Hansen & Munster

Both of our readings for this week take up issues surrounding technology and embodiment. Hansen and Munster both seem to be reacting against assumptions and practices that attempt to cut the body out of digital media. While Hansen's project takes this up by detailing radical works of digital art that reconceptualize the relationship between the body and technology, Munster's work seems to take up issues of technology and embodiment from a slightly different angle by re-thinking the goals of projects like Hansen's and pushes at the ethical implications of such projects.

What is at the heart of each of these projects seems to resemble many of the readings we've seen before. Hansen and Munster seem to take up the project of technologies and bodies to think through what potential these have for social transformation. Hansen's text seems fundamentally more hopeful to me than Munster's in that he organizes his text primarily through examples of artists attempting to do this work (his extended introduction of Kruger's work, for instance). Hansen seems to be suggesting that by focusing our attention on only the visual (3-D graphics) as a means for creating digital spaces, we are losing some of the most important potential that technology has to offer us: a space to re-work and re-mediate our own bodies in participatory ways that challenge passivity. For example, Hansen focuses on how Krueger's work allows the participants to take on some of the "programming" that might traditionally done by the "artist" by being responsible for the "input" in these virtual spaces that reconstruct the body and having the "output" speak to all of our senses. What results, then, from Hansen's work is something like what Dan Cameron refers to when describing these pieces as "a new category of beauty" (37). This new beauty is created through a new kind of awareness that is born from pairing body and technology in the ways Krueger (and others) accomplish.

This is where I see a nice link to the Munster text, which seems to nuance some of the claims made in Hansen a bit more. Although Munster also focuses on the necessity of bodily inclusion in the consideration of what she terms an "information aesthetic," she seems to consider some of the implications for the claims like those present present in Hansen. For example, in Chapter 5 Munster provides a complicated version of the "digital divide" argument questioning the place of new media in creating a more participatory space. Here, Munster detail the concept of the ethico-aesthetic which allows us to ask questions about what kinds of connectivity and social relationships are formed through certain texts. Munster points out here that although bodies (and art) are re-configured through new media, these reconfigurations or remediations do not promise or guarantee social trasformation; yet, there is certainly some potential for this. I appreciated this point in Munster because it reigns in the claims about "new potential" in some of the texts that we've read that often leave me skeptical.

Ah, there is so much more I want to write about here. But I need to save some time today to keep working on my final project. Here are some terms/concepts/ideas that I've found interesting that I'd like to talk more about in class if there is time:

-I'd be interested in talking about Hansen's description of the subject and individual on page 85 (especially in terms of how this paragraph pulls us in a different direction than how we've previously discussed these terms)

-I'm also interested in discussing Hansen's term "intercorporeity" in terms of how this allows us to move away from the notion of a body, one body that has been so consistently present throughout our readings

-Lastly, I'd be interested in talking more about Munster's ethico-aesthetic and what this might mean for relational art, performance, or some of the art Hansen described

That's all. For now, anyway...

Back to Beauty?: On Steiner's Venus in Exile

Wendy Steiner's Venus in Exile: the Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art traces the dismissal of beauty and the feminine subject in the realms of Modernist art and literature of the past century. Steiner mainly focuses her critique on avant-garde art where Kantian notions of transcendent and detached, disinterested beauty seem to have resulted in "masculine" works where women, beauty, ornament and domesticity come to lose their place. Very early on in her text, Steiner contrasts a Kantian notion of beauty with the aesthetic theory latent in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and eventually suggests a societal revision of aesthetics in ways that pull us toward Shelley's critique. It is clear that Steiner sees the 21st-Century as having much potential for bringing back beauty (albeit a beauty that has been somewhat transformed by the Modernist history that has preceded it). Steiner seems to find hope in a renaissance of beauty as bodily, pleasurable and world in which generosity, love and making oneself again through a recognition of the Other are once again valued.

For me, Steiner's text was a wonderful pulling together of some pieces (and critiques) that I was struggling to give voice to. I appreciated the through examples she gave to demonstrate (instead of telling us) just how significant the departure of beauty was on many facets of life from home decorating, photography, novels, and art. I would imagine that Steiner's audience is more heterogeneous than some of the previous texts we've read in that she gives a lot of context information and, while she does assume background knowledge of art and literature, I was able to engage in her argument even when I was unfamiliar with a particular painting or novel.

