthetic iberalim.”2* It also marks Hickey's account ‘of a “thetorcal” beauty There are two components of Hickey’s analysis that are of particular relevance here, Fist i his commit ‘ment to the “work of art” asa specifically privileged vehicle for inducing an “aesthetic” awareness, defined as a mode of cogni- tion that provides a conduit between somatic experience (the felt pleasure of Beauty) and a ground for intersubjec tion, This conduit itself has a highly developed symbolic value, and, although it soften only vaguely defined, ttypieally makes reference to some form of social or political consensus (in Hckey’s ‘case “democracy”). Second, the experience of the work of arts understood as a paradigm for the construction of an exemplary subjectivity. This i an essentially private encounter between the Viewer (defined as a monadic subject) and the artwork (as the ‘material expression of another monadic subject), which must remain free of any external "mediation." It is this belief in an Lunmediated, and essentially private, encounter that allows Hickey to ignore any contextual distinctions between, for example, the market conditions of the gallry sector and the market conditions of the nonprofit “altemative" arts sector2” We might contrast ths with the intorest shown by the contributors herein collaborative ‘modes of production. sil Casi and Maria DeGuzrsén, for exam ple, organize their projects through “collaboration agreements” among their friends and colleagues. They write: “These agree- ‘ments and our praxis of collaboration are for us a means to inter vene in the persistent myth of individualism that lies behind 0 ‘much of U.S. culture's rhetoric of community and consensus, Fur- thermore, through this process of collaboration we attempt to contest the aesthetic fetish of the authorial trace central to theinstitutions of eonnoisseurship and the image market * Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson descibe their practice as the result of “a transformation through critique, collaboration, and communica: tion fin which)... social and visual processes [are] inextricably linked... the work forms a lens that creates a focal point inthe energies of transformation. Desire focused is passion, and what is socialized passion but aesthetics? ‘The political dimension of the aesthetic is explicit in the work of Schiler as well as Hegel. Their concern is not merely with works of art, but with politcal and cultural subjectity on a broad socal scale. In On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793), Schiler provides a prescient diagnosis ofthe effect of a market-based sos: ety in which “material needs reign supreme and bend a degraded humanity beneath their tyrannical yoke.” Its a society in which "we see not merely individuals, but whole dasses of men, devel- ‘ping but one part of their potentialities, while of the rest, asin stunted growths, only vestigial traces remain.” The effect of this society is to fragment and divide human nature, chiller advocates a therapeutic turn to the aesthetic to “restore... the totality of ur nature." Aesthetic knowledge has the redemptive capacity to imagine and figure a more holistic and humane set of social relations. The aesthetic can be taken as an implicit ertiism of the existing social system, which has failed to realize the utopian potential contained inthe relationship between viewer and art- work: However in order to achieve this perspective the aesthetic ‘must stand “outside” existing society. In his Philosophy of Right Hegel uses the concept of aes- thetic distance to describe the function ofthe state asa “diner ested” observer, attending not to the “various parts” of society but tothe larger patterns formed by the interrelationship of these parts, and uitimately to society at could be, rather than as its This is the utopian moment of the aesthetic as that mode of knowledge that can transgress evsting boundaries of knowledge and transcend the here and now to envision a more just ard equi table society. The aesthetic grasps the complex totality of social relations and is thereby able to recognize the effect of the market in gonerating systematic inequalities. it combines both a unique form of knowledge and a desie for social improvernent. Our per- caption of works of art here and now allows usto glimpse the pos- sibility of an Ideal future in which all of our socal relationships would allow for the simultaneous and noncoetcive expression of the individual and the universal. The aesthetic functions as a token (to be redeemed at some unspecified future date) of a more inte: arated relationship between life and labor, and as 2 symbolic ‘embodiment of a world that could be. The aesthetic strkes a Faustian bargain, hawever, which allows itto think utopia but only atthe cost of never being able to ‘ny to bring it about. As Sehiler wrote in 1793; ‘is in the vrorld of semblance alone that tthe artist possesses [a] Sovereign righ. jo the insubstantial realm of the imagination, and he possesses it there only as long as he scrupulously refrains fam pred ‘eating real existence ofitin theory, and as long as he renounce al ‘dea of imparting real existence through itn practice ® Even as he refuses practical engagement, however, the arlist i compensated by the transcendent power of the aesthetic, The artist emerges as the ideal “dsitorested subject af modern iser- alsm, able to shed the cultural aecouterment of a specific identity and to speak in and through a universalzed aesthetic experience. In the case of Hegel’ analogous political reading of the aesthetic, ‘while the state i able to recognize the deleterious effects of the market, he refuses to grant i the authority to challenge the pre- eminence of the market dynamic in determining social relations ‘The state can abserve, and even judge, civil society from the van- tage point of teleological social progress, but itis prevented from realizing ths progres through any practical intervention in matiket forces. For Hegel, the market retains the status of an envitonment In. which the play of forces between consumer and producer and ‘ovmner and worker proceeds in 2 "naturelike” way and must be insulated from state interference, Thus, though Hegel was sym- pathetic tothe plight ofthe paor created by the market forces at work in cvl society, he was at the same time reluctant to suggest thatthe state should offer any large-scale program of aid to the *penurious rabble" for fear of disrupting the moral economy of ‘capitalism in which success or failure in the market isthe sole determinant of one’s well-being.” For Hegel, the solution to the crisis of civil society isnot for the “aesthetic state" to modify the actions of the market or to challenge the centrality of property rights through any form of public regulation, but rather to expand the boundaries ofthe mar- ket itself, to open up new territories or frontiers to economic ‘exploitation. “The inner dialectic of evil sacety thus drves i,” as Hegel writes, “to push beyond its limits and seek markets, and so its necessary means of subsistence, in other lanl, which ae either deficient the goods it has over-produced, or else generally back- ward in industry * Colonization of "backward" lands by “mature” Covi society is Hege’s solution.” Thus ifthe aesthetic state tran- scends Gv society the state itself is subject toa regulatory prinei- ple in the form of the market. Property, the "inner dlalectic" of ul society ultimately “transcends,” and frames, the authority of the state in Hegel's politcal economy. It is for this reason that Hickey’s indifference to the specificity of market functions in fram- ing aesthetic experience is symptomatic. The recognition that the market makes sel felt in almost every cultural domain al too eas- ily becomes an excuse to neglect the important cifferences that pertain among these sites. And the rejection of the nonprofit ats sector slides easily into an uncitical embrace of the glamorous ‘world of galeries. dealers, collectors, and auction houses.” ‘Aesthetic liberalism offers the image of a better life. But so Jong.as the market retains its transcendent status in liberal politcal theory, the tolos of a more just and equitable social order will remain virtual, and the experience of a universal subjectivity will ‘emain the sole province of those who can afford it. Iti this teleo- logical dimension that links the aesthetic judgment of the bour ‘geois subject and the poltical judgment of the liberal state. They each embody Kant’s “finality without end” Ziveckmassigkeit ‘ohme Zweck) by “straining toward the end” that they are by defi= nition prevented from reaching. Thus we are lft with the con- 23