I very much enjoyed Steiner's discussion of ornament and domesticity; however, these parts of the book left me with some questions regarding what was happening and going on in domestic spheres of life within certain cultural pockets despite the general devaluation of the beautiful. That is, while Steiner's project traces high art and lauded literature, I kept wondering what was going on in everyday society in the homes and lives of women who most likely did not leave ornament and domesticity behind (think, working-class womens' decorations/clothing as being called "gaudy"). Granted, Steiner does give mention to decorating books, fashion magazines and photography in a few places throughout her book; yet, I was wondering about who--despite its lack of popularity and cultural prestige--has clung to notions of beauty throughout the 20th century--who were the guardians of beauty and now that beauty is becoming in vogue again, how will this same groups relationship to beauty be changed? The reason I ask this question is that it seems to me that Steiner seems to be suggesting a cultural force (because of need and desire of individuals and society as a whole it seems) back toward beauty. Yet, a focus on the avant-garde then fails to recognize which people have held on to this notion all along and their role (if any) in how beauty will become re-appropriated in high art. I want to know more about the relationships between the avant-garde movement and "common" or "lower-end" consumption" as I think these relationships are crucial for thinking through what the renaissance of beauty will do to and for those who have less available power. Hmm...I hope this is making sense...I guess I'm just trying to reign in the hopefulness Steiner has for a return to beauty because I'm skeptical about what that shift will actually do for those that have been left out of Modernist art. Will the return of beauty be just a reorganization of the relationships to it in ways that make access to what is deemed valuable and artistic less available?

Rancière & Bourriaud, kind of...

Okay, so on Monday night I found out that I ordered the wrong Bourriaud book from Amazon so my reading of Relational Aesthetics has been shaped by some of the .PDF essays from the book that I've been able to track down on the internet. I had imagined, at the time, that I could focus my post here on Rancière, but then, well, I read Rancière and I must confess that this may be an "interesting" post...

Both of the texts for this week seem to share in common a focus on the public and an embracing of the connectivity of life in generally and the role of aesthetics in this connectivity. For Bourriaud, this connectivity (or, more specifically here, relationality) moves art and aesthetic experience from the realm of the private into the realm of the public. In other words, the value of art rests in its potential to bring people in relation to one another in particular ways an in specific cultural contexts. For Rancière, the role connectivity comes in somewhat differently through the connection between aesthetics and politics.

From what I can discern, Rancière seems to be suggesting that aesthetics is deeply entangled with (not necessarily causally, though) politicization and subjectivation and most fundmentally, with experience. Rancière is concerned throughout these interview-essays, among other things, with mapping out the relationship between the visible and the sayable and although I know that these ideas are central to his overall argument, I'm confused about what exactly he is doing with them. Hopefully this will become clearer before class...

I guess I'll stop here and revisit this writing when I am clearer about some of this and have more productive/focused questions and useful things to say...

Back to the Body: Bourdieu and Eagleton

Our texts for this week, Eagleton and Bourdieu, both seem to take up an interest in aesthetics alongside a renewed focus on the body. While the interest in the body is perhaps much more explicit in Eagleton, it is taken up centrally (albeit often implicitly for our reading today) in Bourdieu through his discussion of acquiring competencies and educational, symbolic and cultural capital--and to go beyond our reading some, what he fleshes out as the notion of the habitus in the later chapters of the book. While aesthetics for Eagleton have some radical potentials, Bourdieu's take on the social role of aesthetics and on how aesthetics are embodied seems to imply a more deterministic view. That is, Bourdieu seems to see less opportunity to use taste/art in ways that break down or challenge the system; rather, he suggests that while individuals attempt to move within this system they often ultimately end up unconsciously reifying the system all together through, for example, conspicuous consumption.

I'm interested, then, in talking about how Eagleton's view of the role of the body (and also subjectivity), when juxtaposed with Bourdieu's sense of the embodiment of taste and aesthetics, might suggest as we move forward in the course. In his introduction, Eagleton describes the aesthetic in the following way:

The aesthetic is at once, as I try to show, the very secret prototype of human subjectivity in early capitalist society, and a vision of human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the implacable enemy of all dominative or instrumentalist thought. It signifies a creative turn to the sensuous body, as well as an inscribing of that body with subtly oppressive law; it represents on the one hand a liberatory concern with concrete particularity, and on the other hand a specious form of universalism. If it offers a generous utopian image of reconciliation between men and women at the present divided from one another, it also blocks and mystifies the real political movement towards such historical community. Any account of this amphibious concept which either uncritically celebrates it or unequivocally denounces it is thus likely to overlook its real historical complexity (9).

Given Eagleton's passage here, how might we talk about bodies, subjectivity and the aesthetic as Eagleton sees these in relation to how Bourdieu might see these? What room for change and shift does Eagleton afford? Where are these affordances located (if at all) in Bourdieu's text?

I'm also interested in Eagleton's description of the Bourgeois social order--particularly in terms of how it seems to correspond with Bourdieu's focus on social practice and other minutiae such as taste. Eagleton states:

The ultimate binding of bourgeois social order, in contrast to the coercive apparatus of absolutism, will be habits, pieties, sentiments and affections. And this is equivalent to saying that power in such an order has become aestheticized. It is at one with the body's spontaneous impulses, entwined with sensibility and the affections, lived out in unreflective custom. Power is now inscribed in the minutiae of subjective experience, and the fissure between abstract duty and pleasurable inclination is accordingly healed (20).

What does this passage suggest about the ideology of aesthetics and, as Bourdieu would point to, taste?

Williams & Bérubé

Both of the texts for this week, although written decades apart, move us toward a forging of culture with art. While Williams' text accomplishes this through a series of chapters which take up Marxist concepts in service of a materialist critique, Bérubé's text contextualizes the place of aesthetics within the contemporary academy (English departments in particular) to demonstrate the the rifts between cultural studies and "the beautiful" are created due to a misinterpretation of the role of cultural studies. Essentially, ideology and art/the beautiful, although they have developed varying academic traditions, are quite compatible if we shift our focus to begin to look at what Bérubé calls "cultural forms".

Speaking of forms, I'm interested in the shape that Williams' writing took. Although I appreciated the detailed and often seemingly painstaking tracing of terms, I found it interesting that these terms were written about in ways that relied upon neatly-bound splits in chapter or section (something Williams claimed to theoretically be working against). Anyway, moving on from my grumbling, I specifically appreciated the following passage in the "Ideology" section:

....'thinking' and 'imagining' are from the beginning social processes...and (they) become accessible only through unarguably physical and material ways: in voices, in sounds made by instruments, in penned and printed writing, in arranged pigments on canvas or plaster, in worked marble or stone. To exclude these material social processes from the material social process is the same error as to reduce all material social processes to mere technical means for some other abstracted 'life'. The 'practical process' of the 'development of men' necessarily includes them from the beginning, and as more than some technical means for some quite separate 'thinking' and 'imagining' (62).

For me, this spot in the text was one of the most explicit places that clearly speaks to not only a critique of Marxist aesthetic theory but also affords a critique of the early aesthetic canon which heavily relied upon abstract notions of the aesthetic and beauty as being at odds with everyday process and practice (which Williams argues are a part of one another to begin with). I appreciate the moment, then, when Bérubé makes an argument for breathing as having an aesthetics and this section begins to address my concerns at the beginning of the semester a to how we see the mundane as being divorced from the aesthetic.

What was most surprising to me, though, given Williams' critique, is that it seems as though Bérubé is writing about a split within academia between cultural studies and aesthetics that, at its root, stems from the issue that Williams is first writing about in the late 70s. That is to say, it is interesting how the social and cultural trajectories of the two fields Bérubé writes about often see themselves as incompatible despite the work that has insisted upon a connection between the two.

Anyway, in terms of our class discussion tonight, I'd like to talk more about Bérubé's use of the terms instrumentality/noninstrumentality of art. I feel like these are key to the main arguments in the texts today as well as key concepts for addressing how the concepts of art (materiality) and the social and cultural are being explicitly brought back together.

Continuing on with the Frankfurt School: Marcuse and Adorno

Both part of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Marcuse seem to be writing about art and its radical potentialities. While Marcuse views the radical nature of art as the merging of form and content (by foregrounding form) toward a transformation of consciousness, Adorno posits that art is radical due to its ability to move beyond reality--to present us with the possibility of "other".

The imagined audience for this week carries with it many of the same traits as our previous readings--these writings are written for an academic audience that is familar with Marxist theory and certain literary works. However, these writings (Benjamin, Marcuse and Adorno) seem to be even more tightly in dialogue with one another than some of our readings in the past due to the fact that these scholars all belong to the Frankfurt school. Both Marcuse and Adorno, for example, focus on the autonomy of art and its radical potentialities. Because of the relatively homogeneous audience, these writers, particularly Marcuse, again make assumptions about universality regarding values and tastes. It is sometimes shocking to me that these texts--claiming to move toward a more just and free society--can so easily reinscribe some of the current class stratification through the values latent in these theories.

I'm still finishing my reading of Adorno's text, so I'm not ready to formulate any questions yet. I do have a couple of points I'd like to discuss regarding the Marcuse, though:

While Marcuse goes on to nuance these terms in his later chapters, I'm interested (and troubled) by his notions of "autonomy", "quality", and "standard" (with his discussion of Shakespeare). I agree with Marcuse that Marx's attribution of the class and how social position appears in work is overly simplistic; however, it seems to me that Marcuse's discussion of art lapses into talking about art in ways that make the means of producing art more available to some and not others. Am I missing something here?

Also, I was wondering about the passage at the very beginning of the Marcuse text (3-4) where he is discussing the moving away from individual consciousness toward a class consciousness. I found this passage interesting because it seems that pre-Marx aesthetic theory focuses so heavily on the individual that it erases the collective sense of how we both produce and experience art. If we have time, I'd be interested in talking about this passage more and what Marcuse is referring to exactly with the phrase "the subjective potential for revolution" (4).

A critique of Critique, a review of Review: Collapsing Performance, Production and Critique

This was supposed to be a review, a critique of a text. It will not be, at least, not in the most traditional sense. I simply cannot imagine it being this without taking on some of the major assumptions lurking within the forms of “critique” and “review” writing and these are the assumptions I want to work against.

This post, instead then, will be a critique of a performance--my own “aesthetic” performance in creating my first blog post for this class. I will “critique,” so to speak, the process of writing my first blog post--the review of something that I found pleasurable. My critique of my own critique, though, will be interlaced (and in service of) a more general critique of Critique and review of Review. Because without this essential move toward critiquing or reviewing the embeddedness and performativity of Critique or Review itself, it will be all the more impossible to get at some of the core issues that have concerned us in this class, and, perhaps most importantly some issues that have emerged both in the foreground and background of the pleasures (and displeasures) of our everyday lives.

My performance is formulated long before it is witnessed. It begins, perhaps, in the barely comprehensible remarks that a baby can make out through her families’ spattered phrases and gesture. Whatever it is, though, the beginning of the traditional critique must erase this. A traditional critique often neatly begins at the so-called chronological beginning and forgets the social, cultural and historical beginnings. It freezes a text and its conventions within time and space despite the fact that time and space flow through these texts. I must insist that we start from different beginnings, but nonetheless, beginnings that must inevitably be trapped by their narrativizablilty. Tied up in my first blog post are many beginnings...the course that we are all in that prompted us to create this blog post; knowledge of what a blog post is and how to create one; how to “design”--or choose from the available templates on the blog; how to select something that is “pleasurable” that will say particular things about the identity I want to construct and not other things....these are some of the many, many invisible beginnings in the blog text I created. Beginnings that, are not often not available or even acknowledged when a we engage in the act of review or critique.

I could tell you that when I look at a painting, or the ocean, or my niece’s focused gaze, that I experience beauty in ways that completely undermine (or are at least in tension with) the formal writings we’ve read in this class. I could tell you that despite the rigid taxonomies and hegemonic assumptions, beauty evades this theoretical writing, that it is somehow more than the attempts to define, to formalize, to claim knowledge of it. Yet, disappointingly, I do not believe this to be true--at least not completely. Although I was not previously aware of the deep culture roots of what we deem “aesthetic,” I know they are there. I know they are there in every utterance of what is beautiful and what is not. I know this through social and cultural experience and although I cannot pinpoint why thinking particular things are more beautiful than others is more associated with power, I know beauty and power are inseparably bound up in one another.

I start to write my first blog post several times but am halted by my worry of what I think is beautiful and how that might be read by others. I formally know nothing about “aesthetics”--I am still prudent around this word...careful with my relationship to it. I spell it cautiously, paying attention to when the red squiggly lines call out to me to tell me that I have missed an “e” or an “h”. But I know that I have to write about it. I know I have to locate what I find beautiful, what I find pleasurable. I toss around multiple possibilites, keenly aware of what each will say about me, how each will mark my taste. I definitely can’t write about my love of Celine Dion music unless I can do this writing in a tongue-and-cheek I-know-I’m-totally-uncool-way--unless I can pre-empt judgements about my taste. I choose to talk about cuneiform. I chose to talk about something that is often believed to be divorced from bodies.

A critique is always a performance and performance responds to and then becomes critique. I critique my own production, then, because I want to attempt to break down the passivity of the observer, viewer, listener, audience. During live performances, the role of the audience and the collective experience is often acknowledged; however, I want to highlight here that texts that are experienced in a less immediate way are experienced actively as well. For example, there was a great moment at the Next Step theatre three weeks ago that I could easily have written this entire post about. An actress mistakenly set down a prop at the very outer most edge of the table. The scene, which was already suspenseful, was heightened by the fact that I, and other audience members, were so keenly aware of the fact that the prop might, at any minute, fall and alter the performance in unforeseen ways. It is easy to see how performances, which frequently depend upon the contingent movements of human bodies, are seen as active and dynamic. It is much more difficult, I think, to see how a painting or a drawing or a blog post are also contingent and dynamic in this same way as they too are forms of responses to contexts. Every time we struggle to articulate something or decide not to write something, we are placing the frame on the edge of the table. To break down the boundaries between critique and performance, it is necessary to view texts more fluidly and dynamically and less passively.

Hmm...so now I don’t have much time left. So...what to write about in my first blog post for this class??? Whatever I choose will say something about me. But what should it say? I could write about the textiles in the production of Belle’s Strategem I saw in August. No. I could write about the fact that I grew up listening to music by Celine Dion music (in French and English) and still have a soft spot for it. No, writing tongue-and-cheek isn’t a comfortable style for me. I am finally so short on time so I choose to write about one of the most interesting--and least visited--exhibits I saw at the Louvre this past summer. I chose to write about cuneiform. I am fascinated when I see cuneiform. I am moved. But I also know that talking about this is a safe choice in an English department. It is a safe choice because it is so historically and institutionally validated and stamped with a social and cultural seal of approval that it won’t say much about me.

I write my post on cuneiform and I hate that I can’t easily articulate the complexities around this decision. I hate that I can’t make my blog post or my blog, both shrouded with the lie of “choice”--choice in color, choice in template, choice in picture, choice of what to write about, say what I want them to. Bloggers design constraints push me away from creating a blog that represents what I want it to. The constraints of culture and social position constrain me from representing myself in a way that I want to. What would it be like to be able to create a blog that reflects what I value in design? What would it be like to not have to consider so carefully how what I write about will position me? Choice without much control is not choice; yet, it is framed as such and I am responsible to it as such.

I am so thrilled when someone critiques how people wrote about art in European museums during our first night’s class discussion. I know this critique is, in part, aimed at my post. And it helps me to unravel and see more clearly what I already knew...that my performance of critique was too careful, too neat.

What does it mean to step into the role of “the critic”? A “critic” is one person, one individual who sees or hears or experiences something and then engages in the act of critiquing that thing, generally for the supposed benefit of others. Yet the performance, critique and production are so tightly bound. Before I knew you, the members of this class, I could imagine how you’d respond to what I said. I tried to anticipate your critiques of my critiques and, when, possible, to pre-empt them. I produced my text for you and for myself in line with the constraints imposed upon me by the culture and the social. Most importantly, my critique of my own performance on my initial blog here was no less a performance than it was there.

I cannot, then, very honestly take on the role of “The Critic” as an individual writing this post or any other “critique” or “review” . I know that although it is my hands that are pecking at the keys at this moment, that my performative critiques are shaped by you and others and that without this software, without our class discussions, the museums I’ve visited, the books I’ve read, the food I’ve eaten, the places I’ve been to, the amount of sleep I’ve had, I would have performed critique differently. I know that critique, although seemingly the act an observation of an individual, entails far more than this...includes far more than this.

Chytry & Benjamin

At the heart of both of our texts for this week, we saw a concern for shifts in the way aesthetic objects are produced (more evident in Benjamin) and the consequences of this production on humanity and on freedom.

Chytry's text, essentially a pulling-together of Marxist aesthetic theory, attempts to outline the key aspects of some Marxian aesthetic thought. Here's what I took from that:

-Marx moves away from Hegel by focusing on the "sensuous nature" which places a restored emphasis on the site of production and labor. I'd be interested in discussing how this is in tension (and not) with Hegel's notion of the aesthetic as man-made objects since, aesthetic drive, for Marx, is natural.

-A new notion of "communality" is exhibited where the goal of the society is to have individuals work toward developing their aesthetic selves. This idea, although it relies heavily on individuals, does provide a space to talk about aesthetics as operating within a community. What feels very comfortable for me in all of this is that aesthetics become a part of the masses instead of a means to separate out the masses and create social hierarchy.

-The idea that capitalism will play its part in a history that will eventually give rise to an aesthetic ideal. The below quote better illustrates this idea:

In short, the Aufhebung of capitalism is to usher in an 'aesthetic utopia': 'economic activity will turn into artistic activity, with industry as the supreme avenue of creation, and the planet itsel will become the new man's work of art. The alienated world will give way to the aesthetic world,' (233). I'm interested here in the phrase "industry as the supreme avenue of creation"--what exactly does this quote mean and what are the implications of this?

Benjamin, like Marx, is very preoccupied with the notion of history and how the particular historical climate (the Age of the Mechanical) is diminishing the "aura" of art allowing for us to think in new ways about art and the aesthetic. I think what Benjamin is arguing for is the moving away from a social tradition or ritual as shaping the critical or pleasurable potential of art. I'm very interested in the concept of the "aura" and I'd like to talk more about this in class--particularly in the way that it determines what we are able to perceive and not perceive. The notion of the "aura" in general seems valuable to me because it complicates the notion of the subject viewing the object by inserting a layer or culture and the social.

Anyway, I can't think of anything very interesting to say about the audiences for these pieces: academics interested in political and social aspects of aesthetic theory; in Chytry's case, those who were familiar, but not experts in Marxian thought; those who were particularly interested in drawing up aesthetic theory and looking at it through the lens of contemporary production/politics; I could probably go on and on here. It seems more difficult to write about audience as we move forward because it seems like for the more contemporary pieces, the notion of audience is becoming less visible because we, as writers, share some of these assumptions.

Concerns:

1) I have mention some points that I'm interested in discussion above; however, I'm also interested in further thinking through the human-nature relationship in both Benjamin and Marx (via Chytry).

Hegel & The Special Forms of Art

It is very clear from glancing at the organization of this text that Hegel's main project is to posit three distinctions that he terms the "Special Forms of Art". These distinctions seem to mainly rest on the divisions he draws between each in terms of the form and idea relation. Near the beginning of his text, Hegel summarizes this in the following way, "Symbolic Art seeks this perfect unity of the idea with the external form; Classic Art finds it, for the senses and the imagination, in the representation of spiritual individuality; Romantic Art transcends it in its infinite spirituality, which rises above the visible world" (Introduction). Hegel, then, documents the progression of art from the Symbolic to the Romantic arguing that the Romantic form is finally is able to unify matter with form--which it seems is connected to the Divine within.

One interesting point made quite explicitly in Hegel was the way in which form and idea are, ideally speaking, so tightly bound together. This seems like a quite useful binding, although Hegel often describes it in a somewhat static way. In noting this relationship he states, "imperfection of the artistic form betrays itself also as imperfection of idea. If, then, at the origin of art, we encounter forms which, compared with the true ideal, are inadequate to it, this is not to be understood in the sense in which we are accustomed to say of works of art that they are defective, because they express nothing, or are incapable of attaining to the idea which they ought to express. The idea of each epoch always finds its appropriate and adequate form, and these are what we designate as the special forms of art". Here (and also later in his discussion of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry) Hegel seems to be suggesting that ideas do not and cannot live outside of forms. Ideas and forms are mutually dependent (although idea must be developed before it finds a suitable form) and, hence, we cannot judge an idea or a form without considering them in tandem. This makes sense to me, and although I'm struggling with the notion that particular Forms are better for particular cultural groups which have particular aggregate ideas (which Hegel hierarchizes), I do believe that Hegel does qualify this notion as he continues: "The imperfection or the perfection can consist only in the degree of relative truth which belongs to the idea itself; for the matter must first be true, and developed in itself before it can find a perfectly appropriate form". Then, again, here it seems like Hegel is reinscribing some sort of split between idea and form...hmm...

Hegel's audience, again, seems to be a group of white men who are "experts" on art and the beautiful. Hegels discussion of the Symbolic Form of Art perhaps made most apparent who this text was excluding. It is interesting to me that linear understandings of art and beauty that explain why white, wealthy people's art goes in art museums and the art of the marginalized Other often goes into archeological or field museums are so explicit in this text. I also found it interesting that although Hegel's text was still very rigidly structured, the binaries present in other texts were not as present here--Hegel even made gestures toward reconciling some of these.

As we move into our class discussion tonight, then, I'd like to talk more about Hegel's notion of Forms and what these imply about our society and about freedom. I would also like to start discussing what in these readings seems to map (and not map) onto our current sense of beauty, art and freedom in our contemporary world.

Kant is killing me...

seriously.

Attempted summary:

It seems to me as if the overarching project of this text is to offer up some (often Greek influenced) dichotomies or trichotomies to help us better understand aesthetic judgement in a ways that draw (seemingly) quite rigid boundaries around subject/object distinctions in service of making an argument for the universal. However, as I re-read particular places in Kant's text, my current sense is that there is (albeit perhaps not much) flexibility in Kant's understanding of the universal. Kant does seem to push at the concept of the universal (particularly in terms of how it might actually play out through experiences in the social and cultural) in a few places throughout the text. I'm sure there is much more to say here...

Audience and issues to further consider:

The fact that Kant was writing to a very specific audience (white, male, middle-class academics) was quite apparent in his text. Because this fact was so clear to me as reader, it was easier to see the ways in which Kant's ideas supported the perspective of that group at the expense of other groups. When I read this, I was initially troubled by the ways in which Kant's ideas continue to resonate throughout our contemporary culture for exclusionary purposes; however, I think Kant may not be as overly deterministic as I initially believed him to be--or, maybe I'm just being to generous as I write this. For example, to Kant, true beauty is disinterested--our emotions, "charm" and, more generally subjective experiences get in the way of our "pure" perceptions. It would be relatively easy to make an argument that who we believe to be "emotional" would likely be those with less power and prestige. Hence, we could certainly understand Kant here to be reserving unimpeded judgement for those who already have social power. Yet, despite Kant's focus on universality and unimpeded judgements, he also seems to acknowledge the ways in which perceptions of beauty might (practically speaking) come into being in more of a social sense (situated in between the agreeable and the good). His discussion of culture and "subjective universality" lend some evidence to this idea. It was more difficult for me to pick up on this aspect of the text because of the ways in which universality seems to shut down the possibility of hope for subjectivity/intersubjectivity (and also, I think, because of the ways in which the nature of this text didn't leave me with much hope for expecting him to move beyond very self-interested position). Given all of this, I'd be interested in further discussing the room Kant leaves us to think about the inconsistencies and claims about what is beautiful cross-culturally and, more generally, how we might most usefully reconcile the notion of a universality with what is particular and subjective in the process of making judgments.

I was also interested in distinctions that Kant makes between the agreeable, the good and the beautiful (and later the sublime). I think these terms interestingly overlap (and fail to overlap) with our previous readings but it seems like the beautiful is an interesting concept that mediates that agreeable and the good. This reminds me of how beauty, to the Greeks, resided in recognizing a connection between the particular and the universal. I would love to talk about these concepts again, particularly in terms of how they might lead us to read Kant in ways that are less caught up in reifying existing power structures by cloaking them in what is deemed universal--which I don't believe is Kant's intention.

Anyway, these are my starting points for Kant...

Baumgarten & Schiller: Reconciling the Tension between Reason and Beauty

The overarching theme to our readings this week seems to be the relationship between what we deem beautiful and what we deem logical or reasonable. Both texts desperately attempt to reconcile the distinction between beauty/reason. While this reconciliation is evident in Baumgarten through the discussion of poetry and philosophy, it is apparent in Schiller through the discussion of the battle between reason and the sensuous and the joining of those in play.

Much like the Aristotle, Horace and Longinus texts of last week, Baumgarten's Reflections on Poetry seems to take as one of its main projects drawing rules and distinctions around what is and isn't poetic; however, Baumgarten's text is unique in that it moves beyond a kind of codification of aesthetics in service of very explicitly attempting to demonstrate the "amicable union" between poetry and philosophy through the use of syllogism and example. While Baumgarten relies on logic to demonstrate the similarities and mutual dependencies of poetry and philosophy, Schiller's Letters make an argument about the necessity for beauty in a freedom. Schiller’s text connects back to our readings last week through its positioning of Greece as the paragon of civilized and balanced life.

In his introduction, Baumgarten states, "I wish to make it plain that philosophy and the knowledge of how to construct poems, which are often held to be entirely antithetical, are linked together in the most amicable union" (36). This statement, along with belaboring of the countless syllogisms used throughout the text leads me to believe that there were a great number of thinkers during Baumgarten's time which would disagree with his central argument. Although Schiller's text seems to take shape very differently, similar evidence exists which suggests the audience to Schiller's text would also see beauty and reason as somewhat distinct. On page 8 Schiller idealizes Greek culture by stating, “Poetry had not yet become the adversary of wit, nor had speculation abused itself by passing into quibbling. In cases of necessity both poetry and wit could exchange parts because they both honoured truth only in their special way….how different is the course followed by us moderns!”. Here, we can see how Schiller’s idealism for Greek life demonstrates that he does not believe his contemporaries view reason and art as balanced. Schiller goes on to draw further distinctions between the Greek value of unity and the modern condition of fragmentation. Overall, then, it seems like Baumgarten and Schiller imagined their audiences as those who were already embedded in divisions between beauty/reason; poetry/philosophy.

Given the fascinatingly similar projects taken up here in two very different ways, I am particularly interested in further discussing the motivations of these writers for creating such texts. For example, is Schiller’s discussion of liberty and freedom implicit in Baumgarten’s text? Why does Schiller’s text take the letter form and why is Baumgarten’s text a, what seems to me, overwhelming list of syllogisms and examples?

Another question I had while reading this text was this: It seems as though these texts (but particularly Schiller) uphold a balance between beauty and reason present in Greek society; yet, what about the ways in which Greek society (and what has come between Greek society and these writings) reinscribes the split between poetry and philosophy? In other words, how do other historical distinctions that these writers themselves rely upon seem to reinscribe the distinction between beauty and reason (poetry and philosophy) that they are so clearly advocating against? Wow, sadly, I'm not sure that I can make that much clearer...!

On Plato, Aristotle, Horace & Longinus...

Horace’s Ars Poetica is a piece that tries to describe define poetry by isolating textual qualities and, at times, drawing correlations between which textual qualities are most suited for particular audiences. The goal of this piece seems to be to trace parallels between the complicated process of writing poetry with other arts, such as painting for the purpose of elevating the cultural status of poetry. Like Ars Poetica Aristotle’s Poetics continues to elaborate on a general definition and description of poetry; yet, more specifically Arisitotle draws boundaries around particular genres (focusing mainly on tradedy). Plato’s dialogues are unique in the form they take to explore love through a series of speakers and also lend insight to the ways in which the other authors might be viewing notions of “public” and “general audience”. Through varying speeches, Plato’s dialogues offer the general insight that love will lead us to beauty. Longinus’ On The Sublime offers a discussion regarding how a text can be written or arranged to transcend the ordinary (including reflection on anything from plurality to narrative structure). These discussions, in their strive to get to the nature of beauty, perfection and love, seem to have the cumulative effect of persuading the public to read and regard texts (and the complex processes that are needed to create them) in favorable ways and to distinguish the “good” from the “bad”.

The texts by Plato, Aristotle, Longinus and Horace seem to make many of the same assumptions about who their audiences might be and which values they might hold. All texts (except Plato) share in common a prescriptive--sometimes an almost textbook-like--style to describing and defining the arts. The style of these texts, then, brings me back to something we discussed within our groups last week--that aesthetics are a kind of codification. Plato, Aristotle, Longinus and Horace (despite the fact that they weren’t all writing during the same time period) seem to approach the texts they write about in ways that attempt to determine the pieces, parts, to reflect on the exigencies and to, in a sense, set the rules. The tone in which these three texts define successful writing, good tragedy, or a great poem are seemingly matter-of-fact (albeit, there is some discussion on how the parts must work together to form a successful whole thus indicating that following prescriptive rules is correlated with success yet does not simply determine it); yet, if we think about aesthetics as a process of codification and consider for a moment the time in which these texts were written, then rhetorically it makes sense that these writers would be attempting to define and re-define what was involved in the process and what the ideal product would look like. Put differently, because these textual forms were in their earlier stages of development, it was necessary for all of these texts to try to clearly define some generic rules that those less familiar could use as a basis to better understand and respect a given text as well as, of course, to think in new ways about composing a text of that sort.

To extend this even further, given that these genres were still being developed and discussed, it would make sense for the writers writing about these crafts would attempt to convey the difficulty and complexity involved in engaging in these practices. This final motivation is perhaps most clear in Horace’s Ars Poetica with his multiple attempts to draw parallels between poetry and painting to argue that the process of both are very similar. The constant comparisons between artistic processes in these texts is particularly striking to me given that artistic process if often talked about as being quite idiosyncratic today (i.e. this artist’s process versus that artist’s process). Granted, there are still many current texts that attempt to do the kind of defining and describing that these authors are doing; however, texts that do this today would likely we read only by novices whereas it seems that these texts were read by if not exclusively insiders than an audience that at least included them.

Thus far, I have mainly focused on the shared purposes of these texts and how these might inform our sense of the audience’s culture preparedness for these treatises. Yet, I have mentioned little regarding the textual clues informing us of who--in terms of social position--the audience for these texts might be. Although I am certainly no expert in classical Greek philosophy, all of these texts seemed to privilege the elite (e.g. “to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity however, of learning is more limited”--Aristotle’s Poetics), the middle-aged, and, of course, men. I find it funny to think about the original audience for texts that discuss audiences in relatively static ways. That is, although I’m sure I’m missing a ton in reading these texts due to the fact that I was not the originally intended audience, I can still understand and contextualize these texts. However, I got a strong sense that audiences’ social positions were seen as much more static at the time when these texts where being written. There is much discussion throughout all four of these texts regarding which genres and features are appropriate for which audiences. There is a tension then, between defining the parameters of “good” poetry or “good” plays and what is considered “good” and appropriate to honor particular audiences.


Questions:

Toward the end of Aristotle’s Poetics (on the top of page 27), he discusses the class distinctions between Epic poetry and tragedy. To set up this point, he states the following, “So we are told that Epic poetry is addressed to cultivated audience, who do not need gesture; Tragedy to an inferior public”. How does Aristotle trouble this distinction? What similar distinctions exist today between art forms for audiences that “do not need gesture” and those that do?

In Ars Poetica, Horace seems to offer insight regarding the limitation of beauty alone. On page 7 he states, “Sometimes a tale that lacks stylistic elegance, grandeur, and skill but is adorned with impressive passages and characters that are accurately drawn is a greater source of pleasure and better holds the interest of an audience that verses that lack a vision of reality and are mere trifles to charm the ear”. What is Horace suggesting here about beauty? What does this passage suggest about realism and its relationship to beauty? Who do beauty and realism belong to within this society?

In Longinus’ treatise On The Sublime, he state that “For some hold generally that there is mere delusion in attempting to reduce such subjects [the sublime] to technical rules” (15). Yet, he goes on to write the treatise. This trend of producing technical rules for defining and describing “good” poetry and, more generally, art has been a common theme across our readings for this week. These types of texts (listing technical rules and observations) are given mostly today to novices; yet, to what degree do these authors sense that these technical rules need to work together in ways that cannot be easily described or expressed? What exceptions do they allow for and how do these exceptions introduce a kind of fluidity to the otherwise rigid treatment of text and context?

pleasure & context

"You will need to contextualize the piece that is the source of your pleasure..."

This sentence (quoted from Anne's email) has reminded me of all of the objects, performances and practices that have brought me pleasure over the course of my lifetime and the fact that the types of things that bring me pleasure have profoundly shifted. The fact that within the short contexts of our lives our tastes and pleasures shift dramaticallly, for me, is an interesting piece of evidence that highlights the relativity of pleasure and its dependence on context.

A focus on context when describing something pleasurable, to me, foregrounds the fact that pleasure is generated and mediated through social contexts. This disrupts the notion that beauty or pleasure is intrinsic, that pleasure can be embedded within a text or an object. The connection between pleasure and context is one that I think we are all somewhat aware of at particular moments; yet, often it is easy to be swept away by the textual qualities of what we find beatiful while forgetting about the cultural values and ideologies that have positioned us to marvel at the beauty of certain texts and not others.

Given all of this, I find it peculiar that one could describe something beautiful or that has been pleasurable without contextualizing it. Anyway, now for my own description of an experience with a text that I found pleasurable.

I went to the Louvre this summer and although I was most looking forward to seeing a painting by Ingres, the texts I found most beautiful were probably the small tablets of cuneiform displayed in the Richelieu wing and the northern corner of the Sully wing. The tablets themselves--the color of earth, small and unimposing--are such great examples of texts that clearly have become pleasurable and beautiful because of social context. Because of our growing and deemed important history of writing, these texts, are now honored. I didn't expect that I would be struck by these texts in the way that I was. I didn't expect I'd spend more time looking at them and thinking about them than I would anything else. But I did. I thought about how the scripts were so efficient yet imperfect. I thought about who got to learn to write in the time these texts were made and how this impacted the current work I do with writing. I thought about how differently text looks and acts now. And, perhaps most importantly, I thought about how insignificant these texts would be had history gone in a different direction.

I want to conclude with a brief aside. I want to say that the things I feel most passionately about--the things I want most to find pleasure in--are not the things that are immediately most pleasurable to me. What I mean by this is that I while I certainly cannot erase my own social positioning and training as to what is beautiful (and these are the things that strike me as pleasurable most immediately), I've been trying to be more thoughtful about why I think those particular texts give me pleasure over others. Most importantly, I've been trying to think about why particular texts give me less pleasure and how I might re-see those texts as doing other types of work